Robert Whitcomb: Morgan’s book says a lot about America
This first appeared in GoLocal24.com
“Americans are the only people in the world known to me whose status anxiety prompts them to advertise their college and university affiliations on the rear window of their automobiles.’’
-- Paul Fussell (1924-2012), American historian
In reading William Morgan’s brilliantly written and gorgeously illustrated new book, Academia – Collegiate Gothic Architecture in the United States, you might recall Winston Churchill’s famous line: “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.’’
I thought of this looking back at an institution I attended, a then-all-boys boarding school in Connecticut called The Taft School, founded by Horace Taft, the brother of President William Howard Taft. Its mostly Collegiate Gothic buildings made some of us students feel we were in a hybrid of a medieval church and a fort. This, I think, encouraged a certain personal rigor and seriousness of purpose, amidst the usual adolescent cynicism and jokiness.
The style originally reflected a certain Anglophilia embraced by some American nouveau riche as they accumulated fortunes in a rapidly expanding economy. Rich donors, and the institutional architects they got hired, wanted to create buildings evoking kind of elite, aristocratic culture at certain old Protestant colleges and universities and private boarding schools. (Many of the latter were modeled on English boarding schools catering to the aristocracy.) There was often a lot of snobbery involved. But the style spread to other institutions, too, including businesses and government offices, around the country.
Some of this included fantastical (to the point of silliness) ornamentation and instant aging of stonework to suggest the wear of centuries on what were brand-new buildings, perhaps most flamboyantly at Yale. Get out those gargoyles!
This book is about much more than architecture. It’s also about personalities, many of them colorful, class, including social climbing, economics, politics and many other things.
One of the book’s joys is Mr. Morgan’s footnotes, which besides adding to the understanding of the main text, are often very entertaining, sometimes even hilarious.
Robert Whitcomb is editor of New England Diary.
Tragic and frequent
“The Tragedy of War,’’ by Craig Masten. The painting won the New England Watercolor Society’s first prize in the organization’s 2023 New England Regional Exhibition.
Two business questions
Centreville Bank Stadium in early 2025, shortly before construction was completed.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
A question about the new Centreville Bank Stadium, in Pawtucket, home of the Rhode Island FC soccer team, is whether that it was sold out on May 3, for the team’s first home match, suggests that it will be a long-term success. Or were many of the about 10,700 attendees mostly there out of curiosity to see the pretty place, which will cost Rhode Island taxpayers around $132 million over 30 years? Americans’ increasing interest in the nearest thing to the world sport will help, but the seats are expensive – from $34 to $436 -- and baseball, football and basketball are deeply embedded in the national psyche.
Hasbro’s notably unpretentious headquarters, in the old mill town of Pawtucket.
Poor Hasbro, with so much of its manufacturing in China, has its hands full trying to adapt to Trump’s volatile tariff policies. Executives of the toy and entertainment giant hope to be making fewer than 40 percent of its products in China by 2026, down from about 50 percent now. It will not be moving much manufacturing to the U.S., but rather will seek cheap labor and special favors in other Asian nations or maybe in Africa or Latin America.
A big question in Rhode Island is whether the cost of the tariff trauma will lead Hasbro to decide not to move to Boston but rather to stay in Rhode Island, where most costs are cheaper and there are many designers, in part because of RISD. To get it to stay, will state politicians promise it tax and other incentives that would deplete those that could be offered to smaller companies to stay in, or move to, the Ocean State?
UVM researchers strive to reduce honeybee mortality
Beekeeper at work
— Photo by Ich -
“Skep Sisters” (encaustic painting), by Nancy Whitcomb.
Edited from a New England Council report
“The University of Vermont recently released a study offering hope for stemming the recent debilitating losses of bees in the country and suggestions for breeding more disease-resistant colonies. Beekeepers across the U.S. lost over 55 percent of their colonies in the past year, the highest loss rate reported since records started being kept, in 2011.
“The Vermont Bee Lab at UVM, led by Samantha Alger, works with beekeepers to breed ‘hardy, disease-resistant’ honeybee colonies by using a test (UBeeO) developed by researchers at the University of North Caroline at Greensboro to help identify ‘hygienic’ behaviors in colonies….
“The Vermont Bee Lab found that the UBeeO testing method detects more pathogen loads than was previously thought, letting UVM researchers use the test to better analyze methods to encourage disease-resistant colonies.
