Josh Hoxie: GOP platform includes more tax breaks for the rich
Via OtherWords.org
It was easy to get caught up in the circus that was the Republican National Convention. Rousing speeches (plagiarized and original) and raucous floor votes make for great television and funny Internet memes.
Unfortunately, as we’ve come to expect from events organized by Donald Trump, the convention was decidedly light on substance. For an inkling of what a Trump administration might actually do, we have to look elsewhere.
Let’s start with Mike Pence, the newcomer to the ticket and a relative unknown to most voters.
The self-described Tea Partier served six terms in the House of Representatives and one term as governor of Indiana. He’s best known for his staunchly conservative stances on social issues, notably on reproductive health and LGBT rights.
But Pence also stands way outside the mainstream on economic issues, with a clear track record of coddling the wealthy. He’s an ardent supporter of trickle-down economics, the debunked idea that giving more money to the rich will somehow help the rest of us.
As a congressman in 2010, for instance, Pence made the bizarre claim that raising income taxes would decrease federal revenue. Unsurprisingly, Politifact — the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking group — rated that false.
More recently, Pence put his ideas into action in Indiana, enacting a major tax cut that helped give his state one of the most regressive tax structures in the country.
Indeed, on taxes, Pence is largely in line with Trump, who’s shown significant support for massive tax cuts for wealthy people like himself.
During the primary, Trump released a tax plan that would cost a whopping $24 trillion over the next two decades, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center calculates — most of it in cuts for high earners. Now in the general election, reports indicate he may be promoting a more modest package of cuts, but an unmistakably regressive one nonetheless.
Under the soaring subtitle “Restoring the American Dream,” page one of this year’s Republican Party platform dives straight into ideas around tax reform. The tax code, it claims, “has the greatest impact on our economy’s performance.”
“Getting our tax system right,” it goes on, “will be the most important factor in driving the entire economy back to prosperity.” What Trump and Pence consider “getting it right” is massive tax cuts for the ultra wealthy.
How do the American people feel about this?
I’m sure many see cutting their tax bill as a great thing — the adult equivalent of an elementary school class president promising to end homework or double the length of recess. But most see past this.
Cutting taxes means major cuts to programs that millions of families depend on. It means slashing budgets or perhaps completely eliminating child nutrition programs, senior prescription health plans, and early-childhood education programs. And the list goes on.
Perhaps that’s why for the third year in a row, an annual Gallup poll shows that most Americans agree with the statement, “Our government should redistribute wealth by heavy taxes on the rich.”
Further, a recent poll from Pew Research showed 78 percent are either “very bothered” or “somewhat bothered” by the “feeling that some wealthy people don’t pay their fair share.”
Trump’s candidacy has been anything but predictable, and there’s a long way to go before Election Day in November. But with Pence on the ticket and the GOP platform in place, it’s clear tax cuts for the wealthy are part of the plan.
Josh Hoxie directs the Project on Opportunity and Taxation at the Institute for Policy Studies.
'With parching power'
"All your renown is like the summer flower that blooms and dies; because the sunny glow which brings it forth,
soon slays with parching power."
-- Alighieri Dante
No they aren't anymore
"Love Outside the Box'' (mixed media), by Betsy Cook, in her show "Stitches in Time,'' at the Monkitree, gallery, in Gardiner, Maine, through Aug. 24.
Chris Powell: Clinton, Trump stand on privilege; Democrats' college-promise boondoggle
Hillary Clinton has been at the top of national politics since becoming something of a co-president with her husband, Bill, in 1993. Leaving the White House in 2001, she became U.S. senator from New York. Narrowly losing the Democratic presidential nomination to Barack Obama in 2008, she became his secretary of state in 2009, resigning in 2013 to run for president again.
For 23 years no one has been more of an insider. Even sympathetic observers acknowledge that Clinton is seeking what they call Obama's third term, just as Vice President George H.W. Bush sought and won Ronald Reagan's third term in 1988.
But the country is unhappy and clamoring for change. So addressing the Democratic National Convention last Tuesday night, Bill Clinton described his wife as "the best darn change maker I have ever met." To drive home the pose for the national television audience, delegates waved machine-printed signs reading "Change maker," signifying that the former president's seemingly folksy, personaland spontaneous reminiscences about his wife, now the party's presidential nominee, were actually precisely calculated.
So the Democrats will aim to try to offer the country continuity and change at the same time.
But then the insurgency offered by the Republican nominee, real estate developer Donald Trump, isn't much more persuasive. In his speech to the Republican National Convention, Trump denounced the political system as rigged, just as some Democratic leaders have done, and then claimed to be the only person who could fix it because he knows it so well -- presumably because he has made a career from it.
That is, both Clinton and Trump come to the election as products of the greatest privilege. The British writer and historian Hilaire Belloc made it rhyme:
The accursed power which stands on Privilege
Broke -- and Democracy resumed her reign:
(Which goes with Bridge, and Women, and Champagne).Chr
* * *
Supporting free tuition at public colleges, the Democratic national platform inadvertently has admitted that for most students a college education is worthless, more of a handicap than a help.
For if a college education was as valuable as supposed, graduates would not be bemoaning their college loan debt. That debt would be comfortably repayable from the higher earnings grads would enjoy.
