In New Haven’s Union Station
— Photo by Grendelkhan
‘The bar in the commuter station steams
like a ruin, its fourth wall open
to the crowd and the fluttering timetables.
In the farthest corner, the television
crackles a torch song and a beaded gown.’'
— From “The Northeast Corridor,’’ by Donald Revell (born 1954), American poet
Sections owned by Amtrak on the Northeast Corridor are in red; sections with commuter service are highlighted in blue.
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Politicians across America, even anti-“Big Government” right-wingers in rural states, want Amtrak service, some of it as local pork, however lightly it is used. But as Congress considers President Biden’s almost $2 trillion infrastructure program, and the $80 billion in it for Amtrak, they should, but might not, set aside the lion’s share of the money to improve the Northeast Corridor, where it’s by far the most needed.
That where the nation’s thickest population density is; such density is very important in justifying rail passenger service. And the great popularity of the service, between Boston and Washington, D.C., has been demonstrated for decades.
The Northeast Corridor line plays an important part in lubricating the economy of this immensely important part of America, which includes both its political (Washington) and financial (New York) capitals as well as crucial technological, education and health-care infrastructure. Amtrak service there should be expanded, for economic and environmental reasons.
Amtrak owns and controls some 80 percent of the Corridor, which means, importantly, that it has considerable control over how the few freight trains use it on short sections. New York State, Connecticut and Massachusetts, for their part, own relatively sections of the route. But Amtrak is in the driver’s seat, as it should be. That isn’t to say that at least one more set of tracks, for freight and passengers, hasn’t long been needed.
You must expect that if all or part of the Biden infrastructure package is approved, that Amtrak service to thinly populated and economically insignificant parts of the country will be preserved or even expanded with lightly used long-haul trains (much beloved by train romantics), especially in states with powerful members of Congress. So be it in legislative sausage-making, but the core need for the benefit of the entire country is the Northeast Corridor.
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Note the importance of Providence’s Amtrak stop not only for Rhode Islanders but for the many people from southeastern Massachusetts and eastern Connecticut who also use it, for Amtrak and MBTA service.
An Amtrak Acela train in Old Saybook, Conn.
There are hopes that electric-powered airplanes will help advance the move away from carbon-based fuels. Mr. King writes: “Boeing, for one, is working hard on electric airplanes. Electric air taxis are being experimented with in Dubai and about to be tried in Frankfurt.’’
The newly seated Democrats in the House have lessons to learn, but none more than not to tell people what you’re going to take away from them.
That was the great mistake that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made when she laid out her Green New Deal. It sounds like big stick from big government.
She said everything should be done, from rebuilding the entire stock of American housing (which can’t be done) to phasing out air transport (which would never happen) to tackling cow flatulence (which is a smelly challenge). Dreamy nonsense is nonetheless nonsense, and nonetheless has a political price.
It is a bad posture to say to people that you’re going to take things away from them — whether it’s their money in taxes or their way of life — to achieve environmental goals.
The problem with Ocasio-Cortez’s statements is that she’s seen, wrongly, as the new face of the new, far-left Democratic Party. Come the election, Democrats will have to spend time distancing themselves from the Ocasio-Cortez brand of utopian dreaming while capitalizing on their environmental brio.
Foolish extreme suggestions neither woo those who are going to decide the next election nor are they in the dynamic tradition of successful politics. You tell people you are going to fix things, not take them away.
Underlying the Ocasio-Cortez argument, which was codified in a non-binding joint resolution, is the basic idea that the only way to save the planet is to cut all carbon emissions in a very short time and to substitute solar, wind and hydro energy.
Omitted from the statements by Ocasio-Cortez and her Senate collaborator, Edward Markey, D-Mass., is any mention of nuclear, which is still the largest carbon-free source of electricity and hardly scars the face of the earth compared to wind and solar. Maybe that is because Markey has spent his whole career in public life trying to shut down nuclear.
In fact, the environmental movement spent long years fighting nuclear. When I would ask, in conferences in the 1980s, what they would use in lieu of a robust nuclear regime, they would answer coal. But to make it sound environmentally acceptable, they said it should be burned in circulating fluidized bed boilers. These offer some advantage, using limestone to precipitate out sulfate.
