Global warming and big snowstorms

  How global warming can cause massive snowstorms in New England.

The official New England scene

"Guiding Us Home'' (acrylic on canvas),  by GIG PARIS, in upcoming show  at the Alden Gallery at the Art Complex Museum, in Duxbury, Mass.

David Warsh: Stop the slide toward war with Russia

Incredible as it seems, it was only a year ago that  U.S. relations with Russia began their serious slide. The first sign of trouble that I noticed was the cover of The New Yorker for Feb. 3, 2014, on the eve of the Sochi Olympics.  A figure-skating Vladimir Putin leaps while five little Putin lookalikes feign a lack of interest from the judges’ stand.A month later, after a series of increasingly violent demonstrations in Kiev, the recently elected Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, fled to Moscow. I still don’t know what to believe about those events. Were they a “revolution,” or  “coup?” Whatever the case, there is ample evidence that the U.S. was in the midst of things, in the form of Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland’s famous phone call to the American ambassador to Ukraine, conveniently taped and made public by the Russians. At least I had watched enough of the Olympics to know that there was something off about the New Yorker cover. It was the kind of demonization of a foreign leader deemed wicked that had accompanied the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. In fact, Russia ran those Olympics pretty well, especially for a nation struggling mightily to find its footing among the community of nations. Events have spiraled dangerously since. The flight of Yanukovich from Kiev set in motion the Russian annexation of the Crimea, with its Russian naval  base in Sevastopol, which in turn was followed by a civil war in eastern Ukraine. The U.S. and its European allies imposed sanctions on Russia which, in combination with sharply lower oil prices, have sent the Russian economy into a severe recession. Ukrainian government forces attacked the separatists in the east, calling them “terrorists,” imposing a brutal toll on civilians in the cities. (The Ukrainian forces claim the separatists are shelling themselves.) Last month Russian forces began reinforcing the separatists.  The aims of the new campaign are not yet clear. My most-trusted source of news all along has been Johnson's Russia List. I’ve written before about this remarkable digest of news about Russia. Every few days David Johnson collects The full text of  30 or 40 articles from the English- language press, as well as things the Russians write about themselves, often quite interesting. For $50, I receive an email edition -- 266 of them last year. (Usually, I let them stack up and then scan four or five at a time.) Recently, I have begun to regularly read Bloomberg News columnist Leonid Bershidsky as well, for his insider perspective, even in exile in Berlin. (He was  founding editor of Vedomosti, the Russian business daily, a joint project of the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, and the first publisher of the Russian edition of Forbes.) I’ve also found Stephen Cohen a reliable guide. An emeritus professor of Russian Studies at New York University and Princeton, Cohen writes regularly in The Nation (which his wife, Katrina vanden Heuvel, edits and partly owns.  He is  a friend and admirer of Mikhail Gorbachev, and consistently interprets Putin on Putin’s own terms. Cohen is often attacked  by  hawks about Russia, but it was an especially bilious article about him that brought Julia Ioffe onto my screen. An energetic and perapatetic journalist, Ioffe was born in Moscow in 1982 and emigrated to the  U.S.  in 1990. In 2005 she graduated from Princeton and went to work as a fact-checker for The New Yorker.  Since then she’s made a name for herself as a vigorous critic of Putin, mostly recently in The New Republic. ''Court Jester: Putin's American Toady at The Nation Gets Even Toadier'' (May 1, 2014) made me think that perhaps the demise of that once- great magazine was not such a bad thing after all, Whereupon The New York Times Magazine hired her as a contributing writer and The New Yorker ran her profile of Mikhail Khodorkovsky:  "Remote Control: Can an Exiled Oligarch Prove to Russians that Putin Must Go?'' What’s going on here? The explanation that makes sense to me involves thinking in generational terms, in this case, the generation of U.S.  policy makers and journalists that took shape in 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved.  The years before were so much  prologue:  the return to Europe of the satellite nations; the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany; Tiananmen Square; the Gulf War; the August ‘91 coup attempt to wrest control from Gorbachev; Ukrainian independence;  and the election of Boris Yeltsin:  the beginnings of a Second Russian Revolution, or so it was said. Bill Clinton was elected in 1992 and resolved to make it so. The Clinton administration put in place the policies towards Russia that George W. Bush and Barack Obama have continued: support for privatization and the extension of membership in the Group of Eight, but NATO expansion as a precaution. For the Russians, however, eight years of Boris Yeltsin were enough.  Vladimir Putin succeeded him, in 2000, and Russia turned in a different direction.  What that direction may be surely continues to be a very complicated story. But the direction of U.S.  policy remains unchanged. Strobe Talbott, Clinton’s Rhodes scholarship classmate at Oxford, was at the center of U.S. policy towards Russia throughout the ’90s. A one-time Time magazine journalist, Talbott  was ambassador-at-large to the New Independent States before becoming Deputy Secretary of State in 1994.Today he is president of the Brooking Institution. In a recent op-ed article in The Washington Post, Talbott urged the Obama administration to begin supplying weapons to the Ukrainian army, anti-tank missiles and counter-battery radar in particular. (That elicited a brave – and telling – counterargument from Fiona Hill, director of the Center on the United States and Europe of the Brookings Institution and Brookings fellow Clifford Gaddy.) Talbott’s State Department chief of staff, Nuland, is at the helm of the State Department’s Eurasian affairs today.  During the Bush administration she advised Vice President Dick Cheney on the eve of the Iraq invasion and served as US ambassador to NATO. Similarly, members of the generation of  ’91 in the press remain influential today.  To name just one; David Remnick had become Washington Post bureau chief in Moscow in 1988; in 1994 he published Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire (for which he received a Pulitzer Prize); he became editor of The New Yorker in 1998. Last week three major papers in the U.S.  editorialized in favor of sending lethal aid to the Ukrainians, and so beginning a proxy war with Russia – The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and New York Times, albeit the last-named in an especially weasel-worded way (“But if the evidence continues to accumulate that Mr. Putin and the rebels are carving out a permanent rebel-held enclave in eastern Ukraine, à la Transdniestria, Abkhazia or South Ossetia, he must know that the United States and Europe will be compelled to increase the cost”). Defense Secretary nominee Ashton Carter on Wednesday told a Senate committee that he, too, favors sending weapons to Ukraine. Let’s hope that President Obama has the sense and strength to resist this crazy itch to escalate a war that only Putin can win. Aiding Ukraine economically is one thing; almost everyone agrees on that. But Hill and Gaddy of Brookings get it right when they say, “if we plunge headlong into sending weapons, we may lose our allies, and we may never have the opportunity to get things right.”  The alternative is better news-gathering and more European diplomacy. Ultimately, only a generation replaces a generation.  The thing that will halt this slide towards war is regime change – in Washington, D.C. Counterintuitive though it may seem, electing Jeb Bush, if he is able to gain his party’s nomination, is the only way to break the mood of self-infatuation, often dangerous, that began with Bill Clinton and which for  24 years has afflicted Democrats and Republicans alike. David Warsh is a longtime economic historian and financial journalist. He is proprietor of economicprincipals.com