Instead, of course, many grads are finding that higher-paying jobs are not available to them, partly because the national economy isn't producing enough jobs that require higher education and partly because grads don't qualify, their college education not having conferred useful knowledge and skills.
Indeed, at many colleges political indoctrination has supplanted useful learning. These days a quarter of retail clerks and 15 percent of taxi drivers hold college degrees, and while everyone can benefit from more knowledge, it doesn't always pay for itself.
The country's real education problem is lower education. Half to two-thirds of high school seniors, even in Connecticut, are not mastering high school English or mathematics or both but, in a system of social promotion, they are given diplomas anyway and sent on to college needing remedial work.
But rather than level with the country about social promotion and the collapse of educational standards and thereby prick the college bubble, the Democrats would transfer its huge costs to taxpayers, bailing out not just the disappointed college grads but, more so, another Democratic constituency -- educators, many of whose jobs are no more necessary than those of elevator operators.
Chris Powell is an essayist on political and cultural matters and managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.
Robert Whitcomb: Coastal conflicts; uniting on infrastructure; urban wildlife
This column of diverse ruminations originated as Robert Whitcomb’s GoLocalProv Digital Diary column, a fresh version of which goes on that site ever Thursday,
New England coastal communities have long hosted heated shoreline-access disputes made more complex by state laws, some going back to colonial times, that favor property owners’ rights to tightly limit the public’s access to the shore.
Some states, most famously California, heavily favor the public when it comes to beach access – but not in New England!
With the explosion of new and immense wealth in a sliver of the population in the past 30 years and the love of being on the summer shore, the tensions have gotten worse. The increasing arrogance and separation from their fellow Americans of many very rich coastal-mansion owners have poured more cyanide in the surf. Some of these people are much tougher than their more modest summer-place predecessors in dealing with the Great Unwashed trying to get close to the water.
Fast-moving sand and (related) rising sea levels linked to global warming will pour on more legal gasoline.
A case in point is a controversy about a beach near Oyster Pond on Martha’s Vineyard involving Boston real-estate mogul and Vineyard summer resident Richard Friedman. The Boston Globe reported, “The section of the beach that Friedman’s deed gave him rights to was a small sliver that, by the mid-20th Century, had moved into Oyster Pond itself.’’
“Friedman and a handful of {friendly} neighbors … believed that they could claim ownership of a bit of the beach’’ on the basis of old deeds and custom.
But some other landowners in the area objected, arguing, reports The Globe, that “Friedman’s property was legally underwater, 200 feet offshore. And the rest of the beach, they said, belonged to them’’ under assorted legal documents.
But Mr. Friedman decided to becomea man of the people. His legal advisers came up with new approach: As The Globe put it: “Oyster Pond, they note, is legally {under state law dating to colonial times} a ‘great pond’ – at least 10 acres – which Massachusetts law considers public property’’ and thus, they argued, the whole beach, part of which, again, had moved into the pond, is open to public use.
So Mr. Friedman got legislation filed on Beacon Hill declaring that barrier beaches that move into great ponds are thereby public property!
Some of the other rich landowners in the neighborhood don’t like this one bit. They assert that Mr. Friedman’s public-access argument would involve taking private land and thus require the state to reimburse the owners.
Anyway, as the sea rises and coastline erosion speeds up, especially of the low, sandy glacial debris that makes up such places as Cape Cod, the Vineyard, Nantucket and southern Rhode Island, then what?
Prepare for a lot of new law to be written in the next couple of decades. As for the Oyster Pond case, the law is so murky that the lawsuits could last as long as Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce, in Dickens’s novel Bleak House. With beaches ever faster becoming sandbars and vice versa, oceanside bluffs falling ever more rapidly into the sea and summer people forced to put their (usually too big) houses on stilts, the land-law circus is coming to town. Maybe ahuge hurricane will clarify things.
xxx
In other, perhaps happier, environmental news, zoologists are telling us about how many wild animals normally associated with the countryside are adapting to life in cities.
The East Side of Providence provides examples of this opportunism. Coyotes are thriving, raccoons are into everything, rabbits are proliferating and birds are learning new tricks to find food on rooftops and parking lots. There have even been some deer sightings by the mighty Seekonk River. (A moose wandered through inner Boston suburb Belmont, a few weeks ago; sadly, a car killed it soon thereafter in Weston.}
Why the rabbits (which we saw very few of when we moved to the East Side the first time 26 years ago)? My guess is that they thrive because more dogs are leashed in the area than years ago, there are fewer loose cats and there’s always lots of water being used in backyards and thus lots of green grass and clover and other edible plants. And those automatic irrigation systems (which deposit far too much of their water onto nearby sidewalks and streets) provide lots of reliable drinking water for creatures large and small.
But sadly, because of too much insecticide use, you don’t see many fireflies in our neighborhood.
xxx
One thing that hasn’t changed is the crickets, which started their chirping last week in a melancholy reminder that we’re heading into late summer. The hot dry weather may have started the chirping a bit earlier than normal this year. Retailers ravaged by the Internet seem to have started their back-to-schools ads earlier than usual, too.
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I fear that this will be one of the most vicious and unpleasant presidential campaigns in history. Still, there’s one area inwhich Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton should be able to come together: Fixing America’s infrastructure.