“‘It’s definitely more desirable for a beekeeper to have bees that are better adapted at taking care of their diseases themselves rather than using chemical treatments and interventions to try to reduce these pathogen loads, which of course may have negative impacts on the bees. … UBeeO has been known to identify colonies that are able to better resist Varroa mites, but it had not been used to look at other pest or pathogens. We found this new assay could be used to identify colonies that are resistant to these other stressors,’ said Algers.’’
Mosaic master
From Sandra K. Basile’s (video) mosaic show at the Providence Art Club through May 29.
Rick Baldoz: The long history of America’s politically motivated deportations
Cartoon by Archibald B. Chapin in the South Bend News-Times of Nov. 8, 1919
From The Conversation, except for image above
Rick Baldoz is an associate professor of American Studies at Brown University.
He does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations.
PROVIDENCE
The recent deportation orders targeting foreign students in the U.S. have prompted a heated debate about the legality of these actions. The Trump administration made no secret that many individuals were facing removal because of their pro-Palestinian advocacy.
In recent months, the State Department has revoked hundreds of visas of foreign students with little explanation. On April 25, 2025, the administration restored the legal status of many of those students, but warned that the reprieve was only temporary.
Because of their tenuous legal status in the U.S., immigrant activists are vulnerable to a government seeking to stifle dissent.
Critics of the Trump administration have challenged the legality of these removal orders, arguing that they violate constitutionally protected rights, including freedom of speech and due process.
The administration asserts that the executive branch has nearly absolute authority to remove immigrants. The White House has cited legislation passed during the peak of the nation’s Cold War hysteria, like the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, which expanded the government’s deportation powers.
I’m a historian of immigration, U.S. empire and Asian American studies. The current removal orders targeting student activists echo America’s long and lamentable past of jailing and expelling immigrants because of their race or what they say or believe – or all three.
The arrest of Turkish graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk by Department of Homeland Security agents in Somerville, Mass., on March 25, 2025.
The United States’ current deportation process traces its roots to the late 19th century as the nation moved to exercise federal control of immigration.
The impetus for this shift was anti-Chinese racism, which reached a fever pitch during this period, culminating in the passage of laws that restricted Chinese immigration.
The influx of Chinese immigrants to the West Coast during the mid-to-late 19th century, initially fueled by the California Gold Rush, spurred the rise of an influential nativist movement that accused Chinese immigrants of stealing jobs. It also claimed that they posed a cultural threat to American society due to their racial otherness.
The Geary Act of 1892 required Chinese living in the U.S to register with the federal government or face deportation.
The Supreme Court addressed the constitutionality of these statutes in 1893 in the case of Fong Yue Ting v. United States. Three plaintiffs claimed that anti-Chinese legislation was discriminatory, violated constitutional protections prohibiting unreasonable search and seizure, and contravened due process and equal protection guarantees.
The Supreme Court affirmed the Geary Act’s deportation procedures, formulating a novel legal precept known as the plenary power doctrine that remains a key tenet of U.S. immigration law today.
Court confirms the law
The doctrine included two key assertions.
First, the federal government’s authority to exclude and deport aliens was an inherent and unqualified feature of American sovereignty. Second, immigration enforcement was the exclusive domain of the congressional and executive branches that were charged with protecting the nation from foreign threats.
The court also ruled that the deportation of immigrants in the country lawfully was a civil, rather than criminal matter, which meant that constitutional protections like due process did not apply.
The government ramped up deportations in the aftermath of World War I, fueled by wartime xenophobia. American officials singled out foreign-born radicals for deportation, accusing them of fomenting disloyalty.
The front page of the Ogden Standard, from Ogden City, Utah, on Nov. 8, 1919, announcing the arrest and planned deportation of ‘alien Reds.’ Library of Congress
Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, who ordered mass arrests of alleged communists, pledged to “tear out the radical seeds that have entangled Americans in their poisonous theories” and remove “alien criminals in this country who are directly responsible for spreading the unclean doctrines of Bolshevism.”
This period marked a new era of removals carried out primarily on ideological grounds. Jews and other immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were disproportionately targeted, highlighting the cultural affinities between anti-radicalism and racial and ethnic chauvinism.