Move to:

Land ripe for retirement-home development

"Atlantis" (oil on prepared wood panel), by SUSAN LYMAN, in her show "The Body of Nature: Sculpture in Wood and Oil Paintings,'' at Boston Sculpture Gallery, Feb. 25-March 29.

Of bills of lading and a stolen $45

 

 "November Tide'' (oil and oil stick on canvas), by ROGER MARTIN, in his show "Bills of Lading: The Art and Poetry of Roger Martin,'' at the Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester, Mass., Feb. 14-June 28. Mr. Martin is Rockport’s first poet laureate and author of three books celebrating the people and poetry of his hometown.

xxx

The reference to "Bills of Lading'' brought back  memories of working in the mid-'60s in Mills Transfer Co.,  on the South Boston waterfront. The company was responsible for processing the shipping of  various goods, mostly for the New England shoe business, then in steep decline.

While the view  from the office of Boston Harbor and Logan Airport was gorgeous, (though the air was  often rank with the stench of the nearby pre-EPA Fort Point Channel) much of the work consisted of the tedious collection and filing of bills of lading. These are documents issued by a shipper that detail  what's in the shipment and confirms ownership of that shipment. Oddly, or maybe as a partial  and intentional offset to the tedium presented by these documents, the various  carbon copies came in lovely pastel colors, which I found soothing as I squeezed them  into gun-metal filing cabinets and longed for the clock to show 5 p.m.