They, and virtually all Americans, agree that our transportation system – roads, bridges, rail lines, airports, etc. recalls the Third World. That also goes for much of the rest of our infrastructure, too – e.g., public school buildings and libraries. That’s in large part because of the anti-tax mania (maintained by lobbyists for the very rich) that has produced such inanities as no rise in the federal gasoline tax since 1993. In Rhode Island, with the truckers, and elsewhere we have seen how hard special transportation interests fight to avoid paying for the damage that they do to roads and bridges.
A massive federal infrastructure-repair and expansion campaign would train and employpeople, make business more globally competitive and, all in all, the country stronger. It shouldn’t be a Democrat-vs.-Republican thing.
Part of the answer, of course, is mass transit, which has helped make such cities as Boston and New York rich. It still gets far too little money and marketing, although more of it would save a lot of wear and tear on our roads and bridges, improve the environment, discourage sprawl, strengthen downtowns, and ease the lives of the elderly and the millions of people (many of them working young people) who can’t afford cars.
But it takes patience to make it work. Many complain, for example, that the newish Wickford, R.I., MBTA station is an under-used boondoggle. But they ignore that the Providence train station’s MBTA business took a while to get cooking but is now thriving.
xxx
Maybe the big public-works project could provide jobs for some of those despairing, druggy, tattooed and chain-smoking people who hang around places like gritty/beautiful downtown Pawtucket with nothing to do but await assistance from social-welfare agencies there. You get a vivid look at America’s social dysfunction and decline driving through old mill towns like Pawtucket on a summer weekend.
xxx
There’sa weird glamour about New England diners, which show up in movies from time to time. The latest: Scenes for a Jack Black movie, TheMan Who Would Be Polka King, will be shot at the Modern Diner, in Pawtucket. As of this writing it’s scheduled for Aug. 12. The intimacy and chattiness you find in dinersmake them great places for close-conversation shots, and that they were inspired by late 19th Century lunch wagons and railroad dining cars evokes a kind of (pre-natal?) nostalgia.
The Modern is one of two surviving Sterling Streamliner diners still open, with the other in Salem, Mass.
The Pawtucket diner has a heroic side: In the early ‘90s, Walt Disney Co. sold thousands of shirts featuring Mickey and Minnie Mouse standing before the Modern Diner and its iconic neon sign. In doing so, the behemoth Disney broke copyright laws. The Modern’s owners, represented by Providence lawyer Michael Feldhuhn, who died recently, sued Disney and won.
xxx
The oafish Fox News’s Roger Ailes’s well-paid exit from GOP house organ Fox News is a reminder that sexual harassment is still going strong in some companies. Now that he’s gone will Fox’s on-air bombshells dim their blinding lipstick?
Another example of women being taken advantage of comes in a new book, The Lady With the Borzoi: Blanche Knopf, Literary Tastemaker Extraordinaire, by Laura Claridge.
The heroic Blanche Knopf was a brilliant publishing executive and literary lion finder and cultivator who, more than her husband, Alfred, was responsible for the success ofAlfred A. Knopf Inc., which in its 20th Century heyday was probably America’s most prestigious publisher, including of Nobel laureates. But her often cruel husband took most of the credit. This book provides a global panorama of book culture over the last century and ends up being very moving.
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You might be interested in a nonprofit public-affairs organization called the Providence Committee on Foreign Relations (thepcfr.org; pcfremail@gmail.com), which hosts speakers at monthly dinners September to June. Our 2015-2016 season speakers included:
Evan Matthews, director of the Port of Davisville, on international shipping changes, particularly in the context of the expansion of the Panama Canal.
Greg Lindsay, writer, futurist and expert on cities around the world and their relationship to airports.
Hedrick Smith, PBS documentary maker, former star foreign correspondent.
David Alward, Canadian general consul.
Allan Cytryn, international cybersecurity expert.
Andrew Michta, U.S, Naval War College expert on Russia and NATO.
Rima Salah, High U.N. humanitarian-relief official.
Eduardo Mestre, Cuban-American civic leader and international banker.
Our new season will open Sept. 14.
Mark Blyth, the first speaker of the new season and whom some of you have heard on NPR commenting on Brexit, will speak on Wednesday, Sept. 14, on Europe after Brexit.
Mark Blyth is Eastman Professor of Political Economy andProfessor of Political Science and International and Public Affairs at Brown.
He is an internationally celebrated political economist whose research focuses upon how uncertainty and randomness affect complex systems, particularly economic systems, and why people continue to believe stupid economic ideas despite buckets of evidence to the contrary. He is the author of several books, including Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (Oxford University Press 2013, and The Future of the Euro (with Matthias Matthijs) (Oxford University Press 2015).
Coming fast after that will be:
Prof. Morris Rossabi, probably the world’s greatest expert on Central Asia and particularly Mongolia: a democracystuck between the police states of Russia and China, Sept. 21. How does this faraway country do it? He’ll be speaking to us soon after returning from Mongolia and other points in Asia.
Then:
FormerU.S. Ambassador to Slovakia Tod Sedgwick, on the situation in Central Europe, Oct. 5.
Meanwhile, the World Affairs Council and the PCFR are preparing a forum for Oct. 20 at the Hope Club on the foreign-policy visions of the U.S. presidential candidates. Stay tuned
Naval War College Prof. James Holmes on the geopolitics of global warming, Nov. 15.
