They stay anyway
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
“Many are saying that remote working is making people reprioritize where they choose to live and work. It’s too early to say if we’re seeing a trend of people flocking to Rhode Island because it’s less expensive, more rural, has great amenities or a combination of all three, but it’s definitely something we’re studying. Rhode Island has always been a well-kept secret in terms of value, now perhaps, it’s not as much of a secret anymore.’’
-- Shannon Buss, president of the Rhode Island Association of Realtors, in GoLocalProv.com on people moving to Rhode Island since the pandemic began.
Hit this link:
I have always thought that the assertions that Rhode Island state and local government retirees flee in large numbers to lower-tax states were grossly exaggerated. People decide to move to, or stay in, places for many reasons, such as job options and weather, but most importantly because of their family and friends connections, and those are tight in the old and compact Ocean State. Now, The Boston Globe reports, Watchdog RI, a nonprofit founded by former Moderate and Republican Party candidate gubernatorial candidate Ken Block, who has often complained about public pensions and other things about this liberal state, has found that of 31,762 retired state and municipal retirees studied by the group, 80.3 percent retired in Rhode Island.
Mr. Block, a wizard at numbers, told the paper that he had expected twice as many of these public-sector retirees to be living out of state. “Certainly, the myth is that a lot of government employees retire and get out of Dodge,” he said. “That is clearly not the case.”
Even so, he told The Globe, $222 million in pension payments is being shipped out of state to these retirees each year, and he said, “That’s money that would be really nice to keep in state, if we could.” (It would be useful to get the numbers on what percentage of public-sector retirees leave other New England states.)
The list of the states where the largest numbers of the aforementioned Rhode Island retirees move to, as reported by Watchdog RI, are:
· Florida: 3,017
· Massachusetts: 1,195
· Connecticut: 237
· New Hampshire: 226
· South Carolina: 198
· North Carolina: 167
· Maine: 136
· Arizona: 118
· Texas: 88
· Georgia, Virginia (tied): 84
Interestingly, two of those states are, by national standards, high-tax when you combine state and local taxes – Connecticut and Maine; Massachusetts is in the middle, with New Hampshire a tad under the median. Generally, higher state and local taxes mean more, if not always better, public services, especially for that high-voting cohort called old people. State-by-state tax-burden comparisons are difficult because state and local tax systems vary widely, especially when you consider business taxes and what sort of purchases are covered by sales taxes.
You’d expect Florida, with its warm winter weather and generally low taxes, to lead in grabbing emigres from other states. (I wonder if that will continue after the COVID crisis there.)
Hit this link to read The Globe story:
Hit this link for some national tax comparisons:
https://wallethub.com/edu/best-worst-states-to-be-a-taxpayer/2416/
Hit this link for the Watchdog RI site:
Besides their human connections, many retirees stay in Rhode Island because much of it is beautiful and there are lots of services within short distances. Not much driving required.
They only look dangerous
“Long Lines” (ceramic and twine), by Annette Bellamy, in the show “Volume 50: Chronicling Fiber Art for Three Decades,’’ at browngrotta arts, Wilton, Conn. The show, starting Sept. 12, will highlight works by 50 leading artists in fiber art.
See:
browngrotta.com
and:
annettebellamy.com
At Weir Farm National Historic Site, in Ridgefield and Wilton, Conn. It commemorates the life and work of American impressionist painter J. Alden Weir and other artists who stayed at the site, including Childe Hassam, Albert Pinkham Ryder, John Singer Sargent and John Twachtman.
Llewellyn King: Save disgusting social media from censorship
— Photo by Johnscotaus
WEST WARWICK
I don’t know a lot about social media. I don’t know how it works technically. I don’t know why it is such a force in society. I don’t know why very prominent people, such as comedian Steve Martin, prognosticator Nate Silver and New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, who have plenty of outlets, tweet.
I don’t know why people who are great company, need to post on Facebook tedious photos of a. their cats, b. their grandchildren, c. their hobbies, and d. their vacations (“That’s Ann and myself in a Costa Rican rainforest.’’).
Because of this personal bric-a-brac, I tend to avoid Facebook and solicitations to befriend people there. I fear those children, that cat, those hobbies, and snaps of my friends despoiling places of natural beauty.
What I do know is that we face a clear-and-present danger of social media censorship.
What makes it worse is those calling for censorship should know better. They are, many of them, of the progressive left. It seems they hate “hate speech” more than they hate anything else, including censorship by machine or, worse, censorship deep in Twitter or Facebook by committees of the nameless wonks.
Now social media is full of remarkably ugly, vicious, deranged and fabricated things. The truth isn’t safe with social media. The truth is scarcely an ingredient. But that isn’t reason enough to introduce censorship, whether self-censorship or some other adjudication of what we see and hear.
Google, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, et alia, aren’t publishers. They are common carriers, like the post office, the railroads and the telephone companies. Certainly, they aren’t publishers or broadcasters in the traditional sense.
The remedy for the excess on social media – conspiracies, homophobia, Islamophobia, and even my phobia about cat photos – won’t be cured by getting the companies that carry them to introduce censorship, however well-intentioned and noble in purpose.