Missing from the Green New Deal is any sense of the new, i.e. how technology can help.
Take aircraft. They are in the early stages of development, but an electric airplane is in the sights of the big airframe manufacturers. Boeing, for one, is working hard on electric airplanes. Electric air taxis are being experimented with in Dubai and about to be tried in Frankfurt.
The Green New Deal, which is short on details, only endorses one technology outside of wind and solar: high-speed rail. Unfortunately, Ocasio-Cortez is boosting it at a time when California is drastically cutting back on the U.S. entry into the high-speed rail game. The United States sat that one out, and it may be too late to get into the game.
But there is hope.
The success of Amtrak’s electrified Northeast Corridor points the way: People will use regular trains if they are available and the track is good enough for them to travel at a reasonable speed of about 150 mph. The immediate answer is better track allowing more express trains, like Washington to Boston or Los Angeles to San Francisco without stops.
Nearly all the problems of the climate are amenable to technological solutions. The new fusion of high technology across the board in smart cities will, among other things, reduce the carbon footprint through efficiency and electrified transportation.
Ocasio-Cortez is a fresh voice in the nation: brave and as yet unbeholden to special-interest groups. If she can grasp that we are on the threshold of a brave new world of technology, called the Fourth Industrial Revolution, she’ll see how it can solve many problems, including those it seems to create in climate. Then she’ll have a political product to sell that people will buy.
The one place where technology seems to offer no solutions is with cows and the challenge of Flatulence Arriving Regularly Today (FART).
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He is based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
By ecoRI News staff (ecori.org)
HAMDEN, Conn.
A June 26 announcement by the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) that the $1.1 billion Susquehanna River Rail Bridge Project on the Northeast Corridor in Maryland poses “no significant impact,” drew sharp rebuke from Daniel Mackay, executive director of the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation, who warned that such a decision could set an unacceptably low bar for mitigating historic, cultural and environmental resource impacts from future high-speed rail projects in Connecticut.
The proposed rail bridge replacement project bisects the National Register-listed Havre de Grace Historic District in Maryland, comprised of some 1,000 historic structures, many from the 18th Century, on the banks of the Susquehanna River, according to a recent story in The Baltimore Sun.
“FRA determined that the most comprehensive level of environmental review was not needed for this $1.1 billion dollar rail project in the midst of a historic coastal community in Maryland,” Mackay wrote in a recent press release. “Connecticut and Rhode Island communities caught in the cross-hairs of FRA’s bypass proposals should be concerned for the signal sent by this Maryland project — the process ahead may not yield the protections that communities want for themselves.”
Since the FRA released draft plans on Nov. 15, 2015 to expand new high-speed railroad corridorsacross coastal Connecticut and Rhode Island, under a federal planning process called NEC Future, the Connecticut Trust and its grassroots partner, SECoast, have led a campaign to counter FRA’s “insensitive approach to transportation planning for the Northeast Corridor routes through Connecticut.”
“FRA’s plan represents a once-in-a-generation decision that will fundamentally shape the communities, economies and ecology of coastal southern New England,” according to Gregory Stroud, director of special projects at the Connecticut Trust and co-founder of SECoast. “The only sure way to protect our communities from these types of impacts is to fully remove these projects from the Record of Decision.”
The FRA is expected to announce a long-delayed record of decision for NEC Future this summer, finalizing a blueprint for the Northeast Corridor that will shape infrastructure decisions and investment through 2040, or later.
The current blueprint has been in place since a similar process was completed in 1978. The Northeast Corridor, which connects cities between Washington, D.C., and Boston, is the nation’s busiest rail corridor.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com
President Trump is a crook and a pathological liar, and perhaps a traitor -- nobody's perfect! -- but even a low-life like him can sometimes be right, although with his ADHD most of his good ideas lack little more staying power than each of the endless series of lies, boasts and threats that comprise his Tweets.