Of course, this was long before the Internet. We had some electronic equipment, including an IBM punch-card machine the frequently broke  --- "do not fold, spindle or  mutilate,'' the cards warned -- and electric typewriters, but most of the work was manual, albeit with physical labor  in our office no more arduous than lifting with two hands cardboard boxes of  dusty paper files. It was all a bit heavier, of course, on the loading platforms below,  albeit with the aid of fork-lift trucks driven by tough members of the Teamsters union who were often  menacing in contract talks but always kept to the strict letter of the contract once a contract was in effect.

I found these guys very reliable and quite funny as I went down there from time to time for an office chore. And it was nice to smell the breeze off the harbor after a cool front came through and the wind turned from southwest to northeast.

Most of people in the office  smoked  (their favorite was Salem) and were friendly if almost universally sarcastic. I  became pals with most of them over three summers, especially after we took a summer lunch boat cruise around the Boston waterfront, which at the time was still decayed and a lure for arsonists. The great boom that was to turn the Hub into a kind of Midtown Manhattan was some years in the future. Indeed, in 1970--71, when I was a reporter for the old Boston Herald Traveler, the city was still quite dowdy and gritty. I was happy to move to New York City, even though it was falling apart then under the weight of bad (if usually well-meaning) governance, laws that ignored human nature and demographics.

Anyway, the exception  to the sarcasm was a  kindly guy with the wonderful name of Sylvester Gookin. (Dickens would have used it.)

I thought he was about 70, but I learned later he was only in his fifties. His white hair and haggard and sad face misled me. Apparently "Sylvie" (who was  notable for being 0ne of the few nonsmokers in the office and always wore an executive-style starched white shirt) had been an executive of some sort in   Mills Transfer Co.'s parent, the United Shoe Machinery Corp. -- now long dead but for decades Boston's biggest industrial enterprise. (The gold-topped, Art Deco  headquarters skyscraper that  the company  had built is still on Federal Street, but dwarfed by much newer towers.)

Sylvie, for whatever reason -- lack of confidence and ambition or focus  -- had been exiled to this little  fifth-floor office to perform low-paid, boring, but mostly stress-free, work.  But still "white collar''! The company was still cooly paternalistic and so few people were fired. The top execs didn't want the unpleasantness.

One  hot day someone stole $45 I had in the drawer of my desk. I mentioned it to Sylvia, who said in a weary but empathetic voice: "You'll loss a lot more than $45 in your life.'' For some reason, that line still haunts me. I assume that everyone in that office is now long dead.

Charles Chieppo: Weather puts focus on need to fix MBTA

BOSTON

Sometimes events conspire to shine a spotlight on the effects of decades of bad policy decisions. Such was the case earlier this week when the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority — and with it the Greater Boston economy — all but ground to a halt under the weight of record snowfall and cold.

Fixing the T will require reform, restraint, and money, and it will be far more difficult than it would have been had state leaders acted when the agency’s problems became apparent more than a decade ago.

Today the MBTA owes nearly $9 billion in debt and interest, and faces a $3 billion maintenance backlog. With the T paying nearly as much in debt service as it collects in fares, the commonwealth, despite its own fiscal problems, will likely have to take over some of that debt. Otherwise, the transit agency will be like one of the many cars we’ve seen in the last week, spinning its wheels faster only to get mired ever-deeper in snow.

But the state can’t solve all the MBTA’s problems. The T should develop clear, customer-focused metrics, as promised in Massachusetts’s 2009 transportation reform law, publish them on its website, and regularly update its performance against the metrics.

Performance goals in such areas as on-time performance, percentage of operating costs covered by fare revenue, and a passenger-comfort index based on such variables as working heat and air conditioning and wi-fi availability, should be ambitious yet plausible given the condition of MBTA assets. Annual funding increases should be tied to achieving the goals, which should become more aggressive as the system gradually modernizes.

At first, additional funding should come from raising the state gasoline tax. But with the rise of high-mileage and alternative-fuel vehicles, the gas tax is at best a temporary fix. The longer-term solution lies in electronic tolling of limited-access highways in the state's metropolitan areas, similar to what the Massachusetts Transportation Finance Commission recommended in 2007.

