Why the delay in the medical building?
For years, we've been waiting and waiting for a long-planned big medical building to be built on Providence's North Main Street near the Miriam Hospital. It would both improve healthcare in our area and lead to an economic renaissance of that strip of North Main. Indeed, the building could be the start of a "medical half-mile'' there, with all sorts of businesses, not just medical, being spawned by it.
Why oh why is it being held up? The public wants it. And it could keep many Rhode Island patients and their friends and family from taking their business to nearby Massachusetts.
Plutocrats and their kids in the Ivy League
See how the super-rich help their kids get into and prosper at Ivy League schools. This piece might be the best example yet of how America is no longer the land of opportunity it was long touted to be but a self-perpetuating plutocracy, where overwhelmingly the most important thing you can do for success in life is to pick rich, powerful and, preferably, pushy parents. Harvard and Brown universities are paradises for this sort of thing.
Another is Dartmouth College. Read this.
David Warsh: Heartening signs of social progress
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
The news out of Baltimore suggests some interesting lessons about the possibilities for meliorism. That’s what Boston intellectuals called their belief in progress, in the days before the relevant part of metaphysics became known, first as liberalism, and, recently, as progressivism. Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, John Dewey and Martin Luther King Jr. were meliorists.
The news from Baltimore had seemed pretty bleak until Friday, when a 35-year-old city prosecutor brought charges against six police officers involved in the death of Freddie Gray last month. An attorney for the Fraternal Order of Police in Baltimore complained of an “egregious rush to judgment.”
Those developments got me thinking about some other measures that have been taken over the years to improve civic life in the United States.
Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn James Mosby grew up in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston. He mother, father, aunts, and uncles were Boston police officers. Her grandfather, Prescott Thompson, helped organize the Massachusetts Association of Minority Law Enforcement Officers, in 1968.
Mosby went to school in Dover, Mass., one of three black girls driven 10 miles to that wealthy suburb every day under the METCO program, an alternative that stood the test of time better than Boston’s famously ill-fated court-ordered desegregation plan of the mid-1970s.
When she was 17, in 1994, Mosby’s 17-year-old cousin was shot to death next door to her home in what may have been a case of mistaken identity. The shooter, also 17, went to prison for life. Mosby went on to college at Tuskegee University in Alabama, then entered Boston College Law School.
She met Nick Mosby there; the two married and moved to Baltimore after graduation. He became a city councilor representing the West Baltimore neighborhood in which Freddie Gray lived. Last fall she defeated a much better-funded white male in the Democratic primary for the city’s top prosecutor job.
It seems likely that policies of affirmative action, school integration, voter registration and growing consciousness of gender discrimination played supporting role at various stages in that story, along with pluck and the manifest content of Mosby’s character.
What about other salients of reform along which progressives have pressed for reform?
You might begin, I suppose, with lead paint. A successful campaign to ban lead as an inexpensive stabilizing ingredient of paint was a major goal of social activists in the 1970s. Tiny portions of flaking lead paint ingested by children can cause major harm to developing brains. (Freddie Gray, who was arrested for no more serious infraction than running away when bidden to stop by officers, according to the prosecutor, is thought to have suffered from lead poisoning as a child.) Deteriorating lead paint has become less common in poorer neighborhoods, and abatement has slowed, sometimes precipitating renewed battles .
Meanwhile, James Heckman, of the University of Chicago, has raised to the level of near-certitude the proposition that investment in early childhood care and education pays off more handsomely than virtually any other social spending, including education and job training. Thus President Obama’s 20126 “2016” YES? budget calls for $750 million in grants to states to encourage them to expand their programs for pre-kindergarten care.
(That doesn’t mean the enthusiasm for apprenticeship programs has dissipated. Robert Lerman, of the Urban Institute, says that major expansions of apprenticeship training in South Carolina have stimulated interest elsewhere in a mechanism that is widely employed in Europe. The Facebook page of his Institute for Innovative Apprenticeship describes many successes.)
For my money, the most interesting initiative of the last 40 ears has been the push for minority home ownership that was the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. The CRA has come in for all manner of calumny since the financial crisis of 2007-08 as the motive force behind subprime lending.
Don’t believe it. Predatory lenders fleeced their share of minority borrowers along with every other sort of victim. But not only did the source of the great danger in the crisis lie elsewhere; the greatest good in recent years lies in the CRA having broken the system of highly unfavorable contract sales that has kept poor families penned up in city ghettos for decades. The story of how government credit policy and subsidized housing was used to promote segregation has only begun to be told.