In any case, kudos, at least for now, for his apparent openness to a very good idea. One is that he says he’d consider supporting raising the federal gasoline and diesel tax to help fund repair of America’s decayed transportation infrastructure. The federal tax on gasoline is 18.4 cents a gallon, and the diesel-fuel tax 24.4 a gallon. The tax was last increased in 1993! No wonder our roads and bridges are in such bad shape. Such an increase would not be enough to pay for all the needed work that has been put off for so long, and so further public-private spending will be needed.
The outlays should include a big increase in outlays for mass transit, which changing demographics and residential patterns require.
Amtrak, for one, needs much more work to meet the needs of its surging customer base. We’ll get plenty of inconvenient reminders of the decrepitude of much of its infrastructure this summer as the system starts on much overdue work at New York’s Penn Station, the nation’s busiest train station. Travelers going through that catacomb are warned to expect weeks of disruption this summer.
The Northeast Corridor, by far Amtrak’s busiest and most lucrative route, has a $28 billion backlog of needed repairs. And yet Congress keeps underfunding it, even as members from lightly populated states demand that the railroad continue to run money-losing trains through their jurisdictions. In the current fiscal year, Amtrak only gets about $1.4 billion in subsidies from the Feds. (Still, that is 10 times the amount of money that the government is spending this year to pay for the Trump family’s protection and its vacation and business trips….)
Failure to address decay on the Northeast Corridor could seriously hurt the economy of the stretch between Boston and Washington – the single most important area in the United States, including both the nation’s financial capital (New York) and its political capital, as well as such technological, educational and medical centers as Greater Boston and Philadelphia.
It’s not even a matter of raising the quality of the route to European or East Asian high-speed train standards. It’s a matter of maintaining, or slightly improving, the substandard service we have now.
The proposed path of the new Northeast Corridor railroad route through the Rhode Island towns of Westerly and Charlestown has some officials and residents worried. (NEC Future environmental impact statement). Yes, much of this is impossible to read, but you get a sense of the route.
Via ecoRI News (ecori.org)
By FRANK CARINI
The Federal Railroad Administration, about a week before Christmas, released its final environmental impact statement regarding the straightening of Northeast Corridor tracks, from Washington, D.C., to Boston, during the next few decades.
Impacted communities, including Charlestown, South Kingstown and Westerly, R.I., and Old Lyme, Conn., have 30 days to respond. The comment period is open until Jan. 31. The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) has estimated the cost of its proposal at nearly $130 billion, plus an additional $2 billion annually to operate. Northeast Corridor (NEC) states will be expected to pay part of the cost, and the project can’t happen without approval from the corridor’s eight states.
The proposed new railroad path would cut off an estimated 45 minutes of travel time between New York City and Boston, according to the FRA’s NEC Future initiative, by straightening out curves that currently exist in the tracks.
Both public and private property could be impacted, including some sensitive areas.
The proposal calls for rerouting the tracks through Grills Preserve in Westerly, and through Charlestown's Frances C. Carter Memorial Preserve and Amos Green Farm. The new tracks would rejoin the old rail bed in the Great Swamp Management Area in South Kingstown, where a third rail would be added to increase railroad width by 50 percent, according to NEC Future.
Some wetlands would reportedly be filled in Burlingame and the Great Swamp Management areas, and in Indian Cedar Swamp. The project also calls for the possibility of blasting and trenching.
The massive rail project proposal has both activists and lawmakers concerned about potential environmental impacts and cost.
Gregory Stroud, executive director of SECoast, recently told The Connecticut Mirror he’s no fan of the plan.
“A $100 billion dollar infrastructure project shouldn’t be planned in secret and announced by surprise, on a Friday (Dec. 16), just nine days before the Christmas holiday,” he told the newspaper. “This sets a terrible precedent, not just for NEC Future, but for all of the infrastructure projects planned for towns across Connecticut over the next two decades. This isn’t how you announce a good plan, or a plan with real public support.”
At a Dec. 16 press conference in Hartford, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said “this concept and plan, just to reassure people in Connecticut, is simply not happening,” according to the same Mirror story.
Other environmentalists and officials in both Connecticut and Rhode Island have noted their concerns. In a Dec. 19 e-mail to ecoRI News, a Rhode Island planning board official, who wished not be identified, wrote, “The proposed rail line appears to cut through state and private properties including the middle the Francis Carter Preserve ... this would make it dangerous for wildlife and people to use and negate its value. Wildlife and important flora will be affected.”