The right to free speech is ineradicable, absolute and cardinal. Without it we start sliding down the slippery slope – except the internet slope is steeper, greasier, and globe-circling.
So, I defend President \Trump, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D.-Minn.), Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow as having a right not to be censored. That is all I’m defending: only their right not to be censored, not their speech or even the ideas behind it.
There was a time, before former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher cracked down on unions, when the printers of British national newspapers set themselves up as de facto censors. Not the editors or owners, but the press operators: They wouldn’t print stories that they disapproved of. The newspapers were forever making statements like this, “One third of last night’s print run was lost due to industrial action.” That meant a shop steward didn’t like the content.
The issue now revolves around hate speech, a social construct. It is, as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said about pornography, “I know it when I see it.” That means that there can be no standard when the offense is so subjective that it is in the eye of the beholder.
The blanket indictment of hate speech, if applied to any discourse – for example, political, literary or sports -- is that it can’t be conducted without the honorable traditions of wit, invective, ridicule, scorn, and satire. If a sports columnist berates a fumbling NFL quarterback, is that hate speech?
Until now the laws of libel and slander have worked imperfectly, but they have done their bit to protect reputations, to halt dishonest and malicious allegations, and to give a kind of discipline, sometimes lax, to journalism.
These laws aren’t adequate for the Internet, but they hint at future concepts that might endeavor to quiet the internet and its social media sewers. Censorship won’t do it with perpetrating a greater evil.
When you’ve read this, you may want to hurl used cat litter at me in the street. Your right to want to do that should be unassailable, but if you do it, you should be prosecuted for assault.
Hate is a human emotion, and emotions aren’t criminal until they’re acted on.
If you censor the Internet, as many would like, the workaround will come in seconds. Social media and its sewer of disgusting, repugnant and vile assertions won’t be silenced, but honest disputation may be banned.
Actually, I love cats
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.
Website: whchronicle.com
Philip K. Howard: Let COVID crisis cut the bureaucracy that strangles education
How to bring them back?
The COVID-19 crisis could be the impetus that finally pushes the broken machinery of America’s schools over the cliff. Everyone is scrambling to figure out how to educate in a pandemic, and the answers will differ depending on the infection rates in particular communities and many other variables. Work rules, legal entitlements and one-size-fits-all bureaucracy are impossible to comply with.
Who decides? This is where the centralized education apparatus collapses of its own weight. Teachers unions want to control when and on what terms teachers return to work. Education regulators in Washington, D.C., and state capitals want to dictate answers with a new set of rules. They expect the COVID-19 education framework to come out of negotiations with unions, who have already threatened to strike if teachers must go back to the classroom.
The stranglehold by central bureaucrats and union officials over how schools work is why they fail so badly. Public schools are a giant assembly line of rigid work rules, legal entitlements, course plans, metrics, granular documentation, and legal proceedings for almost any disagreement, including classroom discipline and comments in a personnel file. Day after day, teachers and principals grind through the dictates of this legal assembly line. There’s little room for innovation or creativity, and not even the authority to maintain order. The only certainty is no accountability. No matter how much or how little someone tries, no matter how badly a school performs, there will be no effective accountability.
While teacher pay has stagnated over the past two decades, the percentage of school budgets going to administrators has skyrocketed. Half the states now have more noninstructional personnel than teachers. The Charleston County, S.C., school system had 30 administrators each earning over $100,000 in 2013. Last year it had 133 administrators earning more than $100,000. Union officials and central bureaucrats owe their careers to the bureaucratic labyrinth they create and oversee.
Now the unions want to devise a pandemic school assembly line. In addition to not returning to the classroom, ideas floated so far include a limit of three hours of online instruction, a preference for older teachers to teach online courses instead of teachers with demonstrated skills, and a refusal to allow classes to be recorded and accessed anytime because of privacy concerns.
Top-down dictates don’t work well in any setting, and particularly not in the pandemic. Some teachers want schools to reopen in their communities, but others will not want to take the risks of infection. Distance learning is an experiment just beginning; some teachers will be effective at distance learning, and others not. It may be better to record remote lessons by superstar teachers, and to supplement this with online tutoring. A hybrid model of distance learning with staggered attendance is also a possibility. Tailoring these techniques to particular populations and students holds the promise of effective education. But these experiments will surely fail if rigidly constrained by rules in advance.
A further complication is that parents need to get back to work. But they will also have different tolerances for exposure to risk. They will need not one mandated solution, but different alternatives. How about small learning pods, organized by neighborhoods, and overseen by teachers? This will require teachers to supervise and teach students of different ages. Different communities will require different approaches, taking into account the needs of the students and parents, the local infection rates, and other factors.
The urgency here could lead to innovations that are unimaginable to stakeholders stuck in current bureaucratic machinery. This disruption is also an opportunity to finally abandon the system and replace it with a set of core principles that restore ownership to educators and parents on the ground. These seem to me the core principles:
· Replace bureaucracy with periodic evaluations. Replace most mandates and reports with general goals and principles. Replace red tape with periodic evaluations by independent observers who judge a school by a number of criteria, including academic achievement and school culture.