Until now, residents outside Greater Boston and those who don’t use the MBTA have resisted any role in solving the T’s problems. But drivers benefit from a transit system that takes cars off the road. And a functioning transit system is critical to a metropolitan area that drives regional economic growth well beyond Interstate 495 or even the borders of Massachusetts.

The story of the MBTA’s downfall is one of underinvestment exacerbated by irresponsible expansion. For more than two decades, the T expanded faster than any other major American transit agency, yet no funding mechanism was established to pay for any of it.

Maintenance was the loser in this game of musical chairs. By fiscal 2010, things got to the point where just six of the T’s 57 most critical safety projects could be funded. As former John Hancock President and CEO David D’Alessandro wrote in his 2009 MBTA review, “It makes little sense to continue expanding the system when the MBTA cannot maintain the existing one.”

And it’s both unfair and unrealistic to think that tax- and toll-payers who just rejected indexing the state gas tax to inflation should kick in the astronomical sums it would take to simultaneously shore up MBTA finances and pay to build, operate, and maintain new lines.

While underinvestment and expansion are at the heart of the MBTA’s problems, other issues require attention. According to a 2013 study by former state Inspector Gen. Greg Sullivan, the T pays far more than it should to maintain its buses. Even though the agency’s chief procurement officer said that performing major bus overhauls in-house cost 50 percent more, the commonwealth’s anti-privatization law prevented the work from being outsourced. That level of inefficiency  should no longer be tolerated.

Nor  should the MBTA’s expensive and dangerously underfunded pension system. Unlike state employees, T workers’ pension contributions are subject to collective bargaining. The result is that they kick in about half as much as their state counterparts, leaving the beleaguered agency to pick up the slack.

Governor Baker is proposing $14 million in T cuts, although more than $8 million will come from a hiring freeze and administrative cuts, which are unlikely to have much impact over the remaining five months of the current fiscal year.

Our region needs a 21st-Century MBTA that facilitates economic growth instead of hindering it. In addition to money, achieving that goal will require determination to learn from past mistakes and the urgency to prevent the problem from spinning even further out of control.

Charles Chieppo is the principal of Chieppo Strategies LLC, a public-policy  communications firm. This piece first ran in The Boston Globe.

Go straight, left and right

 

"c12.11, 2011''  (mixed media on canvas), by CAIO FONSECA, in the "Black, White and Red All Over'' show at Heather Gaudio Fine Art, New Canaan, Conn., through Feb. 14

Move your personal information offline

When will Americans push back against being forced by business and government to put so much of their personal information online? NONE of it is safe there. NONE! And it never will be, whatever the absurd assertions that somehow cyber-security experts will protect us.

The hackers and thieves are just getting started.

Companies want to put as much stuff online as they can to make it easier to lay off employees.  The mantra is:  Automate everything!

The cost of this exposure is only starting to be understood. More people should have heeded the warnings of Robert Smith, the longtime editor and publisher of The Privacy Journal.

Consider the breach at Anthem, the health-insurance company, announced this week. The personal information of 80 million people violated!

-- Robert Whitcomb

Disorienting architecture

''Escalera blue/orange'' (oil on board), by JILL WEBER, in her current "New Paintings'' show, at Bromfield Gallery, Boston.

Loaded with bear

 

"Rodney'' (mixed media) by KOLLABS, in the Winter Group Show II at Lanoue Gallery, Boston, through Feb. 28.

The lure of sadism and power

  Journalists and others keep referring to the people who have joined ISIS as being drawn to religion. I suggest  that they are mostly drawn to the pleasures of violence, sadism and power. ISIS is sexually attractive to sociopaths. It's a club for perverts.

That Islam has  aspects that give cover to this evil is a great challenge to its future.

-- Robert Whitcomb

The objects located me

.

''The Table, his house'' (archival print), by JOETTA MAUE, in her show "In Transition....''  March 4-29 at Kingston Gallery, Boston.

She  told the gallery: " I turned my eyes away from those relationships that had so long inspired me, toward the objects that surrounded me. The objects were real, solid, reliable, less malleable, less fleeting, tangible markers of this moment in life. The pile of trucks my son left on the floor was less ephemeral then the fact that my son was changing at an unfathomable speed. The dirty blanket on the couch was reliably there while my partner was often on his own journey without me. The beauty of the sunlight on the plants, that I never seemed to have time to water, made me remember why I had plants in the first place. The objects became what located me in my state of transition.''