In a Dec. 21 e-mail to ecoRI News, Kristen Castrataro wrote that the proposed track changes would impact the entire state. The Richmond resident noted that FRA's environmental impact statement indicated that 11 Rhode Island cultural resources and historic properties would be impacted.
Castrataroalso noted two other concerns: the proposal would impact an additional 200 acres of prime Ocean State farmland; and, of the eight states and the District of Columbia named in the plan, Rhode Island would have the highest acreage of parkland — more than 50 acres — "converted to a transportation use."
NEC Future is a comprehensive planning effort to define, evaluate and prioritize future investments in the Northeast Corridor. The FRA launched the initiative in February 2012, to consider the role of rail passenger service in the context of current and future transportation demands.
Amtrak’s Stephen Gardner, who is in charge of business operations on the corridor, told The Associated Press that the plan affirms the railroad’s “long-held view that rebuilding and expanding the Northeast Corridor is essential for the growth and prosperity of the entire region.”
The 457-mile NEC — anchored by D.C.’s Union Station in the south, New York’s Pennsylvania Station in the center and Boston's South Station in the north — is one of the most heavily traveled rail corridors in the world, according to the FRA. The NEC is shared by intercity, commuter and freight operations, and moves more than 365 million passengers and 14 million car-miles of freight annually.
While improvements continue to be made, the FRA says NEC faces serious challenges, with century-old infrastructure, outdated technology and inadequate capacity to meet current or projected travel demand.
Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., is a proponent of the plan and was against Providence not being included in the project.
“One of the key points we’ve made emphatically is that Providence station has to be a key part of the Northeast Corridor and that’s been accepted by the secretary of transportation and everyone else,” Reed told WPRI Eyewitness News earlier this month. “It has to be an integral part because it’s important not only to Rhode Island but to the whole region.”
Reed is the top Democrat on the appropriations subcommittee that allocates Amtrak funding.
Frank Carini is editor of ecoRI News.
To have a successful mass-transit system you have to correctly answer a simple question: Does it get people where they need to go, when they need to get there, conveniently, safely and affordably?
Right now, Rhode Islanders’ answer to that question is largely “No.” Many people still can’t easily rely on mass transit to get to work, go to school, visit their doctor, go shopping or just see a friend when they’re ready to go. This results in Rhode Island not taking advantage of the economic benefits that an inviting and user-friendly mass transit system offers.
While the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority (RIPTA) has taken steps to maximize passenger mobility with extremely limited resources, achieving and sustaining a robust transit system requires substantial investments in both infrastructure and operations. Among Northeast Corridor states, Rhode Island ranks last in annual per-capita public investment in transit, averaging just $50.53 per person, compared with the regional average of $202.45 per person, according to a 2014 study by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.
It isn’t as though Rhode Island lacks the public will to upgrade its mass transit. In 2014, Rhode Island voters handily approved a $35 million first-ever transit-only bond to create a multi-modal transit hub at the Providence train station.
And Rhode Island already has many other pieces in place to succeed. Notably small, it’s the second-most urbanized state, with more than 75 percent of its residents living within a 10-minute walk of a transit stop. Still, less than 3 percent of the state's population uses transit regularly.
Having a robust and user-friendly transit system is increasingly seen by the business community as an important component to a vibrant economy. This is demonstrated in part by a sustained trend across the country of companies moving to walkable, transit-accessible locations in and around downtowns, big and small.
The Millennial generation, which will soon dominate the workforce, and about whom we hear a constant lament from businesses that young, skilled labor is leaving the state, prefer using public transit to get around. Together with aging Baby Boomers, they’re driving ridership growth around the country. There's no reason why we can’t leverage strategic investments in transit to make Rhode Island more attractive to millennials and grow our economy in ways that further revitalize our urban and town centers.
The recent “Next Stop: Making Transit Work for Rhode Island” forum in Providence demonstrated how we can achieve a transit system that generates a positive return on investment for Rhode Island’s economy and quality of place. Following a “lessons learned” presentation by officials and transit experts from Minneapolis, Denver and Hartford, Rhode Island officials engaged in a lively discussion about the challenges and opportunities for achieving a transit system that really works for more residents and businesses.