· A new deal for teachers. Give teachers much more autonomy to run classrooms in their own ways. Remove most paperwork burdens, especially in special education. Use the funds now spent on excess administrators to pay teachers more, and to provide alternative education settings for disruptive students.
· Restore management authority. Restore the authority of principals (or other designated school leaders) to run a school, including allocating budgets. Because accountability is vital to an energetic school culture, principals or governing committees must be able to terminate teachers who are less effective. Instead of legal proceedings, safeguard against unfair personnel decisions by giving veto power to a site-based parent-teacher committee.
· Revive local autonomy. All stakeholders must have a sense of ownership of their schools. Within broad boundaries, communities should be free to set priorities and manage schools as they believe effective.
For several decades, public-school reforms have focused on measuring and rewarding specific output measures, notably test scores, or improving inputs, such as training programs and new technology. But the best measure of a school is its culture—with shared values, goals, energy and mutual commitment. That’s what good schools all share. It is impossible to have a good culture unless the teachers, administrators and many parents all feel a sense of ownership. That’s why top-down reform ideas have little impact, and why the accumulated red tape is counterproductive. Educators need to focus on their mission, not filling out bureaucratic boxes.
America ranks poorly in international student-achievement results despite spending more per-capita than all but a handful of countries. Teacher attrition is at 8 percent a year, with the best teachers burning out or quitting because of frustration with suffocating bureaucracy. Principals too are leaving, with one out of three saying that they plan to pursue different careers within five years.
No one likes the system. Over the years, I have worked with leaders of school systems across America, such as in New York City and Denver, with teachers unions, and with research firms such as Public Agenda. Everyone feels disempowered from doing what they think makes sense. But the key stakeholders are stuck in a kind of trench warfare, firing bureaucratic rules at each other. Union operatives and public administrators control compliance with, literally, thousands of pages of detailed requirements. Schools are stuck in the muddy no-man’s-land of legal mandates and people demanding their legal entitlements.
The only cure to what ails America’s schools is to abandon the massive bureaucratic machinery aimed at forcing everyone to make it work. The accumulated education bureaucracy crushes the human spirit and any chance of fostering energetic school cultures. The COVID crisis could be the impetus for a mutual disarmament. School bureaucracy should not be reformed but abandoned. It fails every constituency that matters—students, teachers, principals, parents, and the broader society—and it prevents the adaptability needed to cope with COVID-19.
Philip K. Howard is a lawyer, legal-system and regulatory reformer, New York City civic and cultural leader, author and photographer. He’s chairman and founder of Common Good (commongood.org). His latest book is Try Common Sense. Follow him on Twitter: @PhilipKHoward. This piece was first published by Education Next.
Rearranging Boston
Bluebikes in Boston. Originally Hubway, Bluebikes is a bicycle sharing system in the Boston metropolitan area. The system is owned by the municipalities of Boston, Cambridge, Everett, Somerville and Brookline, and is operated by Motivate.
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Boston is starting to implement new street-narrowing, traffic-calming, bike-lane creation and sidewalk-widening plans that will make parts of the city’s very dense urban core more pleasant.
Mass.streets.blog.org summarized the program in May, when it reported:
“The initial plans include a network of new protected bike lanes across downtown Boston and around the Public Garden, expanded bus stop waiting areas, and processes to let restaurants expand their outdoor seating areas on sidewalks and on-street parking lanes.’’
The new bike lanes are already being set up, albeit not yet permanently; cones are being used, not concrete or metal barriers.
Some of these plans were in the works before COVID-19, but the pandemic has jump- started some of them to encourage social distancing and boost walking and bike riding by COVID-cautious people worried about taking public transportation (though those concerns have been found to be exaggerated).
Sidewalks in most American cities are too narrow. Widening them for restaurants, outdoor retail stores and other functions will add to cities’ liveability.
Anything that discourages car traffic and encourages walking and bike riding and, yes, a return to public transportation in center cities, will improve their quality of life and help lure back residents, businesses and tourists who fled because of the virus.
It should be said, by the way, that density per se does not present a COVID-19 peril. Consider how well Hong Kong, Singapore and Taipei have kept virus cases down to a handful. That’s probably in part because of lessons from the East Asian-based SARS epidemic, in 2002-04
And note that virus cases are much lower in densely populated and affluent downtown Boston than in neighborhoods a little further out with more poor people. To reduce your chances of getting sick with COVID, live in a rich, orderly neighborhood where people follow mask and social-distancing guidelines and lose weight while you’re at it. But back to reality….
Of course it’s easier for rich folks to leave town in pandemics and to avoid crowded places.
To read more, please hit this link.
'Selling out'
“Our neighbors have concentrated on trading up, selling out
to the enticements of Real Estate
and their intensifying need for
quick-acting contraptions….’’
— From “Farmer and Wife,’’ by Peter Davison (1928-2004), a Boston-based poet, editor, memoirist and literary historian, especially of New England poets
Chris Powell: Better journalism needs a better public
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Hartford's City Council is worried about the future of the city's newspaper, The Hartford Courant, whose management and ownership have been in turmoil on top of the stresses imperiling the newspaper industry generally.
Like most regional and local papers, The Courant today has much less staff, content and reach than it had a decade ago, and there are fears that its owner, Tribune Publishing, which is offering all its properties for sale, will relinquish the paper to the chain's largest shareholder, hedge fund Alden Global Capital, which shows little interest in journalism and civic life.
