Whitcomb: McMansionizing the Coast; Fine Day for Freeloaders; Restaurant Etiquette

Monday, July 02, 2018

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

 

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Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

“Answer July—

Where is the Bee—
Where is the Blush—
Where is the Hay?

Ah, said July—
Where is the Seed—
Where is the Bud—
Where is the May—
Answer Thee—Me—

Nay—said the May—
Show me the Snow—
Show me the Bells—
Show me the Jay!’’

Quibbled the Jay—
Where be the Maize—
Where be the Haze—
Where be the Bur?
Here—said the Year’’

-- Emily Dickinson

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A potentially dangerous mentally ill person is a lot less dangerous without a gun.

 

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At this writing it was unknown whether Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo would sign bad legislation, backed by builders, that would raise the maximum permissible height of houses along the coast to as high as 56 feet from 35 feet (plus five feet of freeboard) in the growing acreage defined as being in “flood-hazard zones’’. This legislation would encourage the construction and expansion of tall McMansions and continue the trend of the affluent sealing off the coast that’s been so obvious the past few decades. And the legislation would do it in areas that are increasingly vulnerable to flooding because of global warming. When the next big hurricanes arrive, taxpayers, through federal flood insurance, would have to help pay to clean up the mess. Most of these buildings should be moved farther away from the shore.

 

Charlestown Town Planner Jane Weidman told ecoRI News: 

 

“It’s not good planning practice in general to build homes that block the shore and obstruct the view. We should be retreating or moving away, not promoting larger structures in flood zones. Why do we want to be massing up the most sensitive areas we have?”

 

To read the ecoRI News story on this, please hit this link:

 

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Partners HealthCare

In part of a trend, giant Partners HealthCare, Massachusetts’s largest hospital chain and largest employer, is moving insurance coverage from Blue Cross Blue Shield to Partners’ own insurance company, Neighborhood Health Plan. Its aim is to get a stronger handle on its employees’ medical costs, which continue to rise much faster than overall inflation. This attempt to curb expenses was also seen recently in the creation of a still unnamed health-care-cost-control enterprise by Berkshire Hathaway, JPMorgan Chase, and Amazon, which have a total of about a million employees.

 

The curious thing about the Partners move is that the providers in its empire (which include world-famous Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham & Women’s Hospital) are known for their very high prices, even by the standards of the world’s most expensive health-care system. That’s if you want to call America’s fragmented and grossly inefficient mess a “system’’. How does Partners plan to take money from one hand and put it in another, assuming that a substantial part of its employees’ medical costs are spent at the hospitals and physician offices of – Partners? I suppose it can save some money by cutting out such middlemen as insurance brokers.

 

Anyway, look for more and more health providers to become insurers.

 

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Retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy

The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that non-union members cannot be forced to pay “agency fees’’ to unions representing public employees is obviously another big blow to organized labor.

 

Two dozen states have required these “agency fees’’  -- union dues minus the amount that unions use in politics. The payments go to pay for the administrative and other costs connected with the union organizing and collective bargaining that benefits the workers whom the unions represent.  With the ruling, about 5 million non-union workers for state and local governments who have been paying these fees can stop and become freeloaders, perhaps gravely weakening the unions. (The agency fees, in this case, don’t involve federal employees or private-sector workers.)

 

There’s talk in some states of letting public-sector unions exclude nonpaying nonmembers from the raises and benefits that they get as a result of unions’ collective bargaining. Sounds fair to me!

 

I’ve never liked the idea of public-employee unions because of the obvious conflict of interest they pose for political leaders, many of whom have had to kowtow to them. And teachers unions have too often thwarted school improvements.  But civil service protections for civil servants are essential in a democracy.
 

But members of these unions, by being able to bargain for wages and benefits from a position of strength, have obtained compensation that has tended to raise that of nonunionized workers as well as unionized ones simply by the force of example and competition. They have raised the floor a bit.

 

The  Supremes’ 5-4 decision will tend to suppress wages and benefits for millions of workers in the public and private sectors. The resulting loss of purchasing power will probably hurt the economy as it widens income inequality. The long decline of private-sector trade unions, unions that I strongly support, has played a key role in lower-and-middle-income wage stagnation and loss of benefits.

 

The majority decision said that some nonunion members’ First Amendment rights were violated when they were forced to pay fees to help defray expenses of unions whose positions and politics (usually pro-Democratic Party) they disliked.  But the same majority will not act against companies that fire or otherwise penalize employees who refuse to donate to Republican political actions. For the foreseeable future, the Supreme Court will do the bidding of business.

 

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In other news about downward mobility, read Alena Semuels’s entertainingly mordant piece “I Delivered Packages for Amazon and It Was a Nightmare’’.)