German General Consul Ralf Horlemann on the role of Germany in an E.U. without the U.Kand with an aggressive Russia pressing in from the east, Dec. 14.
Internationalepidemiologist Rand Stoneburner, M.D., on Zika and other burgeoning threats to world health, Jan. 18.
Indian Admiral Nirmal Verma, on military and geopolitical issues in South and Southeast Asia, Feb. 15.
Dr. Stephen Coen, director of the Mystic Aquarium, on the condition of the oceans, March 8.
Brazilian political economistand commentator Evodio Kaltenecker on April 5 to talk about the crises facing that huge nation.
The rest of the season’s schedule is being worked on now. And we’re trying to keep some flexibility to respond to events.
In any event, we are working with, among others, Laura Freid, to talk about the Silk Road Project, of which she is CEO; Michael Soussan to talk about the U.N., diplomacy, Iraq and his book Backstabbing for Beginners, now being made into a major movie; an expert on the ocean-fishing industry, and an international travel expert.
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Digital Diary talks with Bruce Newbury on WADK (15:40 A.M.) most Tuesdays at 9:30 a.m. and sometimes more frequently, depending on the news. You can also hear the show at any hour via wadk.com.
Robert Whitcomb is the overseer of New England Diary.
New Hampshire blue
"Canoers'' (oil on canvas), by Kim Case, at the Patricia Ladd Carega Gallery, Center Sandwich, N.H.
'Catching in open screens'
"A break in the heat
away from the front
no thunder, no lightning,
just rain, warm rain
falling near dusk
falling on eager ground
steaming blacktop
hungry plants
thirsty
turning toward the clouds
cooling, soothing rain
splashing in sudden puddles
catching in open screens
that certain smell
of summer rain."
-- Raymond A. Foss, ''Summer Rain''
If only they would
“To my knowledge, nobody has fallen into the lagoon yet,” said Susan Abell, director of communications at the Friends of the {Boston} Public Garden.
— regarding Pokémon players wandering around America like zombies from The Night of the Living Dead, as reported in the current issue of The Boston Guardian.
Body heat and global warming
"Burn Baby Burn'' (oil on canvas), by Mia Cross, in the show "Heat,'' at the Bromfield Gallery, Boston, Aug. 3 through Aug. 28. This juried show features 17 New England artists who explore the theme in relation to climate, sex and politics.
David Warsh: Trump, Rodrik and the clash of global integration, national sovereignty and democracy
David Brooks, of The New York Times, wrote the single best piece I read last week on the Republican convention: “Death of the Party.” Like him, I was riveted by Donald Trump’s acceptance speech. The scene seemed straight out of one of those dystopian Batman movies of the 1980s, ’90s, and ’00s, an outlandish character, sailing under false colors, bullying and threatening, preying on fears, selling Gotham a bill of goods, preparing chaos.
By the time the nominee bellowed, “I am your voice” to the hall of delegates, he seemed simply the latest in a long line of improbable adversaries: the Joker, the Penguin, the Riddler, Mr. Freeze, Poison Ivy, Ra’s al Ghul, the Scarecrow, Bane, Mr. Trump.
But then Batman movies depend on the Caped Crusader, the Dark Knight, to answer the Bat signal, expose the fraud, counter the villains’ plans, and save the city.
Batman in this case is Dani Rodrik, 58, of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He is likely to be the next economist to enter the pantheon of those who went to school in the ’70s whom much of the public knows today” Jeffrey Sachs, Paul Krugman, Larry Summers, Ben Bernanke.
His father, a Turkish manufacturer of ballpoint pens, was happy to finance his son’s education in the United States: Harvard College, ’79, before graduate school at Princeton University, where his adviser was Avinash Dixit. Rodrik’s first job was at the Kennedy School, in 1985. He taught for four years at Columbia University, 1992-96, then returned to the Kennedy School.
In 2013 Rodrik ascended to one of the pinnacles of the profession, replacing Nobel laureate Eric Maskin as the economist on the faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J .He returned to the worldly bustle of the Kennedy School after only two years. Something of an explanation of the journey is to be found in Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science (Norton, 2015). Maskin, too, returned to Harvard and teaching after a few years; the Institute has no graduate students, only fellows.
In 1997, Rodrik published a monograph that boldly asked, “Has Globalization Gone Too Far?’’ (Institute for International Economics). He argued that trade was creating deep divisions between those who possessed the skills to thrive in global markets and those who lacked them. Redistribution to the losers of the gains from trade were almost wholly lacking, and globalization seemed to have permanently altered the norms surrounding domestic production in nations all around the world. There was bound to be a backlash.
In “Rebel with a Cause,” in the International Monetary Fund’s Finance and Development magazine, he told economist Prakesh Loungani that Harvard Prof. Andrei Shleifer, then advising the Russian government on privatization, would josh him whenever they met, “How is the revolution going?”
It was Shleifer who, as, editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, published Rodrik’s 2000 article “How Far Will International Economic Integration Go?” in which he broached what has since come to be known as “the globalization trilemma.”
Democracy, national sovereignty, and global integration were mutually irreconcilable, Rodrik argued, because of the political strains that inevitably would emerge. Nations could have any two of the three possibilities, but could never have all three at once at least not in strong forms.
