Whitcomb: Another Corporate Giveaway Coming? Wet Woes; Newport High Society; New Zoning Approach

Monday, December 17, 2018

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

 

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Robert Whitcomb, columnist

“We say Next time we’ll go away,

But then the winter happens, like a secret

We’ve to keep yet never understand
As daylight turns to cinema once more:

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A lustrous darkness deep in ice-age cold,
And the print in need of restoration’’

-- From “At the Solstice,’’ by Sean O’Brien

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 “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.

And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.”

-- Albert Camus

 

On a bright, cold, still morning last week I was heartened that we’re near the end of the worst of the long dark tunnel of late fall, and that at the end of this week, the daily light will start to increase again, which makes the cold of January more tolerable.
 

A notable feature of the past couple of weeks has been the stillness of the cold days, instead of the painful northwest gales we so often get in New England in winter. And sharp shadows.

 

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Hasbro

And Send the Bill to the Others!

Here we go again: A big famous company makes noises about leaving a place and politicians fall all over themselves seeking to bribe the company to stay. In this case, the big company is Hasbro, based in Pawtucket but considering moving, maybe to Providence or Southern California; hey, it’s an entertainment company! Big tax breaks and other goodies will probably be promised to try to keep the company here  – to be paid for by the many smaller, unsung businesses that are n’t threatening to leave. The effect can be to weaken the overall economy of a jurisdiction.

 

Improving public education and physical infrastructure, and simplifying taxes and regulation for everyone is what makes for a strong and resilient local economy, not bribing a single company to stay because it’s famous. And even after getting the goodies to stay, big companies are famous for soon breaking their promises about saving and creating local jobs and,  for that matter,  many leave for greener pastures soon anyway. Their nearly sole interest is their shareholders, who include senior executives, much of whose compensation is in the form of company stock.

 

Whitcomb and GoLocal News Editor Kate Nagle on GoLocal LIVE

 

Golden Age of White-Collar Crime

As citizens start to collect their tax documents, they might consider how sharp reductions in staff and other resources of the IRS, reductions pushed by the Republicans, have been a bonanza for rich taxpayers, who naturally do most of the tax evading, even as the IRS, under pressure from the increasingly right-wing GOP, has been pushed to audit more low-income people who receive the earned-income tax credit. Indeed, audits of these people represented 36 percent of IRS audits last year. As The Atlantic reported, “the credit’s recipients – whose annual income is typically less than $20,000 – are now examined at rates similar to those who make $500,000 to $1 million a year.’’

 

Thus many billions of dollars that rich taxpayers owe to the government are being hidden. It’s another reason that federal budget deficits are so big and that some worthy government programs are being starved.

 

To read an old but still useful report on this, please hit this link:

 

This is part of the cosseting of the rich and powerful that we see in the decline of white-collar-crime prosecutions. If you’re a rich crook, you’re usually safe in America. Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse reports that, adjusted for the size of the population, the number of white-collar prosecutions in fiscal 2018 has fallen 50 percent from 30 years ago. Not to mention that no big financial-services mogul went to jail despite the massive frauds perpetrated by bankers that helped cause the 2008 crash and Great Recession. The biggest thieves generally get away with it, the little ones go to jail.

 

The apotheosis of this is the Trump regime, and its collection of grifters, thieves and traitors.

To read more on white-collar-crime prosecutions, please hit this link:

 

 

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President Donald Trump

Dirty Water

Of course, the Trump administration wants to roll back federal protections under the Clean Water Act to please mining, agribusiness and real-estate-development interests! If this actually happens, you can expect more pollution, including of public drinking water, as well as damage to fish stocks and other wildlife in wetlands, rivers and lakes. Trump’s plan would harshly affect such coastal bodies of water as Narragansett, Buzzards and Chesapeake bays.

 

The Trump mob likes to say that the move would return needed power to the states to make determinations on water quality and how to protect it. But many states, especially in the South, that are basically run by big business interests, would simply engage in a race to the bottom of regulations, leaving more environmentally responsible states downstream to handle the new pollution.

 

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A project to build up a salt marsh along Rhode Island’s Narrow River to try to protect it from the rising seas caused by man-made global warming is fascinating and admirable although it may well not work for long because the rate of sea-level rise has been exceeding the rate at which New England salt marshes can build themselves up with the cycles of growth and decay of marsh grass. Of course, one thing that won’t help is more polluted water flowing into estuaries and in some places killing the grass.

 

These salt marshes are environmental treasures, essential for the survival of many species. They act as buffers for the coast in big storms and are places of great beauty.  Consider the gorgeous stretches on Amtrak’s route along the Connecticut shore.