So the City Council is preparing a resolution urging Tribune and Alden to stop diminishing The Courant. "This is our paper," City Council member Marilyn E. Rossetti says, and its decline is "a travesty."
But then Hartford is Connecticut's capital city and has been declining for decades longer than The Courant has. Indeed, as a business matter The Courant long has done better by Hartford than the city has deserved.
It's simply a matter of demographics. Hartford's population is about 122,000, a third smaller than in the 1950s. Thirty percent of its residents are impoverished and almost 22 percent foreign-born and thus less likely to be fluent in English and attuned to civic affairs.
While West Hartford next door has only about half Hartford's population, only 7½ percent of the suburb's residents are poor and only 17 percent are foreign-born. As a result The Courant long has had far more subscribers in West Hartford than in Hartford, subscribers in West Hartford are far more valuable to advertisers than subscribers in Hartford, and downtown West Hartford has supplanted downtown Hartford in important respects.
Being so poor, having a political class dominated by government employees and others drawing their livelihood from government, and lacking a strong middle class independent of government, Hartford is far more vulnerable to political corruption and so needs journalism more. But journalism isn't free, and with its awful demographics the city can't afford it. Serious journalism can't make money in the city.
Even if Hartford got all the journalism it needed, would it make much difference when so many city residents are stressed by poverty, can't read English, can't afford to subscribe, and lack the education necessary to understand and care about public life?
To acknowledge Hartford's awful demographics and their impact on business conditions is not to disparage its residents. For like Connecticut's other troubled cities, Hartford is only what all of Connecticut makes it, and impoverished and dysfunctional cities are actually part of the state's longstanding policy and social contract.
Connecticut's poverty and education policies fail chronically but their primary objective long ago ceased to be to elevate and educate the poor but rather to sustain the government class ministering to them. This supports the state's political regime, and those not directly dependent on the regime tolerate this policy failure as long as they can escape its pernicious consequences -- crime, bad schools, and political correctness -- by moving to the suburbs.
Amid the failure of poverty and education policy, the best that Connecticut's intelligentsia can propose is just to spread the dysfunctionality around, to prevent any escape from it as it grows.
In this sense the suburbs may need journalism more than Hartford and the other troubled cities do, since the suburbs are home to the people with the capacity to understand policy failure and to support change -- middle-class people employed outside government, people who pay more in taxes than they get from government in income.
Why do these people accept the failure of government to reverse the decline of the cities? Maybe it's because their journalism is just as content with the awful social contract as the government class is. Or maybe they are just as demoralized by policy failure as city residents have been.
In any case, there may be a chicken-and-egg situation here. There won't be a better press without a better public, a public willing and able to pay for it, nor a better public without a better press. But how can Connecticut achieve either when most students now graduate from its high schools without ever mastering high school work and are not prepared to be citizens, much less newspaper readers?
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.
Leave wildlife alone
Piping Plover chick
From ecoRI News (ecori.org)
An endangered Piping Plover chick was illegally removed from a Westerly, R.I., beach last week by vacationers who brought it home with them to Massachusetts, according to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.
The chick was eventually brought to a Massachusetts wildlife rehabilitator when it began to show signs of poor health. Given its rapidly declining condition, it was transferred to Tufts Wildlife Clinic and then to Cape Wildlife in Barnstable. Despite the best efforts of veterinarians, the chick had become too weak from the ordeal and died.
The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service asks that people don’t disturb or interfere with plovers or other wildlife. While wild animals may appear to be “orphaned,” they usually aren’t; parents are often waiting nearby for humans to leave. Plover chicks are able to run and feed themselves, and even if they appear to be alone, their parents are usually in the vicinity.
“With such a small population, each individual bird makes a difference,” said Maureen Durkin, the agency’s plover coordinator for Rhode Island. “By sharing our beaches and leaving the birds undisturbed, we give plovers the best chance to successfully raise chicks each year.”
About 85 pairs of Piping Plovers breed in the Ocean State under the close watch of several agencies, including the Fish & Wildlife Service and the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management.
The Piping Plover is a protected species, although its population on the East Coast is slowly making a comeback. The number of Piping Plover breeding pairs has increased from 1,879 in 2018 to 2,008 pairs last summer.
Baby songbirds, seal pups and fawns are also at risk from being removed from the wild unnecessarily by people mistaking them for orphans. If a young animal is encountered alone in the wild, the best course of action is typically to leave the area. In most cases the parents will return without human intervention, according to Fish & Wildlife Service officials.
In rare instances where a young animal is truly in need of assistance, people should contact the appropriate state or federal wildlife agency, whose staff is trained to handle these types of situations. Members of the public should never handle wildlife or remove it from the area before contacting authorities. In addition to the likelihood of causing more harm than good, regardless of intentions, it’s illegal to possess or handle most wildlife, especially threatened and endangered species such as Piping Plovers.
From philately paradise
By Tom Monahan, Providence-area-based artist and former advertising agency creative director
'Millions of dark, sooty bricks'
The Albion Paper Mill, designed by internationally renowned mill architect David H. Tower, c. 1869, an example of Second Empire industrial architecture in Holyoke.