‘Foreign’ agitators
The campaign to root out so-called subversives living in the United States reached its apex during the 1940s and 1950s, supercharged by figures like anti-communist crusader Sen. Joseph McCarthy and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
The specter of foreign agitators contaminating American political culture loomed large in these debates. Attorney General Tom Clark testified before Congress in 1950 that 91.4 percent of the Communist Party USA’s leadership were “either foreign stock or married to persons of foreign stock.”
Congress passed a series of laws during this period requiring that subversive organizations register with the government. They also expanded the executive branch’s power to deport individuals whose views were deemed “prejudicial to national security,” blurring the lines between punishing people for unlawful acts – such as espionage and bombings – and what the government considered unlawful beliefs, such as Communist Party membership.
While deporting foreign-born radicals had popular support, the banishment of immigrants for their political beliefs raised important constitutional questions.
Harry Bridges, a West Coast labor leader, and his daughter, Jacqueline, 14, as they listen to proceedings during Bridges’ deportation hearing in San Francisco in July 1939. Underwood Archives/Getty Images
Prosecution or persecution?
In a landmark case in 1945, Wixon v. Bridges, the Supreme Court did assert a check on the power of the executive branch to deport someone without a fair hearing.
The case involved Harry Bridges, Australian-born president of the International Longshoremen and Warehousemen’s Union. Bridges was a left-wing union leader who orchestrated a number of successful strikes on the West Coast. Under his leadership, the union also took progressive positions on civil rights and U.S. militarism.
The decision in the case hinged on whether the government could prove that Bridges had been a member of the Communist Party, which would have made him deportable under the Smith Act, which proscribed membership in the Communist Party.
Since no proof of Bridges’s membership existed, the government relied on dodgy witnesses and assertions that Bridges was aligned with the party because he shared some of its political positions. Accusations of “alignment” with controversial political organizations are similar to the charges made against foreign students currently at risk of deportation by the Trump administration.
The Supreme Court vacated Bridges’s deportation order, declaring that the government’s claim of “affiliation” with the Communist Party was too vaguely defined and amounted to guilt by association.
As the excesses and abuses of the McCarthy era came to light, they invited greater scrutiny about the dangers of unchecked executive power. Some of the more draconian statutes enacted during the Cold War, like the Smith Act, have been overhauled. The federal courts have toggled back and forth between narrow and liberal interpretations of the Constitution’s applicability to immigrants facing deportation – shifts that reflect competing visions of American nationhood and the boundaries of liberal democracy.
From union leaders to foreign students
There are some striking parallels between the throttling of civil liberties during the Cold War and President Trump’s crusade against foreign students exercising venerated democratic freedoms.
Foreign students appear to have replaced the immigrant union leaders of the 1950s as the targets of government repression. Presumptions of guilt based on hyperbolic claims of affiliation with the Communist Party have been replaced by allegations of alignment with Hamas.
As in the past, these invocations of national security offer the pretext for the government’s efforts to stifle dissent and to mandate political conformity.
Intersection of painting and ecology
“We Are Always Growning,’’ by Stephanie Manzi, in the group show “Spring 2025 Solo Exhibition,’’ at the Southern Vermont Arts Center, Manchester through June 22.
She says in her artist statement:
“As I paint, draw and collage, marks collide into bands of color and form that map, frame, measure, separate and merge disparate elements. Information is revealed and concealed into new configurations through processed based systems of repetition and recycling. In the studio, I grapple with concepts of landscape in relation to painting and eco-theory through environmental interaction. Within landscape and ecology, deeply imposed structures around nature create distance between ourselves and our understanding of the natural world. Painting can mirror the same distancing. It creates a window, an object, and conceptually separate pictorial space that can feel detached from the viewers reality. Therefore, the experience of painting and conversations within ecology are similar; both beautiful complex, dark and concerning, hopeful and light. My work straddles similar contradictions: permission and limitation, play and serious inquiry, accumulation and loss, structure and the unbound.
“As a painter, I exist in both worlds. I have no direct solutions, only recorded personal observations of my environments. My hope is that as the work continues to develop, my interest with the intersection of painting and ecology can create a space of conversation, joy, connection and inquiry.’’
Haverhill’s socialist experiment
Text excerpted from Historic New England
The 1890s were turbulent years in New England—and Haverhill, Massachusetts, was no exception. Following the financial panic of 1893, the ‘Queen Slipper City’ quickly felt the effects of the national economic decline.