In other words, discouraging as events may often be, the trend towards the amelioration of social ills is up. That’s why, after the all-but-involuntary spasm of looting was over, so many people in West Baltimore, meliorists themselves, came outdoors to clean up.
David Warsh is proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this piece originated, and a longtime economic historian and financial columnist.
World 'Cities With a Heart'
We're looking forward to tomorrow's (May 5) talk at the Providence Committee on Foreign Relations (thepcfr.org) by Thomas Paine, the international landscape architect and urban planner, on "Cities With a Heart'' around the world. His beautiful book with that title just came out.
"Trailing'' (screen print), by ALLISON BIANCO, in her show "A Curious Tide,'' at Cade Tompkins Projects, Providence, through June 19.
Chris Powell: Conn.'s casino and ID nightmares
MANCHESTER, Conn. Alka-Seltzer commercials touting the product's supposedly soothing form of relief used to ask: Why trade a headache for an upset stomach?
That's the question that Connecticut faces with the legislation pending in the General Assembly to authorize a few more casinos near the state's borders to try to keep state residents from visiting new casinos in Massachusetts and New York. (The two Indian casinos in the southeast part of the state already have the Rhode Island border defended as well as it's going to be.)
Yes, revenue at the Indian casinos, shared with state government, has been declining and will continue to decline as Connecticut's neighbors keep more of their gamblers home. The racket that Connecticut and the Indian casinos have enjoyed for 20 years, drawing most gamblers from out of state, is nearly over and soon gambling won't be a winner for any state in the Northeast. Instead states will be plundering mainly their own people.
When its casinos were fleecing so many out-of-staters, Connecticut could rationalize the antisocial behavior engendered by casinos -- addiction, family destruction and theft -- and presume to recover its costs. No more. Casino gambling is becoming just another method of taxing the local population, the revenue drawn disproportionately from the poor and troubled, the very people government supposedly means to help.
Who wins in such a system? Only the casino operators and those employed by state and municipal government. The poor and needy might be helped as much just by getting rid of casinos entirely and imposing better priorities on state government, redirecting its resources more according to the needs of the population rather than those of elected officials and the special interests that control them.
But the legislation authorizing more casinos almost certainly will be enacted. Why? Because while it will mean more headaches and upset stomachs for ordinary people, none will be suffered by government's own employees. That's where most state tax revenue goes now and where most revenue from any new casinos will end up.
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Hartford, a "sanctuary city" like New Haven -- a city that refuses assistance to federal immigration enforcement authorities -- soon may follow New Haven in issuing its own identification cards to city residents to facilitate illegal immigration. Only illegal immigrants need such cards, other forms of identification being easily obtainable by anyone who can demonstrate citizenship or legal residency.
According to the Hartford Courant, Mayor Pedro Segarra estimates that as many as 20,000 of Hartford's 125,000 residents are illegal immigrants -- a sixth of the population -- and advocates of the ID cards say those people are "living in fear in the shadows." But then anyone violating the law may have reason to live in fear. That someone lives in fear does not necessarily make him virtuous.
An official of the Connecticut Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union says the city ID cards would "ensure that our friends and neighbors are embraced as equal citizens and residents." But most of those obtaining the cards would not be citizens at all; the cards would just allow them to pose as citizens so they might enjoy benefits meant to be reserved to citizens.
The Federation for American Immigration Reform notes that Hartford's ID cards, like New Haven's, probably would be used by many to create some false identifications, since the cities have little ability to verify whatever documents would be presented to obtain the cards and less interest in verifying them.
Indeed, the ID card project is meant only to nullify federal law, the sort of thing that was so contemptible when segregationist Southern governors did it to deny federally established civil rights a half century ago.
But these days liberal nullification has become respectable even though it aims to devalue not just citizenship but nationhood itself.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.
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Weeping wire
"Docce d'Atumno'' (copper wire and stone), by RYAN KELLEY, at Alpers Fine Art, Andover, Mass.
Charles Chieppo: Getting stadiums out of our pockets
BOSTON A little-noticed provision in President Obama's current budget proposal would protect state and local government officials from themselves by ending the practice of allowing tax-exempt bonds to be used to finance sports stadiums.
Tax-exempt bonds were designed to help governments build infrastructure by reducing borrowing costs, but political leaders routinely use them to benefit privately owned sports franchises. A 2012 Bloomberg analysis found that 22 National Football League teams were playing in stadiums that were financed with tax-exempt debt. Sixty-four baseball, basketball and hockey teams played in facilities that were built using the bonds.