High Street in downtown Holyoke, circa 1920
“Holyoke {Mass.} is pure New England mill town….First there is the {Connecticut} river, wide and full of rapids, swinging around a curve, and then the city itself, climbing the hills on the far bank. Holyoke is vast, dense, and somber….Smokestacks and church spires reach into the sky. There are bricks, millions and millions of dark, sooty bricks, and a wealth of detail: granite windowsills, brass weathervanes, copper-sheathed cupolas, bell towers, ornamental ironwork, heavy wooden doors, cobblestone alleys, stone steps worn smooth by millworkers’ feet.’’
— Ben Bachman in Upstream: A Voyage on the Connecticut River (1985)
Put that in your mind's eye
Joseph P. Kennedy as U.S. ambassador to Britain (March 8, 1938-Oct. 22, 1940), in which post he distinguished himself as a defeatist about Britain’s ability to hold off Nazi Germany.
“Whenever you’re sitting across from some important person, always picture him sitting there in a suit of long underwear. That’s the way I always operated in business.’’
— Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. (1888-1969), of Massachusetts. He was a businessman, investor and Democratic political figure known for his high-profile positions in the U.S. government during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency, for the political and other achievements and tragedies of his children and for his ruthlessness.
Crashing with color
“Ambush, Tang Tabu’’ (acrylic on canvas), by Lexington, Mass.-based, in the show “SIZZLE!’’, through Aug. 30 at Bromfield Gallery, Boston.
See:
https://www.bromfieldgallery.com/
and:
https://amanthatsaros.com/
David Warsh: Of Postal Service and Social Security reform
The first U.S. postal stamps, which were issued in 1847
The first stamp issues were authorized by an act of Congress and approved on March 3, 1847. The earliest known use of the Franklin 5¢ (left) is July 7, 1847, while the earliest known use of the Washington 10¢ (right) is July 2, 1847. These issues were declared invalid for postage on July 1, 1851.
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
When the 117th Congress convenes in January, its first order of business just might be to quietly undertake to fix the nation’s system of voting by reforming the U.S. Postal Service.
Critics routinely blame the USPS for losing money. “It’s a Blockbuster service in a Netflix world,” asserted a Wall Street Journal editorial writer the other day. What the editorialist failed to understand is that the USPS is isn’t a business, it is a civic institution.
The Postal Service is older than the Navy, the Marines or the Declaration of Independence, as historian Joseph Adelman has pointed out. Its creation, along with a system of post roads, was practically the first thing that the Second Continental Congress took up, after the Revolutionary War began at Lexington and Concord, in 1775.
They did it for a reason, Adelman writes in Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News 1763-1789 (Johns Hopkins, 2019). Efficient and impartial communication of printed matter was essential to keep 13 diverse and far-flung colonies in touch with current news and opinion. The first Post Office Act, in 1792, set off steady expansion of the newspaper industry, and for the next two centuries printed matter accompanied first-class mail at bargain rates to every corner of the country.
True, a great deal has happened in the last 50 years. Print newspapers seem to be on the ropes in a digital age. The rapid distribution of e-commerce merchandise has been largely taken over by United Parcel Service, Federal Express and, recently, Amazon. USPS has found a secure place among these newcomers in the package-delivery business thanks to peak-load pricing.
But now the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that, thanks to voting by mail, old-fashioned first-class mail is a service that the U.S. cannot do without. Thus putting the USPS on a long-term sustainable basis is a first-order problem of democracy.
How might it be done? The election is fast approaching. The composition of Congress won’t be completely clear for some time after that. But a look back at the little-remembered last time the sinews of American democracy were seriously threatened, in 1983, might be instructive. Still Artful Work: The Continuing Politics of Social Security Reform (McGraw Hill, 1994) provides some clues as to how such compromises are achieved.
Towards the beginning, Paul Light, now a political scientist at New York University, who followed the negotiations as a young Congressional Fellow, provided a capsule glimpse of the feel-your-way by which such things happen.
Reagan proposal to solve the Social Security crisis through deep budget cuts in May 1981
Passage of a scarcely noticed bill in December 1981 that would trigger a Social Security emergency in mid-1983
An attempt to tackle Social Security through the budget in April 1982
A break for the midterm congressional elections
The birth and death of the National Commission on Social Security Reform in 1982
The rise of a secret negotiating “gang” as a shield for talks between Reagan and [House Speaker Tip] O’Neill in January 1983
Navigation of the Social Security agreement through the interest-group-infested waters on Capitol Hill in March 1983
The final House-Senate conference just before the Easter recess in 1983
Congressman Barber Conable (R.-N.Y.) was an architect of the ultimate deal. He told Light that the final compromise “was not a work of art, but it was artful work,” providing the title for the book. The analogy is not precise: Postal Service customers are not involved financially the same way as are Social Security recipients. But both selves are involved emotionally, and both vote. Meanwhile, that earlier reform is itself none-too-gradually running out of time. Soon another Social Security fix will be required.
Here’s to the opportunities that lie ahead!
David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this column first ran.