“At that time, Haverhill’s booming factories produced ten percent of the country’s shoes, employing a workforce of over 11,000 men and women engaged in cutting, stitching, lasting, trimming, and packing at over 230 factories. When the economy struggled, however, consumer demand for shoes decreased. An unexpected increase in the cost of leather cut further into profit margins, and employers quickly turned to several austerity measures to recoup their losses. They initiated a wave of lockouts, firings, and unfair ‘ironclad’ contracts while allowing working conditions to decline, leading to a massive general strike in 1895 in which over 3,000 shoe workers left the factories in protest.
“The strike was a warning for the local government. Haverhill’s workers wanted more for themselves and their families. They wanted better alignment with national unions, and they wanted the local government to recognize their needs more responsively.’’
Chris Powell: Public schooling danger exceeds home schooling’s in Conn.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
At the recent week's hearing at the Connecticut Capitol on false claims of home-schooling that conceal child abuse, state officials stressed that they weren't accusing home-schoolers of doing anything wrong. They were only asserting the need to check periodically on children who have been removed from public schools -- to make sure that they are indeed being home-schooled and not being abused, as a few supposedly home-schooled children in Connecticut have been abused in recent years, as a boy in Waterbury recently was reported to have been imprisoned at home and abused for decades.
Home-schooling parents took offense at the hearing anyway. Of course home schoolers are not the problem, but there is a problem with false claims of home schooling, and home schoolers should acknowledge it. At present no one in authority in Connecticut checks on children who don't attend public school.
Unfortunately there is a far bigger problem of child neglect and abuse involving public schooling, but it has not yet been acknowledged by state child-protection and education officials, the governor, and state legislators.
The solution to the danger demonstrated by the Waterbury case and others is obvious, and the acting state child advocate, Christina Ghio has articulated it. Ghio wants state law to require parents each year to show proof of enrollment for children said to be in private school and, for home-schooled children, to demonstrate to the state each year their academic progress and safety at home.
The far bigger problem is that no one in authority checks on the academic progress and safety at home of most children in public school.
For if annual academic testing to prove achievement is a good idea for home-schooled students, why isn't it already in effect for public school students?
Connecticut gives its public-school students very few standardized tests, and none is used to determine advancement from grade to grade and graduation. That is, all public education in Connecticut is based on social promotion, and, as a result, for years the occasional national standardized testing done in the state has shown that most students perform far below grade level in English and math and never master high school work before being given diplomas.
Indeed, as the Yankee Institute's Marc E. Fitch reported in January, many school systems in Connecticut, including Hartford's, New Haven's and Waterbury's, actually prohibit teachers from giving failing grades even where students learn nothing and have seldom attended class.
Additionally, nearly 20 percent of public school students in Connecticut are classified as chronically absent, missing 10 percent or more of their classes. The rate is much higher in the cities. Chronic absenteeism in New Haven's high schools recently reached 50 percent.
Unless it is caused by a student's illness or disability, chronic absenteeism is child neglect if not abuse at home. So is failure to learn. But there is no punishment of parents for it, just coddling and coaxing of those who fail their responsibility. Sometimes that coddling and coaxing works for a while, and absenteeism is reduced, and sometimes it doesn't. No matter.
Last September the Connecticut Mirror interviewed a recent Hartford Public High School graduate who confessed that she had just been graduated though she remained illiterate. The city's school superintendent and the state education commissioner promised investigations but have reported nothing and seem to expect the case to be forgotten.
Of course because of their lack of parenting and living in poverty, many public school students get into trouble. More public school students lose their lives to drugs and crime than home-schooled and supposedly home-schooled students lose theirs to neglect and abuse at home. But state government considers the worsening failure of public education to be the natural order of things, and it very much wants everyone to worry about home schooling instead.
For worrying about home schooling will distract from the real catastrophe of child neglect and abuse and public education, for which state government is directly responsible but about which no hearings will ever be held.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Creative destruction?
The vast United Shoe Machinery Corp. plant in Beverly, Mass., was closed in 1989.
The One Day
“There are ways to get rich: Find an old corporation,
self-insured, with capital reserves. Borrow
to buy: Then dehire managers; yellow-slip maintenance;
pay public relations to explain how winter is summer….’’