Chris Powell: The fictions of the Conn. justice system

MANCHESTER, Conn.Maybe, as the ancient Greeks wrote, even God can't change the past. But who needs God when you've got Connecticut's General Assembly and Judicial Department? For they long have enacted and enforced laws to conceal arrest and court records and even to allow people to swear under oath that they have never been arrested, though they have been.

It's a consequence of society's schizophrenia about crime and state government's failure to appropriate money equal to the crime it has legislated. For there's only as much crime as government wants to have, only as much as it defines.

On some days elected officials want to get tough on crime, defining more offenses and requiring more severe punishments. On other days they are shamed by the damage the law does to criminal defendants and want to reduce it.

There is a kernel of fairness here. People who have been acquitted or accused but not convicted should not be presumed guilty, though of course they often are, and the public, largely indifferent to due process of law, may assume that mere arrest is as good as guilt.

But in Connecticut that assumption is usually correct, and it is encouraged by the failure of the criminal-justice system to deliver a clear resolution in most cases, since nearly all cases end inconclusively: in expiration of the time allowed to prosecute (13 months from the prosecution's filing a "nolle," a decision not to prosecute but not to drop the charges either); in shady plea bargains that, sometimes in exchange for testimony helpful in prosecuting someone else, discount the charges brought by the police; and probationary devices that not only fail to find guilt or innocence but also put the record of a case beyond public review, devices like the pre-trial probation euphemistically named "accelerated rehabilitation."

Any observer taking these judicial outcomes seriously would have to conclude that most arrests in Connecticut are mistaken or grossly overstated and that the police are overwhelmingly incompetent or vicious. Thus by default the reports of Connecticut's news organizations have become the best available records of crime.

As a result many criminal defendants, including some who have been squarely convicted, are now so shameless that they demand that news organizations remove arrest reports from their Internet sites, since the accessibility of arrest and conviction information impairs people's employability and social lives -- as well it should.

A Greenwich woman arrested on drug charges in 2010 has even been suing the news organizations that reported her arrest, on the grounds that their reports became falsely defamatory when the prosecution let the charges against her expire after 13 months. Last week a federal appeals court rejected her claim, holding that while Connecticut's criminal records concealment law creates "legal fictions" by pretending that certain events didn't happen, the law "cannot undo historical facts to convert once true facts into falsehoods."

That is, in Connecticut fiction is permissible for the criminal-justice system. Only news organizations must stick to the truth.

Of course this doesn't mean that all arrest information provided by police and reported by news organizations is accurate, just that news organizations have the absolute and constitutional right to report arrests -- and indeed that they must report arrests lest police gain the totalitarian power to make secret arrests.

Short of the public's appreciating due process of law more, there's no perfect solution here. But two changes might make criminal justice in Connecticut a lot more honest.

Inessential criminal laws, especially those involving drug offenses without a victim, could be repealed. And probation concealing criminal records could require a defendant to admit that he did something wrong, if not everything he was accused of, with "accelerated rehabilitation" being stripped of euphemism and renamed "let off." Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, based in Manchester, Conn.

'Place, genetics and history' in New England

"Between Sun and Geography'' (polypropylene print mounted on white Sintra behind 1/8th-inch plexiglas), in the show "Kathleen Gerdon Archer: As Above, so Below,'' at Kingston Gallery, Boston, through March 1. The gallery's notes say:

''Kathleen Gerdon Archer's work considers the accumulated effect of place, genetics and history on the individual and the family. This series is a memento mori for her family history and echoes Archer's interest in the geological evidence shaping the coastal New England landscape. She collects stones, seeds, family photographs and personal ephemera from a particular location. These collected elements are arranged in receptacles and frozen, layer by layer, to build conglomerate structures. After removal from the containers, she photographs the icy constructions at intervals, as they disintegrate. It is a constant surprise that these layers of common elements, held together by such a fragile architecture, reveal such an intricate configuration of content.''

Bob Lord: A tax cut for tax cheats

If the most frequently dialed federal agency in America can’t even answer two-thirds of the millions of phone calls it gets, should the government cut its budget?