With continued leadership from the governor's office and House and Senate leaders to make public transit a priority this year, we’re confident that Rhode Island can reap the many economic and quality-of-life benefits of a more convenient and effective transit system.
Investing in a smarter transportation system is becoming easier with the recent approval of the new federal transportation act — the FAST Act — that modestly increased federal investment for roads and bridges and also for local mass transit. Also boosted were public and private incentives for transit projects that best deliver on mobility, and economic, environmental and social gains.
Still, Rhode Island must do even more to focus and leverage its limited resources to unleash the many co-benefits of improved mass transit. This includes a serious pursuit of public-private partnerships that have proven to work elsewhere, particularly for transit stations and transit-oriented development.
That simple question — “Does the public transit system take people where they need to go, when they need to go, conveniently, safely and affordably?” — may not yet yield the answer we all want. But by taking steps now to plan and invest wisely, we can get the correct response that Rhode Islanders and the state’s economy are looking for.
Scott Wolf is the executive director of Grow Smart RI, which co-leads the Coalition for Transportation Choices. Laurie White is president of the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce.
Since the disappearance of private-sector passenger rail service decades ago, intrepid entrepreneurs have tried to bring it back. None have succeeded.
However, in some densely populated places, passenger rail has even thrived in the public sector, at least as measured by passenger volume. This mostly means Amtrak in the Northeast Corridor and several major cities’ long-established commuter-rail networks. But new commuter rail is also catching on in some unlikely places, including such Sunbelt cities as Dallas and Phoenix, which now have popular light-rail systems.
Now, with an aging population, the proliferation of digital devices that many people would prefer to stare at rather than at the road and the increasing unpleasantness of traveling on America’s decaying highway infrastructure amidst texting and angry drivers, private passenger rail looks more capitalistically attractive.
Consider All Aboard Florida, a company that plans to offer extensive rail service starting in 2017. It will connect Miami and Orlando in just under three hours, with stops in Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach.
Its advertising copy eloquently describes commuter rail’s allure in populous areas: “{Y}ou can turn your stressful daily {car} commute into a productive or peaceful time by choosing to take the train instead of driving your car. By becoming a train commuter, you’ll also help the economy and environment while you’re at it.’’
Southern New England, like much of Florida, is densely populated, with some unused or underused rail rights of way. So our entrepreneurs occasionally propose private passenger rail for routes not served by Amtrak or such regional mass-transit organizations as Metro North and the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority.
Consider the Worcester-Providence route, on which a new company called the Boston Surface Railroad Co. wants to start operating commuter rail service in 2017 on the (now freight-only) Providence and Worcester Railroad’s tracks. Most of the commuters going to work would be traveling from the Worcester area, via Woonsocket, where there would be a stop, to Greater Providence. While Providence itself has fewer people -- about 178,000 -- than Worcester (about 183,000), the two-state Providence metro area -- about 1.6 million -- is much bigger than the latter’s metro area’s about 813,000.
The density is there for rail service. That the region has an older population than the national average and frequent bad winter weather also give the idea a lift.
But the old rail line needs to be upgraded if the trips are to be made fast enough to lure many travelers. The company hopes to offer a one-way time of about 70 minutes on a route that you can drive in about 45 minutes in moderate traffic and clement weather. That could be a killer.
What this project and similar ones need is new welded track, rebuilt rail beds (with help of public money?) and some entirely new routes to make service competitive with car-driving times. We need more passenger and duel-purpose passenger-freight rail lines, not more highways. But getting them will be tough in a country that so blithely tolerates crumbling transportation infrastructure and has a deeply entrenched libertarian commuting habit of a single person driving long distances to work. Unless gasoline tops $5 a gallon and stays there for at least a year, it’s hard to see millions of Americans deciding that they’ll quit their cars to take the train.
Still, I applaud the project’s CEO, Vincent Bono, and hope that thousands of commuters will give his railroad a try. While the trip would be long, think of how much uninterrupted Web surfing (free Wi-Fi!), reading and snoozing you could get on these trains, with their reclining seats.