From “The One Day,’’ by New Hampshire-based poet Donald Hall (1928-1918).
But nothing gold can stay
“Fenway Dusk” (oil on wood panel with gold leaf), by Jim Connelly. The painting was recently sold at the show at the Copley Society of Art, Boston, entitled “Small Works: Continuum,’’ which runs through July 3.
Damon Orion: How some indie radio stations avoid sounding like corporate drones
Before 1996, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) restricted U.S. corporations from owning more than 40 radio stations. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 eliminated these curbs, enabling single corporate entities to own an unlimited number of stations.
At that point, listeners “said goodbye to regionality and creativity and hello to bland, homogenized programming,” filmmaker Brendan Toller noted in his 2008 documentary I Need That Record!
Corporate networks continue to dominate the airwaves. BIA Advisory Services reports that iHeartMedia owned 870 stations in 2023, making it the nation’s top radio owner, followed by Audacy, Cumulus Media, Hubbard Radio and Beasley Media Group.
“It’s monopoly after monopoly,” notes Toller, now the director of operations and new initiatives at the volunteer-run WPKN, in Bridgeport, Conn., and one of about 100 independent radio stations in the U.S., according to Wikipedia. “I think the call to independence and a free-form format is important as things become more homogenized, influenced by AI, and automated.”
Founded in 1963, WPKN is a 10,000-watt station. Its terrestrial signal reaches a potential 1.5 million listeners in most of Connecticut and parts of Long Island, New York State and southwestern Massachusetts. Millions of listeners worldwide have access to its broadcasts at WPKN.org.
Toller says WPKN hosts about 170 programs. The content of these broadcasts includes music, news, public affairs, arts and culture, environment and science, and lifestyle.
Besides talented local DJs, the station looks for “organizers and activists who want to highlight people making their communities better in the publicaffairs realm,” Toller states.
WPKN’s DJs, programmers and hosts have full autonomy. “Our schedule is the ‘you never know what you’re going to get’ chocolate box of radio,” Toller says.
“We don’t have the playlist requirements that an obnoxious corporate station has. We are where freedom and human-driven, anti-algorithm expression lives.
“That, to me, is more exciting than a curated playlist because you get the personality [of the DJ] drifting and guiding you toward all this music or information if it’s a public-affairs program or podcast.”
He adds that independent stations such as WPKN enable local musicians, artists, nonprofits and organizers “to reach a wider audience [and] to get contextualized properly within their region, the time and history.”
In April 2025, NPR stated that the Trump administration’s proposed cuts to federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting “would have a devastating impact on American communities across the nation that rely on public radio for trusted local and national news, culture, lifesaving emergency alerts, and public safety information.”
While Toller notes that such cuts will be “major and grave,” they do not pose a threat to WPKN, which does not receive any federal funding. “The station has remained largely listener-supported [since 1989], with a hint of underwriting from local nonprofits, organizations, and businesses,” Toller explains.
Unlike WPKN, which is unaffiliated, some local stations disburse their content through independent networks such as the Pacifica Foundation, which owns and operates non-commercial stations KPFA, KPFK, KPFT, WBAI, and WPFW. It also oversees the Pacifica Network, which provides content to more than 200 stations, according to the network’s Web site. Britannica states that Pacifica “funds and promotes news and public affairs programs, most notably ‘Democracy Now!’ and ‘Free Speech Radio News.’”
Meanwhile, the nonprofit, volunteer-run indie radio network A-Infos Radio Project presents “an alternative to the corporate and government media, which do not serve struggles for liberty, justice and peace, nor enable the free expression of creativity,” according to its Web site.
The freedom of expression that terrestrial radio offers may help explain this medium’s enduring popularity despite competition from online outlets.
“Sparked by the advent of social media in the early 2000s, the landscape of communication underwent a monumental transformation,” the International News Media Association observed in 2024. “This was further accelerated by the global lockdowns of 2020, where the demand for instant, online news reached unprecedented heights, highlighting the growing preference for short-form content among audiences.”
Sound of Life, a platform designed “to foster a community of curious connoisseurs and share stories through the lens of sound,” states that indie radio stations have grown in popularity despite such challenges as rising rents and other overhead. “During the pandemic, the… [number] of radio and podcast listeners boomed, and habits stick. In the U.S., 92 percent of the population listen to [the] radio every week,” stated a 2024 article on its Web site.