Right now, the NFL's St. Louis Rams and Oakland Raiders, the National Basketball Association's Milwaukee Bucks and Golden State Warriors, and Major League Baseball's Oakland Athletics are all threatening to move if they don't get public subsidies to help build new facilities. Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon has said that losing the Rams would cost the state $10 million in annual tax revenue.
Long and Smith College economist Andrew Zimbalist estimated that the public shouldered about 60 percent of stadium capital and operating costs between 2000 and 2006. Long's book indicates that number has since risen to about two-thirds.
And it appears that taxpayers get little in return for their massive investments. One reason is simply that the subsidies are so large that stadiums can't produce enough in local or regional economic benefits to match them over the period they are in use.
Sporting-event attendees are overwhelmingly local; if they didn't attend a football game, they would likely go to a movie or to a restaurant, so the region sees little in the way of money that wouldn't otherwise have been spent there. And much of the subsidy money flows to owners and athletes who often don't live in the area and spend the bulk of the money outside the host city.
State and local taxpayers may conclude that non-economic benefits such as local pride or entertainment value make stadiums worth the investment. But ask just about anyone in Boston, where record snow and cold paralyzed the public-transit system this winter, and I suspect that most would agree that stadium subsidies shouldn't crowd out needed infrastructure investments.
President Obama has his own reasons for trying to put an end to using tax-exempt debt for sports stadiums: Tax exemptions on interest paid by muni bonds that were issued for sports structures costs the federal government $146 million annually. There would be a number of beneficiaries of doing away with the practice, but taxpayers would be the biggest winners of all.
Charles Chieppo (Charlie_Chieppo@hks.harvard.edu) is a fellow of the Ash Institute at Harvard's Kennedy School. This piece originated on the Web site of Governing magazine (governing.com). 5 comments Livefyre Sign in or Post as Guest6 people listeningCristoferHorbeltsportsmenKayoCharles LaVinetoddinde
+ Follow Share Post comment as... Newest | Oldest | Top Comments toddinde toddinde 8 days ago I am not so sure about this. I understand the argument that the benefit of sports teams to a regional economy is overstated, but in a world where young professionals are the most valuable commodity a community can have for its economy, the presence of professional sports teams, and the venue for those teams, may be critical. The 1997 work of Zumbalist and Noll may be dated in the context of the millennial generation and our high tech economy. I am coming to the conclusion that public transit, activities like parks, culture, sports and entertainment, education and pleasant, walkable neighborhoods are all critical to the future of urban areas. Young professionals want it all. They want to take a bike ride to a farmers market in the morning, go to a game in the afternoon, and see a band at a club at night. And they want to be able to do it all without having to drive. Professional sports are a significant part of that mix.
FlagShareLikeReply Charles LaVine Charles LaVine Mar 31, 2015 Ever read“Sports, Jobs, and Taxes The Economic Impact of Sports Teams and Stadiums” by
Andrew Zimbalist and Roger G. Noll, Brookings Institution Press 1997?
It empirically debunks the myth of the economic benifits to states and regions of building stadiums for billionaires. That's right, only the billionaire really benifits, the actual comminty of location only marginally.
But we keep on doing it. We are the stupid ones, not the billionaires. FlagShareLikeReply Kayo Kayo Mar 31, 2015 @Charles LaVine Yes some time ago. But that is history in todays context. That is why I am attempting to tie a new mobility system into a $Billion + rather than put additional lanes and on-off ramps to serve a chaotic parking lot culture. This can be accomplished with a new "off shelf" transportation technologies. All it needs is for cities/counties to JV by calling for proposals! Is this a risky business to alleviate getting further into citizens wallets?
FlagShareLikeReply sportsmen sportsmen Mar 26, 2015 Good public policy should eliminate tax free status for all sports organizations, teams and leagues, with annual revenues of more than a couple million dollars a year. All taxing bodies should be prohibited from financing or incurring expense on behalf of such sports organizations. The extortion that these teams and leagues engage in by having new stadiums (places of doing business) financed directly or indirectly by taxing bodies should not be permitted. Los Angeles has not had an NFL team for decades and it is still a "major league city".
FlagShareLikeReply CristoferHorbelt CristoferHorbelt Mar 25, 2015 Did Barry really come up with this? $146 Million annually out of a budget of over three TRILLION dollars. While it's a good idea, Barry is stepping over dollars to pick up dimes......
FlagShareLikeReply MORE FROM BETTER, FASTER, CHEAPER
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Charles Chieppo Charles Chieppo is a research fellow at the Ash Center of the Harvard Kennedy School. Part of Better Faster Cheaper with Steve Goldsmith
Harvard Kennedy School
Llewellyn King: Riots and the end of industrial prosperity
I was in Baltimore the last time it burned. That was back in April 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Washington also burned at that time. There was something surreal about the mood of the riots in both cities. The anger from African-American rioters seemed to be directed wholly against property.