 

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With Justice Anthony Kennedy, who occasionally departed from “conservative’’ orthodoxy, about to retire, we can be sure that Trump will name a far more reliable right-winger to the court, to further strengthen the position of the rich, gun lovers and abortion-rights foes – crucial constituencies.  (Some fine day we’ll learn more about the great womanizer Trump’s more personal connections with the abortion issue.)

(CLICK HERE)

 

I wonder how many of the many millions of Democrats and anti-Trump independents who didn’t bother to vote in 2016  regret their inaction now.

 

Our neo-fascist kleptocracy marches on!

 

Meanwhile, the Russians are hard at work trying to get into states’ computers to throw the mid-term elections to their Republican allies, perhaps aided by some in the Trump circle who helped them in 2016! Trump will be meeting with his hero Putin this month….

 

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Speaker of the House Nick Mattiello

Will it work? I refer to Rhode Island’s latest Paw Sox stadium-financing deal, crafted at least in part to address the pressing personal political problems of Rhode Island House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello.

 

As of this writing, we still don’t know what kind of offer that Worcester, aided by Massachusetts state government, might make to try to lure the team, besides transportation infrastructure. Nor do we know how the financial markets would respond to a sale of bonds to pay for the proposed $83 million Pawtucket facility. And consider such mysteries as the asking price for the Apex store site in downtown Pawtucket, where the proposed stadium would go. Andrew Gates, who lives up in Chestnut Hill, near Boston, now owns the site. And nor do we know if the stadium would attract enough private investment around it to make the project financially viable in the long run for Pawtucket and ultimately the State of Rhode Island; big problems for cities and towns eventually become state problems.
 

Indeed, there’s a central flaw in the Mattiello bill, which would raise the cost of the project by $87 million over the Senate version by removing the “state guarantee’’. Guarantee or no guarantee, the state will be on the hook if this stadium project doesn’t pay off.  The bond market will demand it. The cities and towns are children of the state.

 

If the deal goes does go through, the state and city must do everything possible to try to make it a business and social success,  including taking full advantage of the potential beauty of the site along the Blackstone River with inspired landscaping as well as recruiting as many non-baseball  activities as possible to reduce the times that the stadium would be empty and therefore not bringing in revenue for the team and the neighborhood. That means professional and amateur soccer, high-school sports, concerts and so on.

 

But an Apex site stadium would have a negligible effect on economic development in Rhode Island. This is mostly about helping out dear old Pawtucket.

 

 

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Huckabee Sanders

Sarah Huckabee Sanders is a liar and a hypocrite, like her charming, religion-racket, con man father, Mike Huckabee, and her boss, Trump. But I guess it would have been better if the owner of the Red Hen restaurant, in Lexington, Va., had agreed to serve this propaganda minister for the most corrupt and dangerous presidential administration in U.S. history (so far) rather than refusing on moral grounds.  By the way, the refusal of the owner, Stephanie Wilkinson, was brave because Lexington is in rabid, heavily armed Trump/Fox “News’’ country.

 

Such confrontations distract attention from what should be Trump foes’ main mission now – taking back the House of Representatives in the mid-term elections so that it can be a brake on Trump’s behavior. Democrats tend to be very lazy about voting in mid-term elections. They might be again this fall, unless the tax-cut-sugar-high economy starts contracting a lot earlier than I think it will. If so, they’ll get what they deserve – again.

 

And while it’s hard to act dignified these days considering what we’re seeing from the White House and the grifters and traitors in and around it, the likes of the enraged Rep. Maxine Waters do themselves or Democrats, in general, no favor by urging that Trump lackeys be harassed in public places. Trump, the expert demagogue, uses Waters, et al., to energize his followers.

 

Of course, the national GOP, now a personality cult rather than a “conservative’’ party, is responsible for most of the venom in American political life the last 30 years.  Going back to con man  and uber-hypocrite Newt Gingrich’s relentless, vicious and often untrue attacks on remarkably supine congressional Democrats in the late ‘80s, the enraged, fact-resistant and xenophobic Tea Partiers and then the astonishingly nasty and mendacious Trump – remember he’s the leader -- the national Republican Party has become an embarrassment to civil society, with the assistance of such organs as Fox and Breitbart and the extreme cowardice of so many leading Republicans, especially those on Capitol Hill.

 

You get the strongest flavor of the Trump cult by watching his frequent political rallies, which recall in a rough way Nazi rallies, albeit without the Germanic order and precision and with much fatter people. The Trump rallies even include uniforms – red shirts and “Make America Great Again’’ hats. There are shouts of “America First’’ – the name of pro-Hitler Charles Lindbergh’s isolationist movement before Pearl Harbor. But many low-information Trump followers, who get most of their “news’’ from Fox, probably don’t know that.

 

One of the effects of having the current kleptocracy in power is to push angry Democrats further to the left, away from the moderate, center-left position that’s most likely to win them elections.

 

For some background about Mike Huckabee, hit this link:

 

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Trump has gotten the GOP-run Supreme Court to rubber-stamp his “Muslim ban’’. The list includes people from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.

 

Guess which Muslim nations are excluded? Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates – in all of which Trump has business interests.

 

Consider that 15 of the 19 hijackers in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were from Saudi Arabia. Two of them were from the UAE, one from Egypt and one from Lebanon. More recent, since 2001, attacks in the U.S. haven't involved immigrants from any of the countries on Trump's exclusion list.

 

We ’re far more in danger of terrorism from young, native-born white men with guns than from foreigners. The ban on Iranians coming to America is particularly sad because Iran, with about 90 million people, has a large middle class, and many highly educated people, many of whom have admired the United States. Lots of these people detest Iran’s corrupt theocratic regime. Quite a few have moved here and contributed much to American society. Your doctor might be an Iranian-American.

 

It’s interesting that the places in America with the fewest immigrants, and the least knowledge of immigration issues in general, are the most afraid of these newcomers.

 

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President Donald Trump

Trump accurately complains about the Chinese relentlessly stealing our intellectual property, and he threatens, in his usual incoherent way, new actions to curb it. But tariffs can be a very clumsy way to address this theft. We need stronger, better-staffed federal panels to oversee issues involving China and other nations seeking access to our technology and then, on a case by case basis, to block certain transactions, including Chinese purchase of certain U.S. high-tech companies.

 

I’m sure, however, that Trump and his commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, another crook who wallows in business conflicts of interest, will take pains to prevent any personal financial losses they might suffer as a result of cracking down on our huge adversary China.

 

For more about Ross, please hit this link:

 

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Plastic-bag pollution has reached the point where all communities that can ban them should. As in much of the world, consumers should bring their own reusable bag or use paper ones, which at least are made from a renewable resource -- trees.

 

Consider a few of their drawbacks: Plastic bags pollute our water and land;  they gum up storm sewers; they contain chemicals that can disrupt hormones in people;  they don’t degrade and most end up in the water, where they kill wildlife; they’re made from fossil fuel, of which a lot must be burned to make them.

 

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There’s something wonderfully soothing about hotels and motels, even with their usually sterile and mass-produced interior designs and the usually fake friendliness of their staffs. You’re sort of suspended in space, channel-surfing the crisis chatter on cable TV in a bland impersonal place that simultaneously evokes the transience of life and yet a sense of security in a temporary hideout.

 

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Oh, these commie EPA regulations! When I was a boy we lived near a pretty beach between two rocky headlands. But raw sewage used to flow from time to time down one side of the beach from the leaching bed near a big house. And from time to time ships a mile or so offshore would dump bunker oil that would cover the beach and rocks for weeks. Neither of these things are allowed now. What outrageous violations of property rights!

 

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While some very able Rhode Island judges might make more in the private sector, the perks of a judgeship are rich indeed.  No wonder these jobs are so sought after. Consider that retiring Superior Court Judge Allen Rubine is about to get a $174,000 pension. Judges only need to hold those jobs for 15 years to get their full pensions.

 

Rhode Island judges get seven weeks (!) of vacation a year as well as unlimited personal and sick days, albeit with the approval of the chief judge of each court. Judge Rubine has taken months of medical leave.

 

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Ira Rakatansky (1919-2014) was a distinguished Modernist architect who studied under the famous Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer at Harvard and set up shop in Rhode Island, where he designed many houses and commercial properties. One of the most beautiful was the one he had built for himself and wife, Lenore Gray, a gallery owner,  in 1958 on the East Side of Providence. It’s an exhilarating, light-filled house, now in the last stages of being spiffed up by the new owners, who have also done spectacular new landscaping on the site; the Rakatanskys had a sort of Japanese-garden approach.

 

There something hopeful, confident and breezy about the best of these Mid-Century houses, especially when compared with so much of the hackneyed post-Modernist stuff going up. But many of the ‘50s ranch houses with garages that look bigger than the houses they’re next to are hideous.

 

 

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How little is changed. I just read Joan Didion’s South and West: From a Notebook. Much of it is about a trip that she and her husband took in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama in 1970, at the tail end of the Civil Rights Movement.

 

On the trip she talked to many people, mostly whites, who had that mix of racial bigotry, wishful thinking, sense of victimhood and frequent affability you find across America, but especially in the South. The first three elements are still in full flower at Trump rallies.

 

For many Southerners, Didion remarked, “The Civil War was yesterday, but 1960 is spoken of as if it were about 300 years ago.” Indeed some in 1970 expressed the concern that African-Americans were far too impatient to get their full place in American life. After all, it had only been a little more than a century since slavery was officially abolished. You still hear these things in the South.

 

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An elderly friend of mine told me how upset she was with the rapidly accumulating reminders of mortality around her. Well, as Philip Roth observed, “Old age is a massacre.’’ But it can also be the most interesting time of life if you take a zoological interest in the scene around you, informed by a memory-laden with sharp reference points.

 

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