Congress thinks so. That agency is the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). And lawmakers have hacked at its budget yet again.

Worse still, those cuts will cost more money than they’ll save. They’re basically “a tax cut to tax cheats,” said IRS Commissioner John Koskinen.

Regardless of your feelings about the IRS, Koskinen is right.

The government has slashed the enforcement portion of the IRS budget by nearly 20 percent over the last five years. That’s forcing the IRS to shrink the number of employees working on enforcement by 15 percent.

Talk about being penny-wise and pound-foolish. For every dollar the IRS spent in 2013, it collected $255, according to National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson.

Imagine that someone told a CEO that a given department was bringing in hundreds of dollars to his company for every dollar it spent. “It is difficult to see how the CEO would keep his job if he chose not to provide the department with the funding it needed,” Olson said.

Yet, she noted, “that is essentially what has been happening with respect to IRS funding.” Congress has slashed the IRS budget four times in five years. And those cuts are feeding the budget deficit that conservatives supposedly fret about.

It’s all about political expedience. Remember when the IRS faced accusations of singling out conservative nonprofits for tax scrutiny? Along with other experts, I predicted that it would spur further IRS budget cuts. Now Republican lawmakers are taking their revenge.

It’s a vicious cycle. Critics attack the IRS for making mistakes, darkening the public’s view of it. That gives political opportunists a chance to lobby successfully for cuts. A smaller budget virtually guarantees future mistakes by a cash-strapped agency.

Taxpayer services are underfunded too. The IRS now is unlikely to answer even half the phone calls it gets from taxpayers, Olson says. The average wait time is 30 minutes.

So another vicious cycle plays out as taxpayers who try to do the right thing get frustrated. Evasion rates rise. Pressure on the IRS enforcement team mounts.

On top of all that, taxpayers and collectors alike are coping with a tax code that’s more complex than ever. The IRS is responsible for implementing about 40 new provisions of the Affordable Care Act alone, for example.

And it could get more absurd.

The Republican Party is fundraising on the promise of abolishing the IRS altogether, as Citizens for Tax Justice reports. What happens when a country can’t collect taxes?

“Italy and Greece have been stuck in vicious cycles in which tax evasion runs rampant,”Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell recently wrote. So politicians “raise tax rates to extract more money from the few law-abiding saps still out there, encouraging people to hide economic activity from even higher tax rates, and so on.”

That kind of dysfunction hurts honest taxpayers and bankrupts governments.

Let’s change course before it’s too late.

Bob Lord, a veteran tax lawyer, practices and blogs in Phoenix.  He is an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow. This was distributed via otherwords.org.

Beauty in South Boston

"The Causeway, South Boston,'' photo by RUSSELL duPONT.

When I was young I was often driven, and then drove through, South Boston on my way to work and found it among the most depressing places I had seen in America. But an artist  as good as Mr. duPont can find the beauty in it.

Llewellyn King: Providence maybe needs a BIG rollercoaster for branding

If your city is mostly famous for being between two other cities, if its main claim to fame is “It’s a great place to raise children,” then it’s time for your city fathers to take a course in branding.

Cities that prosper — that bring in company headquarters, tourists and where the crazy rich want to be — have to have distinguished brands.

New York’s brand is glorious excess. It has the brand of ever higher, stranger skyscrapers. The world’s most successful media mogul, Rupert Murdoch, has just plonked down $57.2 million for what looks to be the world’s most lonely living space: the top four floors of a 60-story, bronze-and-glass building of a kind that is now transforming the Manhattan skyline. Take a small plot of land, build until what you get is a slender tower that defies nature and looks as though its purpose is to challenge a strong wind.

Murdoch’s aerie has glass on four sides, and he can see forever, at the least until other towers rise up. If you want to spy on him, you will have to do it by drone. His own paparazzi might try to get a picture using a drone, but where would they publish it?

If you have a few million to spare you can still get in the East 23rd Street building. But those floors that would make an eagle jealous, have gone to Murdoch. Most of us would be scared up there: a new take on “Naked and Afraid,” because without neighbors, there is no need to wear clothes.