This boom may have helped several independent radio stations in the U.S. survive challenges that wiped out many British stations, including soaring energy and other expenses.
Indie stations such as WBHF, Aggie Radio, WFMU, KUCR, KEXP, the SoCal Sound, and Rinse FM have adapted to industry shifts by offering multiple streaming options. WPKN has also embraced the digital format. Besides posting content to its Web site, it maintains a podcast channel on all major platforms, an archiving system, and a video sessions format.
Toller says that he has witnessed a surprising amount of interest in traditional radio among young people.
“What’s amazing to me is that the youth are being raised with these digital devices that are so attention-commanding all the time, and I see people coming in here from other stations who are much younger than me and are interested in this as a tried-and-true platform that has existed far longer than social media. If youth is still interested, that tells me this is going to be around for another 60 years.”
He adds that a highlight of his work is hearing “a great demo tape that has something we don’t have on the air yet [such as] underground electronic music or a food justice podcast. These are all being submitted by my peers and people younger than me. That, to me, is inspiring and a salve to independent media. I’m still excited.”
Damon Orion is a writer, journalist, musician, artist and teacher in Santa Cruz, Calif. Read more of his work at DamonOrion.com.
This article was produced by Local Peace Economy.
Insect convention
Part of the “Outnumbered Collection’’ (recycled paper, wire and thread), by Kate Kato, in a group show about bugs at the Lamont Gallery, Exeter, N.H., Sept. 2-Nov. 22.
Exhibiting will be, besides Kate Kato, Jennifer Angus, Catherine Chalmers, Ruth Marsh and Britt Ransom.
The curator says:
“This exhibition is a swarm of tiny critters, real and faux, that playfully inspect and reimagine the little giants that live among us. The five artists on view embrace their affection or comfort in entomology (the study of insects) by not only making work about them but with them. Each exhibiting artist explores how creatures, ranging from crickets to bees, can collaborate in the artistic practice rather than merely being inspiration for it. Collectively, the work on view braids pure aesthetic joy with stinging commentary on environmental issues and conservation.’’
Breakfast 24/7
Worcester has long been nationally famous for the number and quality of its diners. We at New England Diary have often patronized them. Here’s one, built by the Worcester Lunch Car Co., in 1936, mostly to serve the city’s factory workers when it was still a major industrial center. It’s on the National Registry of Historic Places and is considered the city’s best-preserved diner from the ‘30’s
So they came to us
View of Willoughby Notch and Mount Pisgah, in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom
“‘Away,’ most of us called anywhere more than five miles beyond the county line. Or ‘the other side of the hills.’ All I knew for certain is that since we could not go to them, the mind readers and barnstorming four-man baseball teams and one-elephant family circuses came to us.’’
— From the novel Northern Borders (1994), by Howard Frank Mosher (1942-2017), set in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, where Mosher lived in the town of Irasburg.
Lord's Creek Covered Bridge in Irasburg.
Faithslucas photo
Some very nice places if you can afford them
Providence neighborhoods
Providence City Council chambers.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
So Providence property taxes are going up this year. No surprise. And, especially with federal cutbacks, they might have to go up more in the next few years. The city last raised property taxes in fiscal 2023. Since then, of course, prices have continued to rise.
But Mayor Brett Smiley’s administration wants to mitigate the property-tax hike a bit by raising revenue on such things as parking and towing fines, animal mistreatment, liquor-license transfers and valet licenses. I suspect that one attraction of boosting parking fines is that the majority of the violators would be out-of-towners, not Providence voters.
Of course, locals and others will complain. But it seems to me that many user taxes are quite fair because they reflect personal decisions (and sometimes personal negligence). Still, I’m ambivalent about fees attached to doing business, such as liquor-license transfers and valet licenses. It can be mighty expensive to have a business in Providence.
Something that tends to be forgotten in the understandable complaints about sky-high housing prices in Providence. Whatever the city’s many flaws, lots of people like living here and many would like to move here, especially affluent folks eying the leafy East Side. That’s a reason that housing prices are so high, along with far too little housing construction.