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An Aug. 10 USA Today story was headlined “Smaller cities emerge among top picks for biz meetings.’’ Depressingly, Providence was not on the list of the top 50 places for “meetings and events’’ in 2015, say evaluations by Cvent. But many far less interesting and attractive places were.
The reasons probably include Rhode Island’s under-funded and balkanized self-promotion and the long delay (now finally being addressed) in building a longer runway at T.F. Green Airport.
Robert Whitcomb (rwhitcomb51@gmail.com), a Providence-based editor, writer and consultant, oversees newenglanddiary.com and is a partner in Cambridge Management Group, (cmg625.com), a healthcare consultancy, and a fellow at the Pell Center. He used to be the editorial-page editor of The Providence Journal and the finance editor of the International Herald Tribune, among other jobs.
Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo is focusing on long-term projects that would help most people in the state, rather than “government by deal’’ wherein powerful groups seek taxpayer help for their special projects.
Improve public education and physical infrastructure and good stuff will follow. After all, Rhode Island already has a highly strategic location, ports, some famed educational and cultural institutions and considerable natural and manmade beauty.
“Our infrastructure is intertwined with economic development,’’ notes Rhode Island Transportation Director Peter Alviti.
So the governor wants commercial truck tolls on many bridges to help pay to fix roads and bridges. The plan is to issue $700 million in state revenue bonds, to be repaid from tolls on big trucks using bridges on Interstate Highways 95, 195 and 295 and state Routes 146, 6 and 10.
That many of Rhode Island’s bridges and roads are falling apart is obvious. Bad roads and bridges of course damage the vehicles driven on them -- a far better reason to avoid the tiny state than new user fees would be. Such disrepair shouts out that the state has been badly run. Bad PR!
That the Ocean State, part of which is an archipelago, ranks last in the nation in overall bridge condition seems suicidal. Big trucks do most of the damage to the state’s bridges and roads, by one estimate 90 percent.
Meanwhile, vehicles are becoming much more energy-efficient, many young people now don’t drive nearly as much as young people did a couple of decades ago and the huge cohort of aging Baby Boomers won’t be driving as much either. This means lower gasoline-tax revenues to pay for infrastructure.
Rhode Island and Connecticut are the only states on the Northeast Corridor between Maryland and Maine with no broad-based commercial truck user fees! Rhode Island does have the Pell Bridge, whose truck tolls help maintain it and the Mt. Hope Bridge. That leaves hundreds of badly maintained bridges. (Connecticut is considering re-imposing tolls; it had them for years for all vehicles on Route 95.)
The governor also wants to boost rail and bus service, including an express bus lane for the Routes 6 and 10 interchange reconstruction, and seeks $400 million in federal funds for public transit. With the GOP Congress, that will be hard, but demographics are on her side.
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Anger grows over many cash-rich companies’ paucity of long-term investment in research, job training and pay raises for employees below the senior-executive level. Rather, increasingly selfish execs and their boards take more and more corporate earnings to buy back company shares to boost their prices to enrich themselves at accelerating rates; much of their compensation is in stock.
Many senior execs are less embarrassed than their predecessors were 50 years ago about paying themselves so much at the expense of other employees and the communities where they do business. That’s one reason for the widening income gap. Some of the here-today-gone-tomorrow execs later repair their PR by creating foundations to give away a bit of the money they have taken. But that doesn’t help those they have blithely laid off and communities they have hollowed out.
Some call this stock-price “manipulation’’ and want to ban it. But this shouldn’t be illegal in a free market, however selfish it may be. Still, out-of-control greed and short-termism are eroding the long-term competitiveness of U.S. companies. Even some on Wall Street are speaking out against it. Lawrence Fink, chairman of BlackRock, the huge asset manager, told the chief executives of the 500 biggest U.S. public companies that this “discouraging underinvesting’’ undermines “long-term growth.’’
Economist William Lazonick calls buybacks "profits without prosperity.’’
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I spend more time these days visiting old sick people, as I prepare to join them myself. I always learn something. Not only do these people tend to be more honest than younger folks because they have little to lose in telling the truth, but they have better stories. And visiting them tends to put one’s own life in clearer perspective, including its brevity.