© 2020 DAVID WARSH
Llewellyn King: More allies than you'd think in decarbonization fight
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
The Democrats, supporting in whole or in part the goals of the Green New Deal, have, one suspects, a vision of themselves facing off against an implacable opposition of energy companies and financiers committed to business as usual.
The fact is, if the Democrats win the White House in November, they may find the enemy isn’t fighting. Indeed, they may find energy producers — both oil and natural gas — and the electric utilities are no longer opponents but devout, if questioning, allies in the struggle for carbon neutrality.
And Wall Street, often identified as the evil force behind the polluters, is striving to be green, and to assess and direct the effect of their lending with a view to reducing carbon emissions and remediating them.
A remarkable organization, the Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials (PCAF), has enlisted top global banks and lenders in the decarbonation of the future. In the United States its partners include Amalgamated Bank, Bank of America, Citigroup, BlackRock and Morgan Stanley.
A slew of banks spread across Western Europe has joined PCAF, including Britain’s NatWest and Denmark’s Danske Bank. Its first task will be to develop organization-wide standards and methodology to assess the carbon impact of their lending.
Oil and gas entrepreneurs and electric utilities have long been entwined with their bankers. They need each other. It takes a lot of capital to explore for and exploit oil and gas deposits, and the electric utilities have traditionally been the most capital-intensive American industry.
So complete has been the relationship between banking and energy that American Electric Power, once the nation’s biggest electric power company, had its headquarters on Wall Street for decades before moving it to Columbus, Ohio, where its customer base is.
The Edison Electric Institute, now a fixture among the power players in Washington, was based in New York City when I began writing about the utility industry in 1970. Likewise, the Atomic Industrial Forum, a forerunner of the Nuclear Energy Institute, moved to the Washington, D.C., area.
When the price of oil went down suddenly in the 1980s, a bunch of Southwest banks failed. The banking-energy linkage is absolute and at heart unshakable. And it can be dynamic and progressive.
PCAF is the singular and extraordinary creation of Guidehouse, a globe-spanning environmental consulting firm. It began modestly in The Netherlands — one of the most eco-friendly countries in the world — in 2015 and spread to banks across Europe. But its big expansion came in the last two years with the addition of the big American financial institutions and NatWest.
It won’t just be large energy investments that will be subject to scrutiny and assessment by PCAF members. “It will extend all the way down to mortgages,” Jan-Willem Bode, a Guidehouse partner based in London, told me in a guest appearance on White House Chronicle, the weekly news and public affairs program on PBS.
Bode said the banks want to harmonize how they measure their carbon impact and work toward investments in everything from alternative energy projects, like wind farms, to solar homes that reduce the carbon load.
Bode insisted that the commitment of the partners is real. They want a decarbonized future and will favor investments that bring that about.
Of course, there will be critics aplenty. They’ll bandy about the pejorative “greenwashing” and will suggest that the companies that financed carbon production in the past are still at it.
I think they haven’t got the message: America will be greened a lot faster when big money says “green.”
Take what Citigroup CEO Michael Corbat said: “If there’s one lesson to be learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, it is that economic and physical health and resilience, our environment and our social stability are inextricably linked.”
The greenback is getting greener.
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.
'Drip drip the trees'
My books I'd fain cast off, I cannot read,
'Twixt every page my thoughts go stray at large
Down in the meadow, where is richer feed,
And will not mind to hit their proper targe.
Plutarch was good, and so was Homer too,
Our Shakespeare's life were rich to live again,
What Plutarch read, that was not good nor true,
Nor Shakespeare's books, unless his books were men.
Here while I lie beneath this walnut bough,
What care I for the Greeks or for Troy town,
If juster battles are enacted now
Between the ants upon this hummock's crown?
Bid Homer wait till I the issue learn,
If red or black the gods will favor most,
Or yonder Ajax will the phalanx turn,
Struggling to heave some rock against the host.
Tell Shakespeare to attend some leisure hour,
For now I've business with this drop of dew,
And see you not, the clouds prepare a shower--
I'll meet him shortly when the sky is blue.
This bed of herd's grass and wild oats was spread
Last year with nicer skill than monarchs use.
A clover tuft is pillow for my head,
And violets quite overtop my shoes.
And now the cordial clouds have shut all in,
And gently swells the wind to say all's well;
The scattered drops are falling fast and thin,
Some in the pool, some in the flower-bell.
I am well drenched upon my bed of oats;
But see that globe come rolling down its stem,
Now like a lonely planet there it floats,
And now it sinks into my garment's hem.
Drip drip the trees for all the country round,
And richness rare distills from every bough;
The wind alone it is makes every sound,
Shaking down crystals on the leaves below.
For shame the sun will never show himself,
Who could not with his beams e'er melt me so;
My dripping locks--they would become an elf,
Who in a beaded coat does gayly go.
— “Summer Rain’’, by Henry David Thoreau (1817-62)
Mature Massachusetts
“Truth and Wisdom Assist History in Writing, by Jacob de Wit, 1754
“Massachusetts is the first place in America to reach full adulthood. The of America is still in adolescence.’’
— Uwe Reinhardt (1937-2017), Princeton economics professor and health-reform expert
When this meant romance
A locally famous nightspot at Boston’s old Hotel Vendome, built in 1872. A 1972 fire there in which nine firefighters died ended the building’s time as a hotel. It was a converted to condos and offices.