In 2000, Rodrik predicted that the nation-state eventually would disappear; that global federalism would take its place. By the time The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy appeared (Norton, 2013), he was no longer quite as sure.
By then, though, Rodrik had ceased to be a gadfly critic, and was well on the way to becoming the foremost policy authority on the political economy of global trade. Just ahead lay Brexit and the insurgent candidacy of Donald Trump. As Loungani writes in “Rebel,” the revolution was over and Rodrik had won.
Here, too, as in the movies, there is a foil, not a Robin-like sidekick, but a philosopher, Harvard Law Prof. Roberto Mangabiera Unger, a native Brazilian whose influence extends around the world to politicians on the Left. Rodrik and Unger taught a Harvard course on trade together for many years.
Unger habitually argued that economics had lost the capacity for grand narrative; Rodrik countered that small-scale theorizing about cause and effect was good enough, at least for now. The prolific Unger produced a book, Free Trade Reimagined: The World Division of Labor and the Method of Economics (Princeton, 2007), a demanding survey of the intellectual underpinnings of contemporary views on trade. The Globalization Paradox and Economics Rules followed in due course. For an introduction to the peripatetic Unger, read about the luncheon that ensued when John Paul Rathbone, of the Financial Times, came calling.
You have to go back to a sunnier time, the ’60s, and a memorable network television series, to find a more congenial Batman to serve as a stand-in for Rodrik as a crime-fighter. That series thrived, the Wikipedia entry says, by presenting relatively simplistic moral lessons aimed mainly at the young, including championing the importance of using seat belts, doing homework, eating vegetables and drinking milk, wrapped up in the story of one caper after another in which some villain tries to take over Gotham City. Today, it’s probably remembered best by those who saw it for its campy tone, especially Robin’s non-stop exclamations of astonishment at each new twist of the plot.
Rodrik isn’t exactly fighting with Trump, the way that Batman fights with those villains. He is, by his own account, recasting the globalization narrative, replacing the familiar triumphalist version with a more nuanced account, including the ill-effects of integration that gave rise to the Trump and Bernie Sanders campaigns, and those of H. Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan before them. (Meanwhile, Rodrik is interpreting events in Turkey as well.)
The Trump campaign supports no intellectual edifice whatsoever. For all its flaws, it is up to the Clinton campaign to begin translating into political terms the deeper understanding globalization – its costs as well as its benefits – that Rodrik, Unger, and many others have been working out.
Holy Hoodwink, Batman! Let’s get to work!
David Warsh is proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this first ran, and a longtime economic historian and financial columnist.
Oil-spill settlement helps fund shellfish-restoration projects around Buzzards Bay
By ecoRI News staff
BOURNE, Mass. — Buzzards Bay recreational fishermen may soon have access to improved scallop, oyster and quahog populations in town waters for recreational harvests, thanks to settlement funding being used by the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries and The Nature Conservancy to restore natural resources injured by a 2003 oil spill near the bay’s entrance.
In April 2003, the Bouchard Transportation Co. Barge #120 spilled about 98,000 gallons of fuel oil into Buzzards Bay. The oil spread along more than 90 miles of shoreline and affected wildlife, shellfish beds, recreational activities and habitat. Eight years later, natural resource agencies secured a $6 million settlement to restore wildlife, shoreline and aquatic resources and lost recreational uses.
With the settlement money, the Buzzards Bay/Bouchard B-120 Trustee Council — the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and state agencies from Massachusetts and Rhode Island — has funded 26 projects. Nature Conservancy bay scallop and oyster restoration projects and Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries quahog and oyster restoration work are among the recently funded projects. These restoration efforts are targeting recreational shellfisheries within the impacted Buzzards Bay communities.
“Recreational shellfisheries were tragically affected by the Bouchard spill, with some municipal harvesting areas closed for six months or longer during the peak harvest season due to the oiling,” said John Bullard, regional administrator for NOAA Fisheries Greater Atlantic Region.
The two settlement-funded conservancy shellfish projects are underway. In early June, the conservancy, in collaboration with Bourne municipal shellfish officials, deployed 7,500 caged adult bay scallops in town waters. The goal is to create a spawner sanctuary as an effective way of restoring sustainable bay scallop populations and supporting seasonal recreational shellfishing.
“Bay scallops are a historically and culturally significant species,” said Steve Kirk, the conservancy’s Massachusetts coastal restoration ecologist. “While populations have always fluctuated, we want to bring them back by creating spawner areas to ultimately boost the wild population.”
In collaboration with the town of Fairhaven, the conservancy is using additional settlement money to restore a one-acre oyster bed in Nasketucket Bay.
The Buzzards Bay Coalition is supporting the scallop and oyster restoration work by securing project volunteers and hosting outdoor educational opportunities focused on this shellfish restoration work.
Also funded by the settlement are projects led by the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, including multiyear hard clam (quahog) relay and oyster restoration projects. This work involves moving adult quahog stock from an area closed to shellfishing in the Taunton River to designated transplant sites in the waters of Bourne, Dartmouth, Gosnold, Marion, Mattapoisett, New Bedford, Wareham and Westport.