Robert Whitcomb (rwhitcomb51@gmail.com) oversees New England Diary.
News media have recently reported on the many people who have permanently given up looking for work. Among the causes cited: federal and some states’ generous disability programs, marriage’s decline, the aging population, the rise of the Internet and the Affordable Care Act.
I would add corporate short-termism, which leads companies to lay off people faster and to be more disinclined to share profits with lower-level employees in raises. Many ex-workers decide it isn’t worth working again. (And grifters game disability payments …)
Especially since the 1980s, senior executives have been heavily rewarded for quarter-to-quarter earnings gains with gigantic pay packages. When I worked for The Wall Street Journal, in the ’70s, the annual earnings report was the big thing; now it’s the quarterly one. Pension and other investment funds (including unions’!) have also pushed for short-term-profit maximization.
A wider view of corporate duties — such as lower-level employees’ compensation and the communities where the companies do business — has slipped in the priority list, especially in public companies. That chief executives tend to stay in their jobs only a few years encourages this by eroding loyalty to fellow employees.
And private-sector union membership has plunged, weakening a power to push companies to share their wealth more widely with non-executives and people without company stock. So while senior execs’ compensation may rise by double digits in a year, average workers are lucky if their raises reach the inflation rate.
Don’t expect any major share-the-wealth action by executives or owners or a higher federal minimum wage anytime soon.
But the large voting constituencies of these seemingly permanently jobless people make it unlikely that programs that help them avoid work will be slashed. Interestingly, their percentages are highest in the Tea Party regions, where complaints about “welfare’’ and the taxes to pay for it are most strident.
Many of the sort of people who 40 years ago would have been working will henceforth continue not contributing to America’s productive energy. Based on anecdotal reportage, most of these people seem pretty depressed and/or bored by their status.
I TOOK THE TRAIN the other week to and from Philadelphia. As I gazed out the window at the beautiful Long Island Sound marshes, I thought of how much of my life I have spent on trains, and how nice it is that we still have so many on the East Coast.
I remember the excitement of being in Pullman car sleeping compartments on trips to the Midwest to see relatives, and the train down to Tennessee to see family there. At every major stop, they’d bring aboard local newspapers. The attendants were almost entirely African-American; being a sleeping-car porter was the most reliable job that blacks could get then.
Then there were the rackety Old Colony Line commuter trains, with their itchy seat upholstery, from Boston’s South Shore to South Station — with the cars and the station dingy and reeking of cigarette and cigar smoke. Still, it was exciting to be put on a train alone as a little kid. And I began the habit of using the train time to figure out assorted issues and to catch up on sleep.
In school I often took a Budd Car train from Bridgeport to Waterbury, Conn., through a heavily polluted sort of Ruhr Valley industrial landscape (most of the factories are long closed now), after getting to Bridgeport from Boston on an old New Haven Railroad train where you could order a nice meal, with linen tablecloth, in a dining car, checking off your order on a card since inane union rules prohibited speaking the order to a waiter. They were remarkably relaxed about enforcing drinking-age rules.
Then I commuted on such innovations as the Metroliners between New York and Washington, and, for a time in the sexy TurboTrains on the Shoreline Route in New England. (They had an elevated section, like trains Out West.)
The Northeast Corridor trains are too often late, especially when they come from the south, the infrastructure way behind European and many East Asian trains and the eating accommodations mediocre. Still, you have much more space than increasingly unhealthy planes (whose ever tighter seating sets you up for a pulmonary embolism), buses and cars and a moving train’s rhythm is soothing, indeed soporific. Trains get you away from it all, even if you’re going to a job.
Robert Whitcomb (rwhitcomb51@gmail.com) is the overseer of New England Diary.
President Obama is making a big mistake in seeking to protect millions of illegal aliens from prosecution by executive order.
While presidents have considerable legal discretion in individual deportation cases, giving amnesty to whole classes of people who broke the law in entering the U.S. stretches to the breaking point proper presidential powers. And remember that Congress has already debated — but not passed — legislative ideas similar to what the president would do, which also undermines his case.