Much of Providence’s tax revenue goes to its public schools – 37 percent for fiscal 2025. This leads to the thought, which I’ve expressed before, that its schools might be far better run if all of tiny Rhode Island’s 36 (!!) local school districts were abolished and replaced by regional districts or even just one statewide district to be managed by the best public-education executives the state could find. This could both improve the quality of schooling in communities, such as Providence, with many disadvantaged students, and save taxpayers a lot of money through economies of scale and elimination of duplicated services.
Of course this would mean a huge change in the Ocean State’s tax structure, wherein the state’s income and sales taxes would pay for most of public education. As it is, property taxes pay for over half of public-school costs.
Darius Tahir: Troubles multiply for Social Security recipients after Musk takes his chain saw to agency
From Kaiser Family Foundation Health News (KFFHealth News) (except for image above)
“The delayed payment is not something I’ve heard in the last 20 years.”
— Carolyn Villers, executive director of the Massachusetts Senior Action Council
Rennie Glasgow, who has served 15 years at the Social Security Administration, is seeing something new on the job: dead people.
They’re not really dead, of course. In four instances over the past few weeks, he told KFF Health News, his Schenectady, New York, office has seen people come in for whom “there is no information on the record, just that they are dead.” So employees have to “resurrect” them — affirm that they’re living, so they can receive their benefits.
Revivals were “sporadic” before, and there’s been an uptick in such cases across upstate New York, said Glasgow. He is also an official with the American Federation of Government Employees, the union that represented 42,000 Social Security employees just before the start of President Donald Trump’s second term.
Martin O’Malley, who led the Social Security Administration toward the end of the Joe Biden administration, said in an interview that he had heard similar stories during a recent town hall in Racine, Wisconsin. “In that room of 200 people, two people raised their hands and said they each had a friend who was wrongly marked as deceased when they’re very much alive,” he said.
It’s more than just an inconvenience, because other institutions rely on Social Security numbers to do business, Glasgow said. Being declared dead “impacts their bank account. This impacts their insurance. This impacts their ability to work. This impacts their ability to get anything done in society.”
“They are terminating people’s financial lives,” O’Malley said.
Though it’s just one of the things advocates and lawyers worry about, these erroneous deaths come after a pair of initiatives from new leadership at the SSA to alter or update its databases of the living and the dead.
Holders of millions of Social Security numbers have been marked as deceased. Separately, according to The Washington Post and The New York Times, thousands of numbers belonging to immigrants have been purged, cutting them off from banks and commerce, in an effort to encourage these people to “self-deport.”
Glasgow said SSA employees received an agency email in April about the purge, instructing them how to resurrect beneficiaries wrongly marked dead. “Why don’t you just do due diligence to make sure what you’re doing in the first place is correct?” he said.
The incorrectly marked deaths are just a piece of the Trump administration’s crash program purporting to root out fraud, modernize technology, and secure the program’s future.
But KFF Health News’ interviews with more than a dozen beneficiaries, advocates, lawyers, current and former employees, and lawmakers suggest the overhaul is making the agency worse at its primary job: sending checks to seniors, orphans, widows, and those with disabilities.
Philadelphian Lisa Seda, who has cancer, has been struggling for weeks to sort out her 24-year-old niece’s difficulties with Social Security’s disability-insurance. There are two problems: first, trying to change her niece’s address; second, trying to figure out why the program is deducting roughly $400 a month for Medicare premiums, when her disability lawyer — whose firm has a policy against speaking on the record — believes they could be zero.
Since March, sometimes Social Security has direct-deposited payments to her niece’s bank account and other times mailed checks to her old address. Attempting to sort that out has been a morass of long phone calls on hold and in-person trips seeking an appointment.
Before 2025, getting the agency to process changes was usually straightforward, her lawyer said. Not anymore.
The need is dire. If the agency halts the niece’s disability payments, “then she will be homeless,” Seda recalled telling an agency employee. “I don’t know if I’m going to survive this cancer or not, but there is nobody else to help her.”
Some of the problems are technological. According to whistleblower information provided to Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, the agency’s efforts to process certain data have been failing more frequently. When that happens, “it can delay or even stop payments to Social Security recipients,” the committee recently told the agency’s inspector general.
While tech experts and former Social Security officials warn about the potential for a complete system crash, day-to-day decay can be an insidious and serious problem, said Kathleen Romig, formerly of the Social Security Administration and its advisory board and currently the director of Social Security and disability policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Beneficiaries could struggle to get appointments or the money they’re owed, she said.