I walked among the rioters, up 14th Street to the U Street Corridor, the commercial hub of the Shaw area of Washington. Later that day, I drove around Baltimore. They seemed to me to be an uncommonly respectful pair of riots.
In Washington, young African-American men directed me where to go safely; one looter, coming out of a shop on 14th and F Street, asked me if I needed anything, as though he were the proprietor.
Over the decades, I have wondered about those riots. I think they were indeed riots of anger as well as sorrow. King, the great civil-rights leader, had been murdered, and already people knew that there would not be another like him.
For days I drove around Baltimore, where I lived at the time, and Washington, where troops were patrolling and curfews were in place. With a large “PRESS” sign taped on my car’s windshield, I was allowed to drive around both cities, and I watched them come to grips with reality. A Washington Post writer described how a white motorist and a black motorist had waved each other through an intersection, both feeling they were doing something significant.
But Washington is not Baltimore. And, at that time, Baltimore was as segregated as any Southern city.
The proprietor of a bar near The Baltimore News-American, the Hearst newspaper where I worked, would shoo away blacks with this lie, “This is a private club and I can’t serve you, but I can sell you a bottle to go.”
I wanted to challenge this, and urged a black friend on the newspaper, Lee Lassiter, to come with me and make a stand. He averred, not because he was lacking in courage, but because he was fighting another battle over bars. Lassiter and other activists were trying to restrict the spread of cheap bars in the ghetto, where licenses were indiscriminately issued by a white board to white businessmen.
Unlike Washington, which, in some ways, was a more secure community and where there was certain amount of integration, the whites in Baltimore took little interest in the blacks. There was no sense that they shared a city.
Baltimore’s politics were white; its sensibilities were white; and it was comfortably assumed that in the profusion of row houses, there were happy blacks, living a happy parallel life -- although that term was not used. Not true then, and not true now.
This is a subjective comment, but I have always felt there is a kind of special dejection in the Baltimore ghetto.
While there was manufacturing, steel and shipbuilding and a car plant in Baltimore, guaranteeing good union jobs, there were pockets of prosperity. As these jobs faded in Baltimore, and other American cities, so did the hope for a route to the middle class for those in the ghetto.
As crime increased everywhere, it surged in Baltimore. Gun ownership shot up, mostly among ghetto youth.
Baltimore’s police – who probably felt the effect in their families, if not in their own aspirations, of the end of industrial prosperity -- took out their frustrations on those who had even minor malefactions.
Men in uniform easily degenerate into bullies. I saw this in London. When a policeman and a suspect face off, after the policeman is sure that he is not facing an ambush, he has absolute power over the suspect. It is an intrinsically ugly moment: When the handcuffs click, justice and liberty are at bay. Later in court, or through a civilian review, those things may be re-established. But when the suspect is under lock and key, the police power is absolute -- and it is absolutely corrupting.
Police officers go over the line often, and I have seen this all over the world. Race worsens things, but it is not a necessary ingredient.
It is sad for me that, 47 years later, Baltimore should have been torched by a mob. It is sad, too, that things in the row houses of Baltimore are as bad as ever, and that the mob is still the only voice black Baltimoreans think they have.
Llewellyn King (king@kingpublishing.com) is executive producer and host of “White House Chronicle” on PBS.
'Afrofuturist aesthetic'
| "Coast Cosmos'' (archival pigment prints, wood frames), by TODD GRAY, in his show "Caliban in the Mirror: Exquisite Terribleness,'' at the Samson Gallery, Boston, May 1-June 13. |
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The gallery says: "Gray’s transcontinental studio practice is informed by cultural hybridity, body politics, and global pop culture. Pulling from his archive of documentary images taken in Ghana, and photographs taken as personal photographer to Michael Jackson in the 80’s, Gray produces temporal and spatial schisms by juxtaposing decontextualized images in overlapping, found frames in low relief compositions. In afrofuturist aesthetic, he combines sculpture and photography to create ambiguous 'third' objects that provide the viewers with a multiplicity of perspectives of layered space and time that aid in problematizing singularity.''
Whew! |
May 1 - June 13
Artist Reception: May 1st from 6 to 8pm
Chris Powell: Conn. would hide murder by police
MANCHESTER, Conn.
