Whitcomb: Fane Decision; Anti-Business GOP; ‘Junk Fees’; Green Lights for Putin
Sunday, February 19, 2023
“Now she gives you a quick toothpaste kiss
And puts a glass of cold cranberry juice,
Like a big fake garnet, in your hand.
Cranberry juice! You're lucky, on the whole,
But there is a great deal about it you don't understand.’’
--- From “Poem About Morning,’’ by William Meredith (1919-2007), a U.S. poet laureate. He lived in Montville, Conn.
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“Never try to keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level. It’s cheaper.’’
-- Quentin Crisp (1908-1999), English raconteur
We all need quiet reflection in this noisy, gyrating world, including in the movies and on TV.
Consider the scene in which Helen Mirren, playing a solitary Queen Elizabeth II, watches a lone stag in the Scottish Highlands near Balmoral Castle in The Queen; Ben Johnson, a veteran actor in Westerns and a real cowboy, playing “Sam the Lion,’’ an old cowboy and a businessman in a small Texas town, reflecting on the passage of time as the wind blows across the plains in The Last Picture Show, and Jon Hamm, playing the oft-anguished ad executive Don Draper as he stares out on a nearly empty train platform in the TV series Mad Men.
Haunting stop-time scenes.
Make Decisions!
Providence received $128 million for its troubled public schools from the American Rescue Plan Act, enacted back in March 2021. But a mere 6 percent of that money has been spent! More needs to be done to speed the money to its intended places, even if that means, say, temporarily hiring a few more people to help decide on, process and oversee the distribution of funds.
And state officials and the people running what is by far the state’s biggest school district still need more of a sense of urgency in fixing the district, upon which depends much on the future economic and social health of Rhode Island. And the Providence Teachers Union needs to get on board.
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Will public officials finally decide whether they’ll allow the proposed 47-story “Hope Point Tower,’’ in Providence’s I-195 Relocation District, to be built!? The process has gone on far too long, and businesses and individuals who would be affected by such a big project need to be able to plan. Developer Jason Fane first proposed the project (which has been revised several times in response to aesthetic and other complaints) back in 2016.
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The first flowers are blooming in sunny spots – snowdrops and these crocuses.
Newport Mayor Xay Khamsyvoravong is quite right to emphasize the reuse of vacant or underused buildings in an old city like Newport for affordable housing. For example, he and the City Council seek to use the Coggeshall School, closed since 2013, for such housing.
It can be faster than building from scratch and less likely to arouse neighborhood opposition than putting up brand-new housing, low-income or otherwise. Neighbors of schools are used to complex crowds on nearby streets most days.
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As Newport’s Cliff Walk continues to collapse in a few places because of increasing coastal erosion, some experts suggest moving the famous walkway inland a bit, which means into the property of rich folks who live, at least seasonally, in big houses there. Now that would set off some lively legal wars, including some celebrities!
Up There, too
Bloomberg News reports:
“{Canadian} Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is facing calls to strengthen Canada’s border controls as the country’s open approach to immigration worsens a housing shortage.
“Quebec Premier Francois Legault said it’s time for Trudeau to reconsider his welcoming message to potential new arrivals. Canada’s second-most populous province has seen a recent rise in asylum seekers entering from the U.S. at an irregular border crossing south of Montreal….
“’We’ve exceeded our capacity to welcome. We have problems with housing, places in schools, staff in hospitals,’ the premier told reporters…’’
On the other hand, Canadian officials have long said that the country needs more workers.
Hit this link for the article:
Anti-Business
The Republican Party has long been called the party of business, one that has, at least rhetorically, sought to let private enterprise do pretty much what it wants, within broad parameters. But as much of the party has moved toward a far-right (“populist”) authoritarianism, that has changed, and now some GOP/QAnon leaders seek to tell companies which policies they are permitted to follow.
One example is that grandstanding “anti-woke” (a plastic term) Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who desperately wants to be president, has been pressing his state to yank public funds from investment companies, such as BlackRock and Vanguard, that use environmental, social and governance criteria (ESG in Wall Street parlance) in some investment decisions. Note, by the way, that ESG investments account for only a small part of these big companies’ holdings.
DeSantis also wants to block the state and its local governments from using ESG criteria when issuing municipal bonds.
He's trying to imply that the people running these huge Wall Street firms are trendy leftists who are making decisions that hurt investors. But in fact, the hard-nosed, hyper-capitalist executives of BlackRock, etc., are considering what they believe is in the long-term interest of their investors as the world continues to change environmentally, demographically and technologically.
As BlackRock’s CEO, Larry Fink, has noted, “climate risk is investment risk.’’ Such current and future risks as poverty, wars and human-rights crises also are, since they’re associated with extreme social disorder, and thus economic instability, that affects profitability. Fink and company are making rigorous business decisions, based on projections of the sustainability of profitability.
