Robert Whitcomb: Raimondo’s No-Bid Contract, Gov. Baker’s MBTA, and Spring
Monday, March 27, 2017
“Yes, one of the brightest gems in the New England weather is the dazzling uncertainty of it. There is only one thing certain about it, you are certain there is going to be plenty of weather.”
-- Mark Twain, who lived many years in Connecticut but it was said that his favorite place was Dublin, N.H., New England’s highest town.
And so we go into another spring, up and down weatherwise but trending the right way. First the flowers that can take freezing and thawing and refreezing – the crocuses and the snowdrops. Then the somewhat less hardy daffodils and the tulips.
It will be “Mud Time’’ for a few weeks in New England’s north country. And, of course, it’s pothole season!
A lot of folks are so impatient for spring that they strip down to shorts and T-shirts and wander around outside when it’s still in the forties, in a triumph of hope over experience.
Plant the radishes first!
The buds on the trees swell and then seem to almost explode on one afternoon in late April or early May—that is, except right along the coast, where the cold water delays the season as the warmed-up water delays winter late in the year. As visitors to Fenway Park know “Boston’s famous east wind’’ can drive down the temperature of a mid-April day by 20 degrees in 15 minutes.
Then comes that hot, humid day in late May or early June when the lushness is almost tropical. In New Hampshire when I lived there, it sometimes seemed as if winter ended one day and summer started the next.
Spring seems at once the real start of the year, at least of the natural year, as well as its ending, a feeling that for most people goes back to their memories of the school year’s approaching end.
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The proliferation of hotel projects in Providence looks like an unexpectedly enthusiastic show of confidence in the future of the city.
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I’m pretty sure that there has rarely, if ever, been such political frenzy in America as the reaction to President Trump, most of it anti but some of its fanatically pro. The rage rolls into social media and won’t quit. But most of the fulminations are in echo chambers and a waste of time. Trump foes (many of whom didn’t vote last November and are now surprised by what they’re getting) especially waste a lot of energy on Facebook expressing their anger amongst themselves.
That anger is partly from feeling powerless. They can address that by participating in local politics either as candidates or as supporters of candidates. That should mean that they cough up a few dollars to send to their favorite party or candidates. Take action, don’t just look at the news.
State legislative seats are particularly important because state legislators do the redistricting of congressional districts, aka gerrymandering.
We need to grit our teeth and become more active citizens again, out of enlightened self-interest, if nothing else. It does matter who gets elected. And ‘’they’’ aren’t all crooks.
Reduce stress by limiting your time following the hijinks in Washington. Just read the news once a day, and push aside the obsessive-compulsive drive to look for the latest outrageous news bulletin every 10 minutes. The added time for reflection will let you understand more of what’s going on and what to do about it.
The Internet is undermining our capacity for developed thought, connections with family and real friends (not Facebook-style ones) and our privacy in the addiction to the rush produced by looking at screens.
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Meanwhile, Michael Andor Brodeur, writing in The Boston Globe, suggests we’d all feel better if there was less “verticality’’ on social media, which tends to drag us down, down, down in triviality. He writes in “How toppling the timeline is changing the Internet’’ (March 3):
“From the earliest bulletin boards and forums to the first frontiers of the blogosphere, the standard-setting timelines of Facebook and Twitter, and the non-coincidentally named ‘verticals’ of digital publishing, the necessity to scroll down to catch up — or more generally, the predicament of reverse chronology — is a fundamental flaw of our online experience.
“We spend hours each day diving over and over again into the unfathomable depths of the recent past, snatching up whatever we can until we’re gasping for the fresh air of the present, clicking to refresh, and preparing for yet another dive into the vastness of whatever we just missed.
“The exercise of online life often feels like treading water to stay afloat in a lake with no floor and no shore. It’s exhausting. Overwhelming. Intrinsically hopeless.’’
So, he writes, a partial solution to this Internet ennui is running things horizontally.
‘’{M}ore and more, I’m seeing apps and mobile platforms pushing things in different directions — to the left and right, specifically. There seems to be a (figurative) elevation of the horizontal underway (and it goes beyond the new language of approval taught to us by Tinder swipes).’’