While Connecticut is inching toward equipping police officers with body cameras and cruisers with dashboard cameras, they won't bring much accountability to police work unless the state's freedom-of-information law is strengthened. For if police video in Connecticut ever captured a murder committed by an officer -- like the killings recently committed by officers in South Carolina and Oklahoma and captured on video that was quickly made public -- the video almost certainly would be suppressed.
In part that's because of the exemption inserted in Connecticut's FOI law last year by the General Assembly and Gov. Dannel Malloy in response to fears that someone might publish photographs of the mass murder at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown in December 2012. The exemption lets government agencies to withhold images of murder victims if the "personal privacy of the victim or the victim's surviving family members" might be invaded.
If that exemption wasn't enough pretext for the police to withhold the video, they surely would withhold it under a second and longstanding exemption in the law, allowing the suppression of "information to be used in a prospective law-enforcement action if prejudicial to such action."
Never mind that murder, assault, and brutality committed by police officers can never be matters of "personal privacy," nor that the only prejudice to a law-enforcement action in such circumstances would be in withholding evidence of a crime, not in making it public.
No, the chief state's attorney, the local state's attorney, and the chief of the department whose officer had been caught in misconduct all probably would insist on preventing the public from getting a quick look at any incriminating video, lest the ability of the police to conceal or minimize a crime by an officer be impaired.
Indeed, Connecticut's prosecutors are notorious for their refusal to prosecute official corruption, almost always defaulting to federal prosecutors, who can handle only the biggest offenses. State prosecutors claim that they are handicapped in pursuing official misconduct by their lack of the power to issue investigative subpoenas. But even when serious misconduct by police was documented for them by civilian video in East Haven in 2009 and Bridgeport in 2011, state prosecutors failed to act and left prosecution to the feds, who won convictions.
In light of the explosion of videos documenting police misconduct around the country, Connecticut's FOI law should be amended to require immediate disclosure of any images involving death, injury, or property damage captured by police or other government agencies.
While Governor Malloy and the General Assembly seem content to leave police body cameras to a small experimental program, at least two Connecticut towns are hurrying toward greater accountability in police work as well as toward greater protection for officers against the many false accusations made against police -- South Windsor and Norwalk. If only other police departments had as much integrity.
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State government in Connecticut can't take proper care of the mentally disabled and ill and addicted. Its finances are deteriorating despite -- or maybe because of -- a record tax increase. The state's transportation system needs tens of billions of dollars in renovations and improvements for which money can't be found. Government policies undertaken to remediate poverty only produce more poverty requiring remediation. Most of the state's high school graduates have failed to master high school work and many are duly sent off to take remedial courses in public colleges.
But last week Governor Malloy announced that he will appoint a committee to address climate change. He seems to think state government is a spectacular success and doesn't have enough to do.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.
Organic and structural
In her sculptures, she uses common building materials to create forms that are both organic and structural.
Devoting their lives to leaving the E.U.
Here's some of Michael Goldfarb's fine British election campaign commentary:http://www.politico.eu/author/
David Warsh: Jeb Bush likely to be the next president
The early stages of the presidential campaign are unfolding as expected. Jeb Bush is irritating his party’s right wing by periodically praising President Obama. Otherwise he remains as elusive as possible, in view of the gantlet of Red State primaries he must run to receive the Republican nomination. Then he can run to the center in the general election.
To make this point last week, Washington Post campaign correspondent Ed O’Keefe reached back to an interview that Bush gave Charlie Rose in 2012:
“I don’t have to play the game of being 100,000 percent against President Obama,” he said at the time. “I’ve got a long list of things that I think he’s done wrong and with civility and respect I will point those out if I’m asked. But on the things I think he’s done a good job on, I’m not just going to say no.”
In the same interview, Bush alleged that Obama was repeatedly blaming his brother for his own missteps and suggested it would be nice to hear Obama give “just a small acknowledgment that the guy you replaced isn’t the source of every problem and the excuse of why you’re not being successful.”
Meanwhile, Hillary Rodham Clinton is bogged down amidst increasing scrutiny of the philanthropic foundation her husband founded after leaving office.
Are the stories fair? In New York Times columnist Paul Krugman’s view, there is reason to be skeptical. He wrote last week on his blog, “If you are old enough to remember the 1990s, you remember the endless parade of alleged scandals, Whitewater above all — all of them fomented by right-wing operatives, all eagerly hyped by mainstream news outlets, none of which actually turned out to involve wrongdoing.”
In fact the Clintons manifested a fair amount of slippery behavior once they got to in Washington, most of it involving a series of appointments of cronies to sensitive positions in the Treasury and Justice Departments, including that of his wife and of his old friend Ira Magaziner to head a Task Force on National Health Care Reform. Little of the initial concern was fomented by “right-wing operators.”