 

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One of America's Grande Dames

Princess of High Society

GoLocal readers may have read last week of the death of Marion “Oatsie” Charles at the age of  (I think) 98. She seems to have been about the last of the great Newport and Washington, D.C., socialite hostesses – a vestige of the old “WASP Ascendancy’’: old money (once  stinking new!), clubs (many of them for a long time anti-Semitic and even anti-Catholic), The Social Register, boarding schools, Ivy League colleges and debutante parties.

 

One thinks of the world parodied in High Society, the 1956 movie, set in Newport and with songs by that world’s poet laureate, Cole Porter.


Marion Charles was apparently a nice, amusing and resilient lady, though her world had plenty of social bigotry and cutting cruelty. So what about the new-money folks (money from, for instance, hedge funds and other Wall Street creatures and Silicon Valley) that are the foundation of the new high society in Newport and other watering holes of the rich, if there is such a high society anymore? I would say that they’re less bigoted, more informal,  more impatient, at least as arrogant, and less polite than Oatsie Charles’s crowd.

 

It will fun to see how they change the mores of such old-money Newport clubs as Bailey’s Beach and the Reading Room. And change them they will: Money wins in the end.

 

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Silicon Valley Newport

Good luck to Innovate Newport, a 33,000-square-foot hub for technology and entrepreneurship being set up on Broadway, at the old Sheffield Elementary School, through a partnership of the City of Newport, Commerce RI and the Newport Chamber of Commerce and with the help of some federal money. The tech incubator and co-work space is supposed to open in the spring, with an aim of rapidly accelerating the creation and expansion of businesses in the area.

 

It’s nice to see abandoned school buildings being put to such productive new uses.


I hope that the center can build on the critical mass of technology-related activities on Aquidneck Island, most notably the Naval Undersea Warfare Center and the U.S. Naval War College as well as Raytheon and some other, smaller tech and engineering firms on the island,  and perhaps create a kind of mini-Silicon Valley.

 

 

The MBTA’s Future

Rhode Island and Massachusetts readers would do well to read The Boston Globe’s Dec. 5 article “Mass. officials have big ideas – and big decisions – for the MBTA commuter rail’’. Bay State transportation officials are pondering how the system should change over the next few decades, including route and station additions, service frequency, fare structures and equipment. The many Rhode Islanders who commute on the MBTA to and from Boston, mostly from Providence but some from points south, should read the piece. Please hit this link:

 

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MGM in Springfield

Lessons From Springfield?

A piece in Governing.com by Alan Greenblatt may hold some lessons for other financially struggling New England cities, such as Providence. This is about Springfield, Mass., now best known for having a big new casino (which will not help the city in the long run).
 

After 18 years of deficits and a deteriorating tax base, a state control board took over Springfield’s government in 2004. The board restructured municipal departments, and, Mr. Greenblatt reports, “laid off employees and ran a rigorous performance program, using data to keep track of what was going on. Mayor Domenic Sarno, first elected in 2007, has helped put into place real-time accounting systems when changes are called for.’’

 

Thus the city’s finances have been stabilized and its credit ratings have risen.

 

Meanwhile, law enforcement has been improved, as have the schools, with high-school graduation rates up 56 percent over the past few five years (but how much of this involves “social promotions’’ ?) and, probably more important, the dropout rate has been halved.

 

And CRRC, a rail-car manufacturing plant, has opened, with about 150 workers, all of them well paid in varying degrees and, unlike the plus-300 and mostly low paid workers at the MGM Springfield Casino, making a useful product instead of a service that spawns crime and other social problems.

 

Springfield still has plenty of problems, especially poverty, but things are much, much better these days. It has some lessons for other old cities.

 

To read the Governing.com piece, please hit this link:

 

 

Trump’s Vanity Wall

Trump’s noise about his “border wall’’  to keep out illegal aliens is all about his vanity.  He has long promised a “beautiful wall,’’ to be “paid by Mexico’’ to adoring fans at MAGA rallies and on Fox “News’’. This is after two decades in which illegal crossings have generally declined.

 

Virtually all important Republican and Democratic politicians stoutly oppose illegal immigration – no border, no country! – but argue about how to do it in the most practical and humane way. And there are border walls and fences already up in key places. Walls and even fences can’t be put up in long mountainous stretches of the border.

 

More planes, more drones, more electronic surveillance and more Border Patrol employees seem in order, not more walls. (These barriers can also do serious ecological damage in some places by, for example, blocking wildlife movement.)

 

The U.S. border with Canada is a more promising place for terrorists to cross than the Mexican border. Lots of forest land and the big and very internationalized cities of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, each with major airports, are close to the U.S. border.