For its more than 70 million beneficiaries nationwide, Social Security is crucial. More than a third of recipients said they wouldn’t be able to afford necessities if the checks stopped coming, according to National Academy of Social Insurance survey results published in January.
Advocates and lawyers say lately Social Security is failing to deliver, to a degree that’s nearly unprecedented in their experience.
Carolyn Villers, executive director of the Massachusetts Senior Action Council, said two of her members’ March payments were several days late. “For one member that meant not being able to pay rent on time,” she said. “The delayed payment is not something I’ve heard in the last 20 years.”
When KFF Health News presented the agency with questions, Social Security officials passed them off to the White House. White House spokesperson Elizabeth Huston referred to Trump’s “resounding mandate” to make government more efficient.
“He has promised to protect Social Security, and every recipient will continue to receive their benefits,” Huston said in an email. She did not provide specific, on-the-record responses to questions.
Complaints about missed payments are mushrooming. The Arizona attorney general’s office had received approximately 40 complaints related to delayed or disrupted payments by early April, spokesperson Richie Taylor told KFF Health News.
A Connecticut agency assisting people on Medicare said complaints related to Social Security — which often helps administer payments and enroll patients in the government insurance program primarily for those over age 65 — had nearly doubled in March compared with last year.
Lawyers representing beneficiaries say that, while the historically underfunded agency has always had its share of errors and inefficiencies, it’s getting worse as experienced employees have been let go.
“We’re seeing more mistakes being made,” said James Ratchford, a lawyer in West Virginia with 17 years’ experience representing Social Security beneficiaries. “We’re seeing more things get dropped.”
What gets dropped, sometimes, are records of basic transactions. Kim Beavers of Independence, Missouri, tried to complete a periodic ritual in February: filling out a disability update form saying she remains unable to work. But her scheduled payments in March and April didn’t show.
She got an in-person appointment to untangle the problem — only to be told there was no record of her submission, despite her showing printouts of the relevant documents to the agency representative. Beavers has a new appointment scheduled for May, she said.
Social Security employees frequently cite missing records to explain their inability to solve problems when they meet with lawyers and beneficiaries. A disability lawyer whose firm’s policy does not allow them to be named had a particularly puzzling case: One client, a longtime Social Security disability recipient, had her benefits reassessed. After winning on appeal, the lawyer went back to the agency to have the payments restored — the recipient had been going without since February. But there was nothing there.
“To be told they’ve never been paid benefits before is just chaos, right? Unconditional chaos,” the lawyer said.
Researchers and lawyers say they have a suspicion about what’s behind the problems at Social Security: the Elon Musk-led effort to revamp the agency.
Some 7,000 SSA employees have reportedly been let go; O’Malley has estimated that 3,000 more would leave the agency. “As the workloads go up, the demoralization becomes deeper, and people burn out and leave,” he predicted in an April hearing held by House Democrats.
“It’s going to mean that if you go to a field office, you’re going to see a heck of a lot more empty, closed windows.”
The departures have hit the agency’s regional payment centers hard. These centers help process and adjudicate some cases. It’s the type of behind-the-scenes work in which “the problems surface first,” Romig said. But if the staff doesn’t have enough time, “those things languish.”
Languishing can mean, in some cases, getting dropped by important programs like Medicare. Social Security often automatically deducts premiums, or otherwise administers payments, for the health program.
Lately, Melanie Lambert, a senior advocate at the Center for Medicare Advocacy, has seen an increasing number of cases in which the agency determines beneficiaries owe money to Medicare. The cash is sent to the payment centers, she said. And the checks “just sit there.”
Beneficiaries lose Medicare, and “those terminations also tend to happen sooner than they should, based on Social Security’s own rules,” putting people into a bureaucratic maze, Lambert said.
Employees’ technology is more often on the fritz. “There’s issues every single day with our system. Every day, at a certain time, our system would go down automatically,” said Glasgow, of Social Security’s Schenectady office. Those problems began in mid-March, he said.
The new problems leave Glasgow suspecting the worst. “It’s more work for less bodies, which will eventually hype up the inefficiency of our job and make us, make the agency, look as though it’s underperforming, and then a closer step to the privatization of the agency,” he said.
Darius Tahir is a KFF Health News reporter.
Darius Tahir: DariusT@kff
Jodie Fleischer of Cox Media Group contributed to this report.