Yes, Congress has long irresponsibly avoided fixing the immigration mess. No wonder the president is frustrated. Republicans, for their part, are torn between the campaign cash of businesses that love cheap illegal-immigrant labor, much of it at or below minimum wage, and nativist Republicans who feel culturally and economically swamped by the alien hordes. Cheap immigrant labor has helped undermine American wages, by some accounts as much as 8 percent.
Many illegal aliens are doing jobs that used to be considered entry jobs entirely for Americans, especially young Americans — a foot in the door of the economy. Some of these were summer jobs that helped pay a lot of college tuition.
Still, there’s no immediate new crisis in immigration. The numbers of those coming across the Mexican border have been declining lately.
That doesn’t mean that it’s not a very bad problem. But the situation doesn’t justify acting in legally dubious, delegitimizing ways that will tend to give a green light to more people to come here illegally, with economic and national-security implications.
If the president and the new Republican-led Congress cannot agree on immigration reform, then they should put off its resolution until, if necessary, one party controls Congress and the White House. Until then, here’s a simple proposal: More firmly enforce the laws on the books. To be fair, note that the Obama administration has deported record numbers of illegals.
ANOTHER THOUGHT on the mid-term elections: The Democrats’ biggest mistake was, out of fear of offending its big-money backers, it took no strong stand against those whom Franklin Roosevelt called “economic royalists” in pushing for a better deal for the middle class.
This is what happened back when Democrats failed to fight for extending Medicare to everyone, rather than coming up with the labyrinthine (and GOP-inspired!) Affordable Care Act. The Democrats need a clear message. In the last election, the perception was that the Democrats really didn’t stand for anything. The high-voting Republicans clearly stood for something: To block Barack Obama at every turn. The president may be standing for something in his immigration plans, but he’s doing it in the wrong way.
AS A RESIDENT of Brooklyn in the ’70s, when New York City was falling apart, I enjoyed the recent Associated Press article about that borough (“Once mocked, Brooklyn emerges as global symbol”).
It has become a symbol of innovation, renewal, gentrification, locavore restaurants and tech startups, with many young Silicon Valleyish types. (One of my daughters recently left Brooklyn for Los Angeles complaining that she was tired of living in a place “where everyone is 25.”)
Somewhat similar transformations have occurred in other old urban areas, including parts of Providence. And even Detroit may be at the very start of a revival.
When I worked in Lower Manhattan and lived in Brooklyn my co-workers acted as if I were commuting to Outer Mongolia. Now it’s where Wall Street types want to be. Never give up on a city!
IF THERE’S one thing that Republicans and Democrats ought to agree on, it’s the nation’s physical infrastructure, especially transportation. And yet key parts of it are falling apart.
Consider the 100-year-old Portal Bridge, part of the underfunded but very heavily traveled Northeast Corridor of Amtrak and local commuter trains. New Jersey Transit, which runs the Garden State’s commuter trains, says that problems on the old bridge caused more than 200 delays from the start of 2013-through July 2014! And that’s far from the only bottleneck on the Northeast Corridor. The aging system (which also needs more tracks) is also a particular mess around Baltimore, as those awaiting northbound trains in New York’s squalid, claustrophobia-inducing Penn Station can especially confirm.
Now there’s a belated plan to replace the Portal Bridge. But with much of American commerce flowing on the Northeast Corridor, the whole stretch must be rebuilt in the next decades. Even with all its flaws (especially when compared with European service), Northeast Corridor train service is a huge wealth creator. If fixed, it can be a much bigger one.
READ Richard Norton Smith’s “On His Own Terms: A Life of Nelson Rockefeller,’’ about the charismatic, dyslexic master builder, arts patron and would-be president, who was decisive about many things but not about how to run for president. Rockefeller once said: "I'm not bright. I'm imaginative.'' But he was very bright sometimes, and usually very imaginative -- sometimes too much so.
For years, he represented the GOP's "Eastern Establishment,'' but his party moved south and west on him. By 1964, when asked by backers to call in the “Eastern Establishment,” he replied: “You’re looking at it, buddy. I’m all that’s left.”
Robert Whitcomb oversees New England Diary.