“It’s an Internet that moves with you rather than against you, that doesn’t drag you down and force you back to the top. It emulates the natural way we move through narrative space (however illusory our linear perception of time may ultimately be, professor) and in doing so, it helps impose some order where chaos rules — or at least creates a clearing for context in an otherwise hostile wilderness.’’
Even better – read a book or take a walk.
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Back in Moscow, with Trump’s hero Vladimir Putin, we see that lawyer Nikolai Gorokhov died the other day after he was pushed out of a window. He had been working on behalf of the family of whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky, who was murdered in a Russian prison.
Then we have a former Russian member of parliament who defected to Ukraine and began sharply criticizing Putin gunned down Thursday in downtown Kiev in an apparent contract killing.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko called the murder of Denis Voronenkov, a former member of Russia’s Communist Party who fled to Kiev in October 2016, an “act of state terrorism by Russia.”
Putin’s enemies tend to have untimely deaths.
This is the regime with which some Trump colleagues have been very close. As investigations continue in Washington into cooperation between the Trump team and Putin’s murderous kleptocracy, the smell of Russia-linked corruption grows ever stronger in the White House. The Trump-Russia connection is a real scandal.
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The original proposal would have made the MBTA the only commuter rail service in America to shut down on weekends! With work schedules becoming more fluid and business and building booming in Boston, such a shutdown would have been a false economy.
Of course, labor contracts and some other things need to be changed at the deficit-ridden agency but, still, it produces far more wealth for Greater Boston than it costs. It does this by easing road congestion, making business schedules more reliable, reducing the disruption from bad weather, providing a service that lets people work (and sleep!) while they commute and all in all improving the quality of life in Greater Boston (and to some extent in Rhode Island, too.) And, if you tally up all the costs, it’s always cheaper to take the train than to drive a car you own. The MBTA is a major reason that Greater Boston is prosperous.
What the MBTA needs to do is to heavily promote its weekend service to raise ridership. Regularity and reliability of service are essential for successful promotion.
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One good thing about President Trump’s budget proposal is that its extreme cuts in some programs encourage serious thinking about what the Feds should do. For example, do we really need the Small Business Administration? How about the billions of dollars a year in giveaways to agribusiness?
I was thinking of adding the relatively tiny National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities to this question. Their foes note that they tend to appeal to the affluent. However, they both provide, among other projects, very useful educational programs for public schools in poor districts.
As for NPR and PBS, while they also tend to appeal to more affluent (and older) people, they do important public-information work in news and other fields that commercial stations do less and less of, and they’re accessible to everyone. They deserve public support (and provide exposure for the sort of individuals and groups – artists, writers, etc. -- who benefit from the NEA and NEH). That the BBC is arguably the world’s best broadcast news operation can be explained in part by the fact that it doesn’t depend on ads. As most commercial news organizations continue to lay off reporters to maximize profit, NPR and PBS have had to step up their efforts to help keep the public informed.
By the way, the annual cost to the taxpayers of security for the Trump family at their gilded residences and as they fly around among their estates and on their luxury vacations and business trips may end up exceeding the total budget of the NEA, which right now is about $150 million a year, as is the NEH’s. Not only is this famously tax-avoiding clan costing the taxpayers a fortune so that the family can continue to live in the baronial style they demand but the taxpayers are in effect paying to promote the Trump Organization’s business interests.
What a country!
Anyway, let’s take a good look at the Trump budget before cursing the whole thing because of some of its horrors, such as its attack on the Environmental Protection Agency and the State Department. It’s always healthy every few years to review our assumptions and look at the outcomes of government programs. And, yes, the political third rails of Social Security and Medicare do need reform.
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Mr. Gainer is a politically connected and nationally respected former law-enforcement person. (He also used to be the U.S. Senate’s sergeant-at-arms, among other jobs.) As it turns out, Mr. Gainer’s niece Bridget gave a $1,000 campaign donation to Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo’s election campaign in 2014. The two women had discussed public-pension reform on TV in Chicago, where Ms. Gainer is a Cook County commissioner who has been considered a possible future Democratic mayoral candidate. Ms. Raimondo had become nationally known for public-pension reform in her term as state treasurer. GoLocalProv broke this story on March 16.