(Climate risk is especially serious in Florida, where rising seas threaten the extreme coastal development that has long been taking place there.)
Of course, the states can do whatever they want. But punishing investment firms whose decisions are aimed at protecting customers’ capital doesn’t seem very responsible.
And then we have “pro-free-enterprise” Republicans seeking to have government order online media, such as Facebook and Twitter, to run far-right propaganda. The U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment does not permit government to order private entities to publish or not publish stuff. The amendment bans censorship by government in most situations, though there can be exceptions in the case of national security and of incitement to violence.
For example, here's Supreme Court Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s (1841-1935) famous phrasing:
“The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic... The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.’’
For the GOP/QAnon, you have a right to free speech as long as you are saying what the right wing wants you to say. And note that a media outlet’s decision not to publish words or images (because, for example, they’re brazen lies) is itself an exercise of free speech.
In any event, the right wing has plenty of media outlets, large (Fox, etc.) and small in which to market its opinions.
Meanwhile, Republicans in some communities are busy removing books that they think they don’t like from public libraries and schools, in some cases without actually reading the books they complain about.
‘Junk Fees’
Another example of government overreach (as if it doesn’t already have enough to do) is President Biden’s proposed (and presumably popular) “Junk Fee Prevention Act’’ aimed at reducing those irritating “unexpected” fees by airlines, banks, hotels, credit card companies and other service providers. These fees are usually not listed in the initial, “official” price of a service but are added at payment time.
As alluring as such a law sounds, it would add more regulatory red tape to business, as well as expense, which most companies will find ways to pass on to consumers. And if consumers take the time, they can generally find out before making a purchase what sort of supplemental fees they might face and plan accordingly.
And we should be aware of the sharp differences between some of the charges at issue. There are, for example, “secret” fees tacked on by resorts and airlines and those in which consumers are charged for breaching contracts, such as overdrafts in bank accounts.
Probably the most effective way to reduce these maddening fees is to open up competition, of which there is far too little in some of these service sectors because of very weak federal antitrust action since the ’80s – in large part because of relentless corporate lobbying, campaign donations and right-wing/libertarian ideology. More competition would lower prices and would tend to force early disclosure of more details of service fees and other pricing details. Sunlight is a powerful disinfectant.
Many people are angry at the pricing power of such virtual monopolies as Ticketmaster. The solution is to break it up, though I find it hard to get too worked up about the price of something as discretionary as a ticket to a pop-music concert!
Dollars From Death Cult
With much of the GOP fighting to block even the most modest and reasonable gun-control laws, such as universal background checks for would-be buyers, the party is hosting a death cult, but a very profitable one for the National Rifle Association, the gun companies that finance it and the NRA’s servants in Congress.
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Harvard College’s women’s hockey coach, the very tough Katey Stone, now in her 26th season, faces calls for the university to fire her for telling team members that the team had “too many chiefs and not enough Indians.’’ That was taken as an ethnic slur. It’s a very old expression. I never took it as derogatory, but then I’m an old white guy. Are we getting too thin-skinned, sometimes to the point of paralysis, as we always seem to be, er, skating on thin rhetorical ice?
Green Lights for Putin
“A lost war in Ukraine is a stepping stone to war in the Asia Pacific. You need to understand that when even a big guy is hit in the face, a number of other guys will start to doubt whether that guy is really that strong, and they will want to go for his teeth. … If the U.S. wants to go to war in Asia, then the most correct path to this is to show weakness in Ukraine as well.”
-- Mikhail Khodorkovsky, exiled Russian tycoon and Putin critic, in a Washington Post interview
If only Ukraine had been heavily armed by the West starting back in 2014, when Putin ordered the invasion and seizure of Crimea and eastern Ukraine, and for that matter, if only the West had been much tougher when Russia attacked Georgia in 2008 and seized part of that country. Those were green lights for further Russian aggression. The G.W. Bush and Obama administrations helped undermine the rules-based international security system, such as it is, with their weak response to such brazen actions, but then the response of our allies was generally pretty weak too.
Tyrants like Putin keep pushing.
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As we’ve been reminded since the big Chinese spy balloon floated over America recently, there’s lots of stuff, malign or benign, circulating above us from 40,000 feet on up – indeed so much stuff that you might think that they would affect our weather.
Not only does China send us balloons, it also sends us massive quantities of fentanyl, via Mexico. The magic of the market, indeed.
Robert Whitcomb is a veteran editor and writer. Among his jobs, he has served as the finance editor of the International Herald Tribune, in Paris; as a vice president and the editorial-page editor of The Providence Journal; as an editor and writer in New York for The Wall Street Journal, and as a writer for the Boston Herald Traveler (RIP). He has written newspaper and magazine essays and news stories for many years on a very wide range of topics for numerous publications, has edited several books and movie scripts and is the co-author of among other things, Cape Wind.
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