Upwellers for nursery grow-out will be installed and juvenile quahogs will be outplanted in Dartmouth, Wareham and Fairhaven. Outplanting of single field-plant-sized oysters will also take place in Bourne, Marion and Wareham.
The goals of the Division of Marine Fisheries-led projects are to increase overall municipal quahog populations and enhance recreational shellfisheries.
“Boosting the local quahog stocks for local recreational fishermen will be a tangible benefit to those impacted by the spill,” said Division of Marine Fisheries director David Pierce. “Once the transplanted clams are certified clean and held for at least one spawning season after a minimum of six months from relocation, fishermen will have access to this crop. We hope there will be increased quahog reproduction from these transplants, resulting in increased and sustainable harvests from their progeny in the future.''
You won't need a reservation
"Destination in Sight'' (acrylic/oil on paper mounted on board), by Susan Blatt, at the New England Collective VII'' show at Galatea Fine Art, Boston, Aug. 3-28.
To remember them when they're extinct
"Roger's Zoo Marlin'' (hand-dyed, retired longline fishing gear/enamel/taxidermy form), by Gin Stone, in the "The England Collective VII ''show at Galatea Fine Art, Boston, Aug. 3-28.
William Morgan: 'On Cape Cod' celebrates 'ebullience of the summer Cape'
On Cape Cod, Photographs and text by Don Krohn; 175 pp.; David R. Godine, Publisher; $29.95.
If you cannot get to the Cape this summer – you refuse to fight the traffic, you can't afford the exorbitant rentals, the old family cottage has been sold, leveled, and replaced by a hedge fund manager's McMansion – then some time with Don Krohn's new book, On Cape Cod, will slake a little of your thirst for beaches and cranberry bogs.
Signs, Truro
All the pictures were taken in the summer. "They depict the ebullience of the summer Cape that is so easy to love," notes Australian writer and Vineyard resident Geraldine Brooks in her introduction. "A primary-colored place illuminated by tumbles of beach roses and impossibly blue hydrangeas, glossy-painted dinghies and buoys, bright beach umbrellas an suntanned faces."
Krohn, the Brandeis- and Harvard-educated founder of Main Street Books in Orleans, offers up exceptionally handsome images of standard Cape fare: antiques shops, ice cream stands, shingled houses, jam jars and abundant flora and fauna. Some of his shots are abstract compositions, and most are artistically strong.
Four Girls Swimming, Old Silver Beach, Falmouth
One senses that this book is actually three: the photos, plus a couple of extended essays. The "Photographer's Note" is a wonderful 12-page exegesis on history, craft, art and life.
"Fortnight in the Dunes" is a thrice-longer journal of time spent in an artist's shack outside of Provincetown. These simple shelters have been getaways and creative sojourns for the likes of Eugene O'Neill, Jack Kerouac, Jackson Pollock, William de Kooning, Tennessee Williams, and Norman Mailer. Krohn's particular cottage was built in 1940 by Russian surrealist painter Boris Margo and his wife Jan Gelb as a summer retreat.
View from inside Boris's Shack, Provincetown
Krohn writes: "We gathered some sea lettuce which had been tossed upon the beach in abundance in the recent ocean churn, rinsed it numerous times at the pump to remove the sand, and enjoyed it for lunch tossed with olive oil and, of course, sea salt."
Willam Morgan is an architectural historian, essayist and photographer. He is the author of, among other books, The Cape Cod Cottage (Princeton Architectural Press).
Robert Whitcomb: Open woods; the aim is merely fame; Art Deco challenge
A version of this first ran in the Digital Diary feature on GoLocalProv.com.
The other week, as I drove through miles of woodsin inland southern New England where caterpillars had consumed the leaves of so many trees, I thanked God that no one has suggested spraying to kill the creatures. You hear enough about massive spraying campaigns to kill mosquitoes carrying the Zika virus.
The trouble with these campaigns is that they kill a lot more than the targeted culprits. They kill, for example, bees, which we need for pollination of our crops, as well as birds, fish and many other creatures.
The trees will come back without chemical bombing. For now, we can enjoy the eerie sight of midsummer woods looking like November’s.
xxx
In picking Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate, Donald Trump has shown yet again that he really doesn’t have any “policies.’’ His only real apparent interest is maintaining himself as a “winner’’ and Mr. Pence might help.
Mr. Pence’s support for “free-trade’’ agreements that have helped kill jobs and lower wages in the U.S.; his backing for open immigration (which also cuts U.S. wages), and his evangelical Christian views don’t jibe with Mr. Trump’s rhetoric or behavior.
Mr. Trump has two main issues: Crack down on “free trade’’ and on immigration. On the latter, he wants to kick out 11 million illegals, build a “wall’’ on the Mexican border and make it tough for Muslims to enter America. Operational details to come.
Maybe.
The governor has also been a loyal servant of the Koch Brothers and other very rich people. For a time, Mr. Trump made vague populist noises about the need to reduce the power of Wall Street big shots and Washington lobbyists but that has gone away as he realizes the Republican reality. The public has less and less patience with details anyway, and citizens rarely remember what a candidate said a few months back.
Judging by how he has conducted his business and much of his personal life, The Donald would rank high up on most metrics of, to be polite, ‘’amorality’’.