Cities in the United States that have done the branding thing right are New Orleans, jazz and food; San Francisco, cable cars and attitude; Boston, higher education and hospitals (eds and meds); and Chicago, wind and the uber-hub airport. Washington is a special case: great museums, the White House and the Capitol, and palpable delusions of importance.

The branding ace, running in front worldwide, is London. The Romans gave it a head start, but it was not until the Swinging Sixties that London became a destination for the globe. You would think that the place had enough branding with the old features: Tower Bridge, the Tower, the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace, plus the changing of the guard.

But no. London keeps adding dizzying new features to its brand superiority. There is the Tate Modern, an art gallery in an old power station; the London Eye, a Ferris wheel that has captured world attention and city imitators; a bridge across the Thames River that wobbles, and now a new bridge is planned with gardens and shops on it. Then there are the taxis — black boxes, that remind you where you are in case you have overlooked the big red buses.

The current mayor of London, Boris Johnson (who has branded himself as a possible prime minister), has been keen to preserve and protect the London brand by insisting on preserving the double-decker buses, distinctive taxis and other expensive city bric-a-brac, because it is a hell of an investment.

Sure, Paris has the Eiffel Tower, but it is aging. Rome has the Coliseum — talk about aging. And St. Petersburg has the Winter Palace and the Hermitage. But for city branding, London is in front and pulling away, as the Brits exploit the cash value of differentness.

Providence and Baltimore are two cities of which I am particularly fond. But I would urge the city leadership in both places to get a brand, a trademark. It pays. Rides (London Eye, Eiffel Tower elevators, the San Francisco cable cars) are sure winners. Could I suggest an amphibious train across Baltimore Harbor, and the mother of all rollercoasters — big, but not scary — in Providence?

Like London and New York, these days you have to think big in city branding, or you will miss the incredible fun and profit of a city being silly.

Frivolity pays. Ask London’s Boris Johnson — and share a thought for Rupert Murdoch, stuck up in the sky.

Llewellyn King (lking@kingpublishing.com) is executive producer and host of “White House Chronicle,” on PBS. He is a longtime international media executive, consultant and columnist.

In only six months

 

"Blueberry Patch,'' by Providence artist and historian Abbott Gleason.

David Warsh: U.S. party politics in our more perilous times

"Anti-Drone Burqa,' by ADAM HARVEY, in the show "Permanent War: The Age of Global Conflict, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, through March 7.

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

Why is the race for the Republican presidential nomination shaping up the way it is?  On Friday Mitt Romney ended his bid to return to the lists after only three weeks. It’s clear why he got out:  the Republican Establishment that supported his candidacy in 2012 has switched to backing Jeb Bush.

But why did he get in? We know something about this, thanks to Dan Balz and Philip Rucker of The Washington Post.

One issue that seemed to weigh on Romney was the Jan. 7 terrorist attack in Paris on the Charlie Hebdo publication. Romney talked about the issue with close advisers the night before he declared he would seriously consider running. “Paris was the biggest of all the factors,” the Romney associate said. “It was a tipping point for him about how dangerous the world had become.”

That sounds more than plausible. Romney spent more than two years as a Mormon missionary in France in the late 1960s.

We don’t know much yet even about the reasons that Jeb Bush has stated privately for deciding to enter the race, despite, for instance, this illuminating examination of his involvement in public-education issues in Florida, where he was governor for eight years. It seems a safe bet that his motives eventually will turn out be similar to those of Romney, stemming from his family’s long involvement in US foreign policy.

If you listen carefully, you can hear tipping going on all around.

For my part, I was deeply surprised to find myself thinking aloud in December that, as a centrist Democrat, I might prefer Bush to Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2016. I expect to read several books and chew plenty of fat over the next few months figuring whether that is really the case.

It’s not simply that I expect that the path to the nomination would  require Bush to rein in the GOP’s Tea Party wing – all those space-shots meeting late last month in Iowa – an outcome to be devoutly desired, but not enough in in itself to warrant election. More important, it is possible that Bush would promise to bring the Republicans back to the tradition of foreign-policy realism that was characteristic of Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford and George H.W. Bush, and bring future Democratic candidates along with him. That would be something really worth having.