Don Pesci: The old, tired and reclusive Joe Biden
Waiting to talk politics
— Photo by Visitor7
“If ever a time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin”
— Samuel Adams (1722-1803), Massachusetts politician and a U.S. Founding Father
VERNON, Conn.
I’m sitting in the Midnight Café, only half full on orders of Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, having breakfast. The place names and personal names throughout have been changed to protect innocent non-politicians. The usual waitress, Sami, of indeterminate age, sporting her usual braided ponytail, greets me, a steady customer, and the order is quickly put on the table.
The next few booths are filled with electricians brought into the state by Eversource to reconnected houses and businesses with mostly repaired power lines. They are, many of them, on their way back to their home states after a grueling stretch in Connecticut dealing with the damage wrought by Tropical Storm Isaias.
Sami calls out to them, “Have a safe trip back, guys,” and they wave beefy forearms in her direction.
“Sami, look at this picture, and tell me what you think.”
The photo, top of the fold, front page, shows Sen. Kamala Harris, whom former Vice President Joe Biden has picked as his vice-presidential candidate, standing at a podium holding forth, while Biden, stone-faced, is seated in a chair that looks alarmingly like a kiddy highchair, legs wide open, his arms tightly clutching his stomach, his face masked in pretended interest.
Sami quickly assesses the photo and, never shy of sharing her opinion, smiles wickedly.
“Wonder if he had to use a stool to mount that chair?”
“Yeah, you noticed. If he were lying on the floor, he’d be in a fetal position.”
“Right. He’s hugging his tummy tightly.”
“Harris looks presidential though, doesn’t she?’’
“Very. I’m not sure that will help whatshisname,” (Same animated smile.)
It’s one of those pictures that are worth a thousand words.
The skinny on Biden, even among some Democrats, is that he has become a recluse, and not owing to Coronavirus. His early implication that he would choose as his vice president a Black woman had limited his range, but many Democrats feel that Harris might make a tolerable president when Biden, if elected, declines to run for a second term. Biden has not been able or inclined to answer successfully barely concealed imputations that he has become an in-the-closet presidential campaigner because he fears a public, mano a mano confrontation with President Trump.
It is thought by some that Biden's possible future foreign policy with respect to an aggressive and muscular China already has been compromised by Hunter Biden, his grasping son, who had been employed and monetarily rewarded by China because his daddy was Joe Biden, the Democrat’s Great White Hope in the November 2020 elections. And there is a suspicion that Biden has problems unspooling simple English sentences, that he will not be able to carry his weight in office, that he really has forgotten more than he knows, and on and on and on. Biden is 77 years old. His best days, many agreed, lie behind him.
The skinny on Trump is that he has been fatally damaged by repeated failed attempts to remove him from office, and a painfully protracted, failed attempt, lasting as long as his presidency, to find him guilty of collusion with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Some suppose that Trump will be easy campaign prey for a weakened Democrat presidential contender and his more vigorous, Black, female running mate candidate.
Under the hammer-blows of a Democrat opposition unalterably opposed to a Trump second term, it has been supposed that Connecticut Republicans, as happened in 2018, will tremulously withdraw in horror from a toxic president, thereby giving weight to Democratic assertions that even a damaged Biden-Harris administration would be preferable to four more years of an Trump regime.
In both law and politics, silence signifies assent; therefore, silence by Connecticut Republicans on two matters of importance to them – the re-election of a Republican president and the recapture of the U.S. House, as well as a stony silence on what is broadly called progressive social issues – can only be interpreted by state groups traditionally allied against Republicans as a permission to continue unimpeded many progressive programs that conservatives, libertarians, most Republicans and many unaffiliated voters consider repugnant and dangerous to the social fabric of the Republic.
In the new age now upon us, the center has not held, and The Second Coming, born in a dry desert, is slowly slouching toward Bethlehem. The media is now capitalizing “Black” in its reportage, as if “Black” were a race; it’s a color. “White” is also a color, not a race. Distinctions are not made between tolerable and even necessary mottos such as “Black Lives Matter” and political organizations and operations. George Orwell might well sweep all the rotgut Newsspeak away, but there are no Orwells among us.
And we have assented to the anarchic rule of windy and rootless politicians, never mindful of Ben Franklin’s answer when he was asked by a woman on the street, once the Continental Congress had finished its business, “Sir, what have you given us?”
“A republic, madam – IF YOU CAN KEEP IT.”
Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.
Looking tired? Joe Biden in Henderson, Nev., last February
—Photo by Gage Skidmore
Marcelo Suarez-Orozco: My plan for UMass Boston
The UMass Boston campus, dramatically situated on Boston Harbor.
— Photo by bostonphotosphere
From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)
BOSTON
Becoming chancellor of the University of Massachusetts at Boston is a humbling experience and a great responsibility for me—it is indeed the opportunity of a lifetime. As a kid who emigrated from Argentina to the U.S. to escape political unrest at age 17, with just a few dollars in my pocket, I was one of millions of Americans by-choice arriving over the years, searching for a better life. Settling in California, I was incredibly fortunate to be able to access the public higher-education system.