But instead of simply monitoring the president’s behavior in office, the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, under editor Robert Bartley, launched a campaign to, in effect, overturn the result of the election, by conducting an extensive investigation of the couple’s Arkansas years.
The result was the Whitewater craze —the name stems from a vacation development in the Ozark Mountains in which the Clintons had an interest. Bartley’s inquisition found relatively little smoke and much less fire. Typical was the discovery of a futures trade, arranged by a favor-seeker, from which Hillary had benefitted in 1978, having put very little money at risk – at a moment in which her marriage hung in in the balance. Afterwards she backed away from the broker.
Mrs. Clinton’s healthcare reform initiative collapsed in 1994, amid heavy criticism of its approach (employers required to provide coverage to all employees) and its lack of transparency. Later that year Rep. Newt Gingrich (R.-Ga.) led the Republicans to control of the House of Representatives. The struggle for power became more intense.
It reached a crescendo when impeachment proceedings failed to convict the president of “high crimes and misdemeanors” for having lied about his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The Democrats gained seats in the House after that.
Clinton served out his time in the White House with only one more memorable scandal – his pardon of Glencore commodities founder Marc Rich on charges of trading with Iran and tax evasion.
The case against Bill Clinton was sunk by the consistently unfair and ultimately deplorable way in which it was brought. But Hillary Clinton’s problems with the Clinton Foundation – possible conflicts of interest while serving as secretary of state, her husband’s lavish speaking fees – are there for all to see, 18 months before the election. Politico’s Jack Shafer compares the scheme to the concept of “honest graft,” as enunciated long ago by George Washington Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: “I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em.”
Shafer writes, “The Times story contains no smoking gun. As far as I can tell, the pistol isn’t even loaded. Hell, I’m not sure I even see a firearm.” But then Plunkitt never ran for president.
So it seems likely the next president will be Jeb Bush. He would be the third member of the family to serve. Is that a bad thing?
Not in my reading of it. Jeb Bush more nearly resembles his realist father than his idealistic brother. The net effect of a Bush victory would be the marginalization of the populist wing of the GOP – and their fellow travelers at the WSJ ed page. Remember, the editorialists there played a significant role in bringing about the defeat of the first Bush. Furious at him for having raised taxes slightly to finance the first Gulf War, they systematically forced Bush to the right. Pat Buchanan gave the keynote address to the Republican convention in Houston, H. Ross Perot split the GOP vote and Clinton was elected with 43 percent of the popular vote. .
Rupert Murdoch bought the WSJ in 2007. Since then I have detected a gradual slight moderation of its editorial views (if not those of its more fiery columnists (Bret Stephens, Daniel Henninger, Kimberly Strassel). In 2014, Club of Growth founder Stephen Moore left the editorial board for the Tea Party’s Heritage Foundation, taking with him the portfolio of crackpot economics. Due next for an overhaul is the page’s stubborn denial of climate change.
The WSJ editorial page and the Clintons have shaped each other to an astonishing extent over the past 25 years. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
Disclosure: I worked on the famously fair-minded news side of the WSJ for a short sweet time many years ago. In the name of fairness, I have to say that an awful lot of wise opinion and shrewd editorial writing appears on its editorial pages. .
WSJ reporters are still remarkably straight. I have the feeling that the disdain among them for the wilder enthusiasms of their editorial colleagues hasn’t changed any more than mine in all that time.
David Warsh is a Somerville, Mass.-based based economic historian, long-time financial journalist and proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this essay first appeared.
Dripping with the past
"Silent Serenade'' (charcoal and chalk pastel), by LESLEY COHEN, in her "Presence and Absence'' show, April 29-May 31, at the Bromfield Galllery, Boston. She explores memories of childhood in her work.
It's curious how some of those memories, especially the bad ones, get stronger as one goes deeper into old age. I think of this as I look across from the patio here in Los Angeles to a yellow, parched, steep hillside with $2 million houses teetering at the top and flocks of gray parrots swooping in on palms with excessive force.
My memories of New England are usually of wet and cold, as it was here in LA of all places yesterday. So the line from the "The Lady Is Tramp,'' by Rodgers and Hart, can be accurate briefly:
Hates California, it's cold and it's damp.
That's why the lady is a tramp.
-- Robert Whitcomb
Exhibition against anxiety
"C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience), Part 1 (video), by A.L. Steiner & Robbinschild, in the show "It's gonna take a lotta love,'' at Franklin Street Works, Stamford, Conn, through May 24.