To the end of thinking about what is involved, I have been reading Overreach: Delusions of Regime Change in Iraq (Harvard, 2014), by Michael MacDonald, professor of international relations at Williams College.  It is a brilliant reassessment of the opinion-making forces that led to the American invasion of Iraq, an aide-mémoire more powerful than Madame Defarge’s knitted scarf  for all its careful comparisons, distinctions and citations.

The conventional wisdom has become that George W. Bush all but willed the invasion of Iraq singlehandedly. There is, of course, no doubt that the president was essential, says MacDonald. For one reason or another, Bush positively hankered to go to war. But he had plenty of help.

For one thing, there were the neoconservatives.  By 2000, they more or less controlled the Republican Party.  MacDonald put the emphasis less on policy makers such as Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld than on the extensive commentarial behind them:  Journalists Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan at the Weekly Standard and the New American Century think tank, the long-dead political philosopher Leo Strauss (nothing neo about him) his and latter-day acolyte Harvey Mansfield, of Harvard Law School, and Bernard Lewis, an historian of Islamic culture, to name the most prominent.

For another, there were the Democratic hawks. The Democratic Party itself divided into three camps: opponents (Sen. Edward Kennedy, former Vice President Al Gore, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi); cautious supporters (Senators John Kerry ,Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, former President Bill Clinton); and passionate supporters (Senators Joseph Lieberman, Diane Feinstein, and Evan Bayh).  Former Clinton adviser Kenneth Pollack made the argument for war in The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq.

MacDonald discounts the theory that the oil companies argued for war, with a view to obtaining control of Iraqi reserves.  But he credits the argument that Israel and the Israeli lobby in the United States strongly supported regime change.  And the pundits, ranging from Thomas Friedman of The New York Times to Michael Kelley of The Atlantic to Max Boot of The Wall Street Journal, as well as the editors of The New Yorker, The New Republic and Slate.   Economic Principals, whose column you are reading now, was a follower in this camp.

At first the war went well.  The U.S. captured Baghdad, Saddam fled, and Bush staged his “Mission Accomplished” landing on an aircraft carrier.  But after the apparent victory began to melt away, MacDonald writes, those who had supported the war for whatever reason united in what he calls the Elite Consensus designed to shift the blame.

The war should have been won but it was poorly planned. There weren’t enough U.S. troops. Defense chief Rumsfeld was preoccupied with high-tech weaponry.  Administrator Paul Bremer was arrogant. The Americans never should have disbanded the Iraqi army.  The Iraqis were incurably sectarian.  The Americans lacked counterinsurgency doctrine. The whole thing was Bush and Cheney’s fault.  And, whatever else, the Elite Consensus was not at fault.

In fact, writes MacDonald, the entire intervention was based on the faulty premise that American values were universal.  Regime change would be easy because Iraqis wanted what Americans wanted for them:  democracy, individualism, constitutional government, toleration and, of course, free markets.  Some did, but many did not.

Breaking the state was easy; liberating Iraq turned out to be impossible. Instead, MacDonald notes, the always precarious nation has turned “a bridge connecting Iran to Syria.” Meanwhile, Russia is annexing eastern Ukraine, over its neighbor’s attempts to break away from Russian influence and enter the economic sphere of the European Community. It has become a much more dangerous world.

Hence the dilemma facing Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, if either or both are to become presidential candidates in 2016. Can they back away from the proposition that has been at the center of American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War – as Michael MacDonald puts it, that we are the world, and the world is better for it?

David Warsh, a longtime business journalist and economic historian, is proprietor of economicprincipals.c0m

'Cosmic center'

''Fountainhead Stupa''  (assemblage), by DANIEL STUPAR, in his show at Cade Tompkins Projects, Providence, through March 7.

The gallery says:

"Daniel Stupar’s  recent work is inspired by the metaphysical concepts associated with axis mundi or cosmic center. In this construct an axis mundi is both a physical and spiritual marker of sorts, designating a point as geographic center of earth as well as a kind of column suggesting transcendence. While axis mundi is typically associated with Hinduism, all cultures throughout history have shared in the mythology. Newari stupa architecture, East Asian pagodas, Muslim minarets, the spires of Catholic cathedrals, May poles and totem poles all serve as types of axis mundi. In the secular world one can think of skyscrapers, lighthouses, copulas even the Washington monument and perhaps most poignant of these, the two beams of light pointed skyward from Ground Zero'' {in Lower Manhattan}.