But that matters little in the Reality TV and Twitter age, even to the Boy Scouty Mr. Pence, who has decided to try to ride the Trumpmobile back to Washington, where he was an ineffective, if pleasant, congressman promoting the usual collection of Tea Party and supply-side nostrums that, although having been tried for much of the past few decades, do not seem to have ushered in a golden age for the middle class.
Anyway, the aim is fame. Isuspect that Donald Trump originally ran for president simply to keep himself and his businesses in the news. He may have been surprised that his incoherent, virtually detail-freebut entertainingly demagogic primary campaign did as well as it did. And this pathological liar and con man will get a lot of votes in November from people who won’t admit their choice to their neighbors. As for Mike Pence, he knows that there’s a good chance that a vice president can become president.
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People tend not to like Hillary Clinton because she has told some self-protective lies; because she has a reputation for extreme secretiveness; because she seems to feel herself privileged to make her own rules (but not as much as Donald Trump), and because she and her husband have made a fortune by mingling/cross-self-promoting government work, “nonprofit’’ work and for-profit work (especially by being paid vast sums to speak to companies and other special-interest groups). And, as unfair as it is, a lot of people find her voice grating.
Not surprisingly, she generally avoids press conferences. But she could do herself a big favor by holding a long press conference in which she takes any questions. She could, for example, elaborate more on why she used a private server to conduct top-secret discussions by email and also explain the mysterious workings of the Clinton Foundation. Such a forum might help lance the boil of public distrust, if not dislike.
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David Sweetser, whose High Rock Development owns the Industrial Trust Building, in downtown Providence, is smart to have arranged for public tours of the Art Deco skyscraper to be offered over the next couple of months to, he hopes, get people excited/intrigued enough to rent there (or buy the whole place).
It’s a gorgeous structure, although, of course, fading. The model in New England of how to retrofit such a stepped-back Art Deco building is the gold-topped United Shoe Machinery Building, on Federal Street in downtown Boston, which is now fixed up and full. But it’s usually a lot cheaper to tear down an old building and put in a cheap utilitarian replacement than to save it. And there’s much more money in Boston than in Providence. But hang in there, Mr. Sweetser!
Robert Whitcomb is the overseer of New England Diary.
Llewellyn King: Murdoch created the formula with which Ailes built Fox News
In the beginning, there was Rupert Murdoch. He created the formula.
Then he met Roger Ailes and installed him as head of what would become America’s most successful cable news channel, Fox News Channel, also known as Fox News.
And so the formula of conservatism and sex, pioneered on a newspaper in Britain, came to television and the rest, as they say, is history.
In 1969 Murdoch bought an ailing British newspaper called The Sun. He bought it from the Daily Mirror Group, then the publishers of the most successful tabloid in Britain, The Daily Mirror, and its sibling The Sunday Mirror (where I once worked). The Daily Mirror was firmly left-wing and The Sun, if anything, more so. It had started life as The Daily Herald and was owned collectively by the trade union movement.
The new owners, who used an old formula — the working class as exploited, downtrodden and hopelessly dependent on the largesse of their employers — failed to attract or excite readers.
Murdoch, fresh from Australia (although he had worked earlier as an editor in London), looked around and saw something quite different. He saw a new worker, who owned a car, took vacations in Spain (thanks to jet travel), and did not feel oppressed.
The British workers — especially working men — had thrown off the past and were now much more like the workers of Australia and the United States. It was also a period of sexual freedom.
These workers would be Murdoch’s target.
Overnight, without warning, he turned The Sun from far-left whining to triumphant far-right throatiness. Murdoch had realized that the working man had become a man of property.
As for sex, Murdoch would go further. British tabloids had always published “cheesecake” — pictures of busty, young women in bikinis. Murdoch took off the tops: Every day, on Page Three, he published a photo of an English rose blooming in a bikini bottom. It was bold and it was brave and it worked.
The Sun, with its new brawny politics of nationalism, anti-European attitude, right-wing enthusiasm and topless beauties, was a triumph. It began a meteoric rise, almost entirely at the expense of the forelock-tugging Daily Mirror.
The formula was born: right-wing nativism and sex.
When Murdoch came to the United States, he found the society was less louche and he could not put nudity into his newspapers. Also, there was a tradition of editorial duality: Although the politics of newspapers was not concealed, readers wanted to think that the news was impartial. Murdoch bought newspapers in San Antonio, New York, Boston and Chicago, and he started a weekly supermarket tabloid.
None succeeded and gradually Murdoch sold off these properties, except for The New York Post. Murdoch’s daughter, Elisabeth, told me that he was the first to admit that he had misunderstood the U.S. market. That is probably why when he bought The Wall Street Journal in 2007, he was careful to respect that property and to change it incrementally — for the better.
But the formula was not dead. When Ailes applied it to television, it worked all over again. Except this time, the result was even more spectacular in political power and profit.
Fox News is the voice of raucous conservatism, all served up with sex appeal.
Ailes clearly has had a fascination with beautiful, blond women reading the news — and other channels are going that way.
Ailes has done more than apply the formula: He has applied it with brio. He has given the news pace. It moves along and little inventions, like “Around the World in 80 Seconds,” are part of that energizing.
I visited with Ailes when Fox News was just beginning its ascent. He was thrilled with the fact that it had just drawn slightly ahead of CNN Headline News. I do not think he realized then how potent the formula would be and what heights his creation would reach.