The gallery says that in the video "two women perform dance-infused movements in backdrops of natural and built environments, connecting color, action, attitude and environment in a way that includes the audience in their choreographed antics. In an age of anxiety, isolated individualism and virtually-lived experience, this exhibition is a refreshing exploration of inclusivity, authenticity and commonality.''
Ira Sharkansky: The wandering Jews of Portugal and Fall River
JERUSALEM A number of individuals from my home town of Fall River, Mass., have traveled to Ponta Delgada, in the Azores , to commemorate the refurbishing of a synagogue that they had financed. They also met with the one Jew still living in the islands.
The story is long and interesting, and ironic from both sides.
Jews had once been a major element in Portugal, but no more.
They also were a major element in Fall River, but no more.
Jewish history in Portugal resembled Jewish history in Spain. A sizable population developed in the early Middle Ages, by some reports a larger percentage of the total population than in Spain. In both countries the Jews were mostly eliminated by forced expulsion or conversion. Some remained, passing themselves off as Christians, and some returned when the anti-Jewish policy was relaxed.
The Portuguese first came to southeastern Massachusetts as crew members on whaling ships. The work was hard and risky enough to dissuade Americans, so the ships would sail from New Bedford and Nantucket with skeleton crews to the Azores, pick up men willing to serve, at least partly for the opportunity to remain in the U.S. when the ships reached home port with the results of several years' hunting. When the cotton industry began to develop in Fall River, mill owners sent labor recruiters to the Azores.
Jews came to the city from the latter part of the 19th Century, and served a growing industrial population as peddlers and small merchants. Their children, more than others, stayed in school and moved up the economic ladder to larger businesses and the professions. As the cotton mills closed in the face of competition from the South, another wave of Jews came, mostly from New York, to produce clothing, taking advantage of empty buildings and unemployed workers.
Then competition from China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam and elsewhere did to their small factories what Southern cotton mills had done earlier.
At its height, the Jewish community amounted to several thousand individuals, with a number of small Orthodox synagogues and one grand Conservative temple.
If there is more than one Jew remaining in Fall River, there is not not enough for a daily minyan. For some years now, the Conservative temple has rented space that once served as classrooms to municipal social service agencies.
My first assignment as a student of political science led me to the city's problems. According to official statistics, 30 percent of Fall River teenagers did not finish high school, and the average adult had not gone beyond ninth grade.
The city stimulated my interest in ethnicity, and the topic for my Senior Thesis was "The Portuguese of Fall River." Demographic and political research was made easier by the few family names among the Portuguese. One of them was Franco.
There are Francos in our family. The grandparents of the Franco who married a niece came from Turkey, and earlier ones most likely went there from Spain or Portugal..
There are Portuguese in Fall River who say they are Jews, or that their family had been Jewish.
Gentile friends lament the absence of Jews. They say that the public high school has become an "inner-city school," and that few graduates apply to prestigious colleges.
The ambitious Jews of my generation had to apply to several places, insofar as the most desirable limited the number of Jews they would accept. Virtually none of us returned to the city after college.
Fall River's total population has dropped from more than 115,000 to less than 90,000. Tenements are empty and cheap. Boston relocated some of its homeless to the city.
The city's education profile hasn't changed in 60 years. Still close to 30 percent of teenagers fail to finish high school. Now the average adult has reached 10 grade, but has not finished it.
There are Jews who live outside of Fall River, while continuing to practice their professions in the city.
It's not only the Azores and Fall River where there are empty synagogues. There are about as many Jews in each of Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Libya, Iraq, Algeria, and Afghanistan, all of which had been home to thousands..
Jews remain a significant population in the area of the former Soviet Union, despite about half of them--more than a million--having left since the late 1980s.
Estimates of Jews in Iran have declined from 100,000-150,000 in 1948 to about 80,000 prior to the revolution, and 17,000-25,000 currently.
Assessments of Jews' lives in Iran vary as widely as the population estimates.
Jews not only move. They also look for Jews in what for them are exotic places. The support of what had been Fall River's community for the Azorean synagogue is part of a wider tradition. Israelis do "roots" trips to their own, their parents', or their grandparents' former homes in Europe.
My wife, Varda, and I have seen where her parents grew up in Dusseldorf and Berlin, and visited the graves of her grandfather and a young cousin who died before the Holocaust. We have passed by the synagogues in a number of other European cities, walked the streets of Judeiria in Spain, and saw indentations in the stone alongside doorways in Gerona that most likely remain from when there was a mezuzah. .
After a professional conference in Moscow during 1979 I visited Jews in Samarkand, Bukhara and Tashkent. When I told one old man that I came from Jerusalem, he began to weep.