A spokesman for the governor said that her office had recommended Mr. Gainer’s firm but that she hadn’t known of Bridget Gainer’s link to Terrance Gainer until well after the State Police announced the hiring, in February. I doubt if there was any quid pro quo but this sort of thing undermines public trust in the state contract process. Stay away from no-bid contracts; they tend to carry the aroma
of real or perceived corruption.
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My friends at The Boston Guardian report that there’s an effort underway to get some residents to help reduce the swelling Canada geese population by “egg-addling,’’ which includes “painting vegetable oil on the eggs or gently scrambling them so they don't come to term. ‘’ Sounds cruel, but the goose droppings are a bit of a health issue, albeit probably exaggerated.
Marion Larson, spokeswoman for the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, explains that Canada geese were once used as live decoys for hunters until that practice was banned in the ‘30s. But, she told The Guardian, while many of these birds were then liberated, they had “their migratory instincts bred out of them.’’ So now their descendants hang around all winter and make a mess, although they are fun to watch.
They particularly love golf courses, which take up too much open space.
Like raccoons and more recently coyotes, these wild animals have learned to live among people, opportunistically taking advantage of the human-related food, such as garbage and backyard plants, and the relative lack of other predators near people. Given how human over-population is rapidly taking over and ruining much wildlife habitat, in the end perhaps only such opportunistic species will thrive in the future.
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The role of governors and states’ dominant political philosophy and policy in the economic success or lack thereof of these jurisdictions has always been exaggerated. Economies are very complicated. You see this in the list of states that haven't regained the jobs lost in the Great Recession. In New England, those are Rhode Island and Connecticut – both states mostly run by liberal Democrats. But the other states on the list --- Alabama, Michigan, Mississippi, New Mexico and Wyoming – are all run by Republicans.
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I’ve had some medical adventures, most recently cataract operations.
For one thing, I’ve been surprised by the extent to which I’d been seeing things through a grayish/brownish haze for years, with loss of depth and color perception.
Everything is now much, much sharper and more vivid. A handy improvement as we slide into the colors of spring. Of course, there will still be plenty of things I’d be better off not seeing.
Cataracts used to make many people legally blind – but they’re now removed and replaced in fast, efficient, assembly lines in outpatient clinics.
Consider such much more traumatic procedures as coronary-artery bypass surgery (which I’ve also had) – a rather gory affair. These things are now routine.
That’s a happy note in the cacophony about U.S. healthcare reform, whose problems are more about payment than about treatment. The sickest part of our healthcare system is our insurance system, upon which feed physicians, hospitals, insurance companies and pharmaceutical and medical-device companies all striving to maximize their profits.
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So the last of what were called in their mid-20th Century heyday “The Brothers,’’ has died at 101. David Rockefeller, like his brothers, Nelson (New York governor, vice president and would-be president); Winthrop, who among other things was governor of Arkansas (of all places), and John D. Rockefeller III and Laurance, the latter two best known as philanthropists, all saw public service in various forms as their calling. David, however, is most remembered for his time running the Chase Manhattan Bank, now JP Morgan Chase.
They all had their foibles, Winthrop and Nelson particularly, but all in all they represented a kind of quiet noblesse oblige/civic-mindedness, combined with an innovative spirit, that looks particularly edifying compared to some of the Big Money types today.
"Barbara and I were deeply saddened to hear that our wonderful friend, David Rockefeller, has passed from this good earth," former President George H. W. Bush said. "So many knew him as one of the most generous philanthropists — and brightest Points of Light — whose caring and commitment to the widest range of worthy causes touched and lifted innumerable lives."
Actually quite accurate. The vast fortune made by the Rockefeller Brothers’ sometimes rapacious grandfather John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil and America’s first billionaire, ended up doing a lot of good, especially under the stewardship of his son, John D. Rockefeller Jr. and his hard-working sons. (Their other grandfather was the very tough and very pro-business U.S. Sen. Nelson Aldrich of Rhode Island, nicknamed the “general manager of the United States.’’)
‘’Rich as Rockefeller’’ was a phrase you’d hear all over the place until a few decades ago. Long before I worked in New York in the ‘70s, when “The Brothers’’ still bestrode the city as benevolent dukes, their name had come to evoke good works as much as wealth.
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