Llewellyn King is host of White House Chronicle on PBS. Based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C., he is a longtime publisher, editor, columnist and international business consultant. This originated on InsideSources.
Jim Hightower: Banks like Goldman Sachs don't commit crimes, their bankers do
Hey, stop complaining that our government coddles Wall Street’s big, money-grubbing banks.
Sure, they went belly-up and crashed our economy with their greed. And, yes, Washington bailed them out, while ignoring the plight of workaday people who lost jobs, homes, businesses, wealth, and hope.
But come on, buckos. Haven’t you noticed that the Feds are now socking the banksters with huge penalties for their wrongdoings?
Wall Street powerhouse Goldman Sachs, for example, was recently punched in its corporate gut with a jaw-dropping $5 billion punishment for its illegal schemes. It’s hard to comprehend that much money, so think of it like this: If you paid out $100,000 every day, it would take you nearly 28 years to pay off just $1 billion.
So imagine having to pull five big Bs out of your wallet. That should make even the most arrogant and avaricious high-finance flim-flammer think twice before risking such scams.
So these negotiated settlements between the Feds and the big banks will effectively deter repeats of the 2008 Wall Street debacle, right?
Actually, no.
Notice that the $5 billion punishment is applied to Goldman Sachs, not to the “Goldman Sackers.” The bank’s shareholders have to cough up the penalty, rather than the executives who did the bad deeds.
Remember, banks don’t commit crimes — bankers do. Yet Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein just awarded himself a $23 million paycheck for his work last year. That work essentially amounted to negotiating a deal with the government to make shareholders pay for the bankers’ wrongdoings — while he and other top executives keep their jobs and keep pocketing millions.
What a great example for young financial executives. With no punishment, the next generation of banksters can view Blankfein’s story as a model for Wall Street success, rather than a deterrent to corruption.
Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer and editor of the Hightower Lowdown.
Some like it hot
"Gasoline'' (oil on canvas), by Dale Stephanos, in the show "The New England Collective VII,'' Aug. 3-28, at Galatea Fine Art, Boston. This has indeed been a banner year for pouring gasoline on hot issues.
Chris Powell: Politically correct vandalism at Yale
Liberals, the old saying goes, are too broad-minded to take their own side in an argument, and Yale University in New Haven prides itself on defining liberalism, or at least the political correctness into which liberalism has devolved.
So Yale has asked the New Haven state's attorney's office not to prosecute a black cafeteria worker for the university who, finding it intolerable, smashed a stained-glass window at Calhoun College, one of Yale's dorms, that depicted two black slaves carrying baskets of cotton. The shards fell on a passerby and the vandal was charged with criminal mischief and reckless endangerment. He confessed and resigned, though now he wants his job back and promises to behave.
Yale long had defended the cotton-picking window as a mere historical illustration rather than an endorsement of slavery, though it has been getting harder to understand the university's persistence in honoring John C. Calhoun, a Yale graduate from South Carolina two centuries ago. While Calhoun held many national offices -- in Congress, the Cabine and the vice presidency under two presidents -- he was not one of the country's founders and he is most remembered for advocating slavery and state nullification of federal law.
Maybe Calhoun's advocacy of nullification is what Yale still finds attractive about him, since the university has made itself the headquarters of the movement to nullify federal immigration law, having induced New Haven to proclaim itself a "sanctuary city" and issue city identification cards to illegal aliens.
After the cafeteria worker's arrest the politically correct brigades who essentially run New Haven and patrol it around the clock for improper thought and expression rushed to his defense. They said the window was "racist" and deserved to be smashed and that Yale should rehire the smasher.
So the incident raises an issue more important than an employee's duty to his employer: freedom of expression. That is, Yale may be insensitive in merely depicting slavery; the university may be crazy in glorifying it and may even hold racist views. But doesn't the university still have the right to put into its windows whatever illustrations it wants and to honor whomever it wants?
The PC brigades say no. They contend that smashing windows is not just acceptable but necessary if a window bothers you enough.
Of course the perpetrators of Kristallnacht, another outburst of window breaking, felt the same way. Suppressing contrary opinion and enforcing orthodoxy, they were the politically correct of their time. No one stood up to them until it was too late.
But at least they were rebuked eventually, perhaps best by a judge of the 2nd U.S. Court of Appeals in New York, the great Learned Hand.
"Liberty," Hand declared to an audience of more than a million people in Central Park in 1944, "lies in the hearts of men and women. When it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.
"And what is this liberty that must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will. It is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few, as we have learned to our sorrow. ... The spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not too sure it is right."
If Hand tried giving such a speech at Yale today he'd be shouted down, as others who are politically incorrect have been shouted down lately, and not merely because he went to Harvard but because attending Yale these days seems to confer the certainty that one is right, even in breaking windows.
Chris Powell, an essayist on politics and culture, is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.
Backyard bathing beauty
Photos by Thomas Hook, taken in Southbury, Conn.
I have always loved the little lush worlds of backyard ponds, especially with frogs residing there. (See photo below.) There's so much life in such small places, and it's all so alluring on a hot day. The trick is to keep the raccoons from eating the frogs.
This tiny pond is at the bottom of a steep wooded hill, whose springs feed the pond.
-- Robert Whitcomb