Neither of us has a desire to visit the ashes in Eastern Europe where family members perished.
Jewish movement has something to do with Jews' historic association with commerce. There are Biblical mandates about charging interest, and extensive Talmudic disputes about what constitutes interest, fair dealing, and the financial relations appropriate with Jews and others. Communities have invited Jews on account of their economic skills, and then turned against Jews for the same reason. Concerns for bookkeeping and commercial agreements may have contributed to the early development of literacy throughout the community, or at least among most of its males, and subsequent contributions in every field of science and culture..
Commerce is part of what we are, for the good and the bad associated with it. Including our capacity to move elsewhere when things turn sour.
While the Azores, Fall River, and many other places have empty synagogues, there are four within 100 meters of these fingers. All have daily minyans, even without my attendance.
Ira Sharkansky is an emeritus professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Robert Whitcomb: Boondoggle baseball stadium or jobs?
“The political condition of Rhode Island is notorious, acknowledged and it is shameful. Rhode Island is a state for sale, and cheap.” -- Lincoln Steffens, in 1904
Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo is right to focus a lot on job training. You repeatedly hear from business executives that there aren’t enough people in the state with adequate literacy and numeracy. That’s a major reason why Massachusetts is so much richer than the Ocean State.
What’s needed are not just college graduates but high-school graduates with some post-secondary-school vocational training who can prosper in work environments using high technology, such as assembly-line robotics, and who can understand, and explain to each other and the outside world, an enterprise’s needs.
Greater Boston has many thousands of such people. We can lure more of them, but the Ocean State desperately needs to start producing more of its own.
The governor’s $1.3 million grant program via the state Workforce Board will help. It will provide grants of up to $25,000 to help partnerships convene, determine employers’ needs and create plans to meet those needs. The remaining money would fund the approved training partnerships.
Ms. Raimondo announced the program at the Cranston facility of Yushin America Inc., a global robotics maker. Yushin wants to expand and has 14 open positions but is having trouble finding trained workers in Rhode Island to fill even that small number of jobs.
The governor’s plan is too modest.
Contrast it with the plan to help some rich guys build a baseball stadium in downtown Providence to host a successor to the Pawtucket Red Sox with the aid of state and city government subsidies of $4 million a year. The stadium would employ a few people mostly paid near minimum wage – in season. Off-season, I suppose they’d go on state-funded unemployment insurance. And what happens to the stadium when the team decamps to another venue offering more public money? Then it might be empty 12 months a year instead of 5.
Note that Terry Murray, one of the rich guys in the stadium plan, moved Fleet Financial Group from Providence to Boston, taking many hundreds of jobs with him.
The stadium would be on land where otherwise facilities could be built with hundreds of well-paying jobs, many connected with the medical, design and academic complexes in the very same neighborhood. Of course, that might require importing trained people from outside Rhode Island. (See above.)
But the stadium will probably get built because of the powers behind it and such short-term allures as short-term construction jobs, for which organized labor pines. While only a minority of the population cares a lot about baseball teams, those who do include powerful people in business and government who see themselves hyper-validated by association with the government-protected, heavily tax-subsidized macho monopolies known as professional sports teams.
A few consultants will say how wonderful (at least psychologically) stadiums can be for their localities. Then you discover that they have earned buckets of money as consultants for teams.
These teams are welfare for the rich and opium for them and the dwindling percentage of the masses who can afford $11 hot dogs. Still, the teams aren’t boring, unlike job training and fixing roads.
xxx
A line (probably erroneously) attributed to Harry Truman goes: “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.’’
Recent research shows us more about how humans and dogs evolved together. As spinoffs of wolves or wolf-like canids, dogs developed over millennia as pack animals whose packs came to include people. We selected them to help us hunt and generally favored those who were the least aggressive. They hung around for free meals from carnivores even better at killing than they were (us).
In doing so, they developed social skills for dealing with humans – e.g., reading our gazes – that no other animals have. Indeed, they read us better than do such close human relatives as chimpanzees.
And, no, dogs don’t just pretend to like us to get free room and board. Scientific studies of such factors as the hormone oxytocin show true affection on both sides of the human-dog duet.
Even their diets are changing, with more dogs (like us) mostly eating vegetable-based food. Now on what might be my last dog, I wish I had known all this with my first, in the Truman administration. I would have been nicer to him.
Robert Whitcomb (rwhitcomb51@gmail.com), overseer of New England Diary, is a former Providence Journal editorial-page editor, a partner in a healthcare-sector consultancy and a Fellow of the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy.