Bob Whitcomb’s Digital Diary: Trump and Clinton, Raimondo’s CA Developer, and Warren’s Greatness

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Friday, October 14, 2016

Bob Whitcomb, Contributor

Automation’s assaults; head of state?  get another developer; from cranberries back to wildlife; wonderful Warren

 

Many politicians, most notably Donald Trump, have talked about international trade’s destruction of American jobs. But there’s been far too little discussion of how to respond to automation’s assault on well-paying jobs. The losses have been concentrated in such places as factories and many other places employing blue-collar workers, as well as in office support staffs and middle management.  But now computerization and such sidekicks as artificial intelligence and algorithms are destroying work further up the chain, including in such places as the law, retailing, travel and the news media.  (Of course, even in heavily automated factories, you need a few highly skilled people to run “smart machines.’’ For now.)

 

The automation greatly benefits the holders of capital, which include the people in company C-suites who are richly rewarded for laying off as many people as possible.

 

What to do about the many millions of workers who either lose their jobs or, to stay employed, must take frequent pay cuts?

 

Do we tax the holders of capital more in order to do such things as giving everyone a base income whether or not they work and/or to help pay for training for new jobs? Of course at the rate that automation is going, those jobs might soon be destroyed by automation, too.  (Uber has been one way for otherwise unemployed people to make money in the past couple of years. Will self-driving cars soon eliminate that option?)

 

The idea, promoted by Hillary Clinton and many other politicians, that we can cure  many of these problems by creating expensive new  federal programs to send lots more people to college in delusional.  Bigger and more vocational apprenticeship programs, not only for young people starting out but also for workers every few years in their careers to keep them competitive in the world economy, might help but as automation rolls on, perhaps not all that much.

 

Complaining about trade deals is good politics, touching as it does on elements of patriotism and  even xenophobia. But as much as globalization, in which American workers are pitted against much lower-paid workers abroad, especially in China, gets attention, automation poses the bigger problem. It’s past time for politicians and other policymakers to come up with some fresh ideas to address its effects.

 

So what sectors are safe? Among them will  probably be nursing (to which will flow a lot of work now done by physicians),  food service, house repair, personal service, such as maids and  babysitters for the affluent, some graphics work and such trades as plumbing and electrical work. Plumbers and electricians should continue to do very well. And as Woody Allen said: “Not only is God dead, but try getting a plumber on Sunday.’’

 

 

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Americans often forget that the U.S. president is both head of the executive branch of the government and head of state.  Especially in the latter capacity, the president is supposed to represent in a dignified way the entire nation. In  that sense, then, the president’s role as head of state is similar to that of a constitutional monarch, such as Queen Elizabeth II in the United Kingdom. Being head of state would, you’d think, demand a certain modicum of decorum.

 

Thus the behavior of Donald Trump becomes more and more disturbing. He is crude, astonishingly arrogant and narcissistic, relentlessly dishonest in his private and public life, and he has accelerated the decay of America’s civic life, aided and abetted by the celebrity and the lie-and-hate machines of the Internet and  cable-TV,  where the more you can arouse rage, the better the ratings and profits.

 

What a change from the dignified Mitt Romney’s candidacy four years ago!

Yes, Hillary Clinton, after decades in public life, has baggage, but there is no equivalence with the nationally destructive corruption of Donald Trump. (For what it’s worth, I favored Jim Webb for the Democrats and Mitch Daniels for the Republicans in the primary season.)

 

But rather than blame the candidates, denounce an increasingly ill-informed and lazy electorate, both some of the minority of adults who bother to vote in the primaries and the millions of Americans  who don’t take 20 minutes to  cast their ballots and then complain about the results. H.L. Mencken famously said:

 

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.’’

 

It is astonishing that a man like Donald Trump has gotten this high, and that millions of Americans would vote for someone who has soiled the reputation of America around the world.

 

But scarier  than his crassness and lack of dignity are Mr. Trump’s despotic impulses. In Sunday night’s debate, he said (joked?)  that if he were elected, he’d put Mrs. Clinton in jail. That, in a way, recalls his remark to another spoiled rich kid, Billy Bush, that “when you’re star, they {women} let you do it {make sexual advances, wanted or unwanted}. You can do anything.’’  As another egomaniac, but one with considerably more self-control, Henry Kissinger, said: “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.’’

 

Donald Trump will probably lose the election. But he will continue to damage the country with  his often chaotic demagoguery while making money off the adoration of his fanatic supporters. But, as he has shown time and again, everything with him is self-referential.

 

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Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo should have moved to swiftly withdraw the $3.6 million in state tax credits and $800,000 in sales-tax breaks for  a Pawtucket project of Lance Robbins’s firm Urban Smart Growth. Numerous signs have resurfaced that he has been a sleazy landlord and developer, and sometimes a deadbeat in paying taxes. State officials should have done more homework. There has been plenty of information on Mr. Robbins in the news media from various parts of the country.

 

They should find an honest person(s) to put up the proposed residential project near Hope Artiste Village in Pawtucket that the state currently wants Mr. Robbins to develop.

 

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Kudos to Providence officials for thinking big in their ideas for fixing the deteriorating 6-10 Connector to, among other things, knit back together the neighborhoods torn asunder by its construction and free up land for development. The most intriguing part of the city proposal is constructing an elevated rotary structure called a “halo’’ to connect Route 10 north to Route 6 west. Below the halo would be a limited-access parkway that would go from Roger Williams Park to downtown. (It would be terrific if there was space left on the halo for bicycles and pedestrians, too.)
 

The decision is in the hands of the state, which I hope gives the city plan a close look.

 

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While New England’s main cranberry-growing region – southeastern Massachusetts – got some beneficial rain last weekend, the area remains in deep drought. My wife and I noticed that on a drive to West Falmouth to see relatives last Sunday. Normally flooded cranberry bogs were dry. So bad is the drought that many cranberry growers have had to resort to “dry harvesting’’ of the sour,  vitamin C rich fruit instead of the much more efficient method of flooding the bogs and then raking up the floating berries. The latter method provides quite a show on a sunny October day  – the bright red berries on blue gray water under azure skies and the swamp maples on the terrain around the bogs in vivid colors.

 

Whatever our drought, not that far away --  in the Carolinas -- some places got a foot and half of rain from Hurricane Matthew as localities reported record measurements of atmospheric moisture. We can expect more of such extremes with global warming.

 

Meanwhile, The Boston Globe, in an Oct. 7 article headlined “Plymouth {Mass.} project aims to return wetlands to natural state’’ discusses efforts to turn abandoned commercial cranberry bogs into wetlands. That’s good news. Alex Hackman, a land-restoration specialist for the Massachusetts Division of Fish and Game, told The Globe: “Wetlands are extremely valuable. They are natural filters that clean out water. They store carbon, they provide wildlife  habitat {including fish}. We have thousands of acres of cranberry farms in Southeastern Massachusetts, and some will be retired in the next few decades. This project {in Plymouth} could serve as a model for other farmers that might want to pursue wetland restoration.’’

 

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Congratulations to downtown Warren, R.I., for being named  one of “America’s 5 Great Neighborhoods’’ by the American Planning Association for the town’s “foresight, innovation, and cooperation” in building a better place.

 

It has always seemed to me a bit of a miracle that downtown Warren has been able to maintain its shops, restaurants and other signs of being a healthy old-fashioned, pre-mall downtown. That Warren is not a rich town and that its downtown is not an all-too-precious place like, say Stockbridge, Mass. (where Norman Rockwell worked) or Nantucket makes it all the more attractive.

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