 

As for illicit drugs coming via Mexico, they’re mostly smuggled into the country via vehicles that are allowed through at legal crossings. Others are shipped through tunnels at the border. Some come by boat, and some are mailed from China, especially opiates such as Fentanyl. They don’t come via the likes of the several thousand men, women and children from Central America seeking asylum that Trump has made much of this fall to appeal to his base before the mid-term elections. They’re fleeing conditions that the U.S. itself helped create in their home countries through the insatiable U.S. drug market and U.S. companies’ promotion of agricultural monoculture in Central America to serve the American market.

 

The Ambiguities of Innovation

David Sax had a refreshing piece in the Dec. 9 New York Times headlined “End the Innovation Obsession’’. He’s the author of The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter.

 

He writes about our obsession with gadgets and electronic services, most of them digital and many greatly oversold.  Indeed, many of these “innovations’’ aren’t as good as the old physical ways. Reading a book on paper is generally a much better experience than reading it on a screen. Paper ballots are far more secure than our computerized voting machines (which Trump’s pals in the Kremlin keep trying to invade) and it’s generally more reliable, and cheaper, to buy at bricks-and-mortar stores the physical stuff you want than on screen, whatever the convenience provided by the likes of Amazon. And as old-fashioned as it seems, your banking is much safer recorded in paper checkbooks than in online banking, which can and will be hacked.

 

Plenty of innovations have dark sides. Consider cell phones – very handy in an emergency but they also promote attention deficit order, undermining developed thought, and they can be used to track people without their knowledge and otherwise invade privacy. Or social media –an easy way to find, and reconnect with, old friends but also a way to avoid real, face-to-face relations and open to manipulation by bad actors, such as the Russians working with the Trump mob in 2016.

 

Much of this digitization of services is not about making things more convenient for customers but about laying off as many employees as possible – a service for which senior executives are very well compensated.

 

“Innovation’’ for innovation’s sake can be a trap.

 

 

Minneapolis’s Zoning Revolution

To address the problem of the lack of that fuzzy thing “affordable housing,’’ Minneapolis has just enacted a new zoning law that will change over the few decades the look of a city where currently 75 percent of residents live in neighborhoods zoned for single-family homes. The new law will allow, indeed encourage, three-family homes in these neighborhoods, along with more mixing of stores and other nonresidential uses.

 

This will be one of America’s most interesting urban experiments!

 

The idea, beyond boosting the housing stock, is to make more walkable and convenient neighborhoods, with a more diverse population – socio-economically, ethnically and otherwise. The controversy in a particularly affluent part of Providence’s East Side about the proposed tearing down of the old Nickelson mansion,  to be replaced by smaller (but expensive!) houses has gotten me thinking about the single-family-house zoning that has been so dominant for the past century, especially in middle-class and affluent neighborhoods.

 

To read citylab.com’s article on Minneapolis’s  zoning revolution, please hit this link:

 

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President Eisenhower

Why He Likes Ike

The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s, by University of Virginia historian William I. Hitchcock, is superb history writing. That’s because while it ranks President Dwight D. Eisenhower as a great president, in both domestic and foreign affairs, it also describes and analyzes what turned out to be, in the fullness of time, big mistakes. These include the U.S. engineered overthrow of the Iranian and Guatemalan governments to install American clients and Ike’s too slow and cautious criticism of the odious red baiter/pathological liar Sen. Joseph McCarthy. (McCarthy’s chief aide, the lawyer Roy Cohn, was, with Donald Trump’s father, Fred, one of the Oval Office Orangeman’s two biggest mentors.)

 

But consider such accomplishments as ending the Korean War; avoiding war with an aggressive China and the Soviet Union from a position of strength by, among other things, building up our alliances; refusing to send troops into the Indochina quagmire; strengthening  such central aspects of the New Deal such as Social Security and public housing; signing the first new civil-rights act since Reconstruction; starting  the process of enforcing school desegregation, helping to create the Interstate Highway System and crucial science  and technology programs, including for space, and overseeing a  very responsible budgeting process.  Ike even tried to make a start on expanding health insurance to millions of people.

 

He left the country in good shape.

 

He governed with dignity, restraint, capacious knowledge and with as much integrity as the complex and sometimes perilous situations he faced would permit, and sometimes he did this while in ill health. The quality of his crisis management was particularly impressive considering the ambiguities, contradictory expert advice and incomplete information he had to deal with. No wonder a recent survey of American presidents ranked him the fifth best, after Lincoln, Washington, Franklin Roosevelt and Theodore Roosevelt. To read the rankings, please hit this link:

 

The book also splendidly evokes the generally upbeat,  confident if often hypocritical (especially about sex) and naive nature of American life in the 1950s, during which most citizens liked Ike a lot. The materialistic and moralistic time of a good part of my boyhood, which I remember with mixed emotions.

 

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