My life journey embodies America’s great public university system and its transformative power.
As a young immigrant I worked my way up from the very bottom, doing all kinds of jobs—painting apartments, cleaning offices and pumping gas while taking night classes to learn English in our local high school. I am a product of former University of California President Clark Kerr’s great Master Plan for Higher Education. I started my studies in the California Community College System, transferring to the University of California at Berkeley, where I received a bachelor’s degree in psychology and master’s and doctoral degrees in anthropology. That extraordinary public education was the foundation for my scholarly career at universities around the world, including tenure at Harvard, a University Professorship at New York University and, eventually, as the inaugural Wasserman Dean of the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles.
My experience distills the power of education as a public good, essential for all human beings to flourish and for the formation of engaged and independent citizens capable of self-governance and giving back. Education must also prepare our workforce to thrive in the labor market of the 21st Century. At its best, education nourishes the brain, heart and hand, helping to create a dignified and purposeful life. In my case, these were not simply worthy abstract principles. For me, education was a transformational life force. The brilliant scholars at Berkeley who became my mentors (early on I learned how to avoid the tormentors in the faculty!) taught me how to write for a scholarly audience (often inviting me to publish with them), hands-on scaffolded my teaching as I started work as a teaching assistant, and above all, they taught me how to think in the tradition of the great social science disciplines.
But the system that provided opportunity to me and millions of others faces grave threats—from a ravaging pandemic, particularly devastating to communities of color, to unchecked climate change extracting untold suffering in the world’s poorest regions, to the structural racialization of inequality and the intergenerational persistence of anti-blackness, to xenophobia and exclusionary anti-immigrant policies. We must harness the power of higher education to address the growing inequities in our world. These forces work to undermine the principles and practice of democracy in the U.S. and around the world.
In my view, public higher education is the indispensable tool for disrupting and overcoming the malaise of growing inequality, an ominous threat to the practice of democratic citizenship. These times call for an education to nurture what is true (logic), that which is good (justice/ethics), and that which is beautiful (aesthetics). Creating a more inclusive, just and sustainable world is education’s urgent challenge.
As the head of an institution dedicated to upward mobility—where a majority of students are people of color, where many are the first in their family to attend college, where the number of Pell-eligible students is among the highest anywhere in New England—I have a special responsibility to create the conditions, on and off campus, under which our students can flourish.
Indeed, all of us must extend ourselves to nurture a greater ethic of care and solidarity, an ethic of preference to the least empowered among us, an ethic of dignity and human rights, and an ethic of engagement and service to others. In practice, I endeavor to embody these principles in quotidian practice. Mind what I do, not just what I say. What I learned from Pierre Bourdieu, who was teaching at Berkeley in my graduate student days, is that the habitus comes to define us—how successful we are and how others come to view us: the competencies, sensibilities, skills and dispositions that guide the ethos and eidos in our comportment.
Excellence, equity, diversity and relevance are the four cardinal points to navigate today’s rough waters and unprecedented undertow. To that end, I have established and endowed the George Floyd Honorary Scholarship Fund at UMass Boston to provide financial support to our talented students who otherwise may find it difficult or impossible to pay for a college education. My wife, Carola, and I have seeded this with funds in the amount of $50,000. I am happy to report the fund has already exceeded $100,000 in commitments from generous and visionary members and supporters of the UMass Boston family.
UMass Boston’s students of color—like their peers across the nation—face economic and social barriers to their education exacerbated by COVID-19’s malignancy, placing too many of our students at an educational disadvantage. I firmly believe that equitable access to quality education is a foundational step we must take to see systemic racism dismantled in our country.
This fund is also an investment in future leaders who will fight for social, political and economic justice, drawing from their lived experience as I did, and using the tools forged by the invigorating ideas and experiences shared by students of every age and background in our classrooms.
In addition, as one of my first acts, I intend to appoint a faculty member as special adviser to the chancellor for Black life at UMass Boston. This person will advise me on matters of importance to our Black faculty, students and staff. The adviser will work with me and my leadership team as we commit to create new structures and to develop new codified and customary practices purposefully designed to put our university at the forefront of excellence, engagement and relevance on racial justice, equity, diversity and inclusion.
As scholars in education dedicated to the practice of democratic citizenship and committed to social justice, we must reflect on our privileges and act in all that we do against the systemic racism that impacts our community and the children and families and communities who we serve.
Marcelo Suárez-Orozco became the ninth chancellor of UMass Boston on Aug. 1, 2020.
His research focuses on cultural psychology and psychological anthropology, with an emphasis on education, globalization and migration.
Hurricane warning
“Hurricane 2, Sudan’’ (oil on shaped canvas), by Barry Mason, in his show “We Hold These Truths,’’ at Atelier Newport through Sept. 11.
He says that this painting “deals with a multitude of issues. Various symbols like the bluish circles with the yellow golden rings cry out the ‘hurricanes’ which are symbolic of the challenges, pain and suffering that people all over the world deal with from time to time. The bright spots of yellow throughout the painting echo the ‘sunshine’ (joy) that most may have in their everyday lives while some wait for it to come after the storm.’’
See:
https://www.ateliernewport.com/