Don’t suffer ‘a den of thieves’
In this painting by John Trumbull, “The Declaration of Independence,’’ JohnHancock, as presiding officer, is seated on the right as the drafting committee presents their work.
“Surely you never will tamely suffer this country to be a den of thieves. Remember, my friends, from whom you sprang. Let not a meanness of spirit, unknown to those whom you boast of as your fathers, excite a thought to the dishonor of your mothers I conjure you, by all that is dear, by all that is honorable, by all that is sacred, not only that ye pray, but that ye act; that, if necessary, ye fight, and even die, for the prosperity of our Jerusalem. Break in sunder, with noble disdain, the bonds with which the Philistines have bound you. Suffer not yourselves to be betrayed, by the soft arts of luxury and effeminacy, into the pit digged for your destruction. Despise the glare of wealth. That people who pay greater respect to a wealthy villain than to an honest, upright man in poverty, almost deserve to be enslaved; they plainly show that wealth, however it may be acquired, is, in their esteem, to be preferred to virtue.’’
— John Hancock (1737-1793), a U.S. Founding Father and Massachusetts politician and merchant
Pets became family members and children worked in mills
“Portrait of Hippodale at Six Years Old,’’ (circa 1910), by Mariette Leslie Cotton, in the show “Wild Imagination: Art and Animals in the Gilded Age (1865-1915)’’ at the Rosecliff mansion in Newport, R.I, through Jan. 12.
Edited from curator’s remarks:
“During the Gilded Age (1865–1914), Americans’ relationship with animals was transformed in lasting ways. ‘Wild Imagination’ explores how this … era shaped our modern attitudes towards animals, from pampered pups to wondrous sea creatures. A broad range of artworks, photographs, scientific specimens, and other objects reflect vital period developments, including the dawn of the animal rights movement, the surge in pet keeping, the popularization of such natural history pursuits as birdwatching, and the golden era of zoos and circuses. They also reveal the stories and experiences of individual creatures who continue to capture our imagination.’’
Wealth in the woods
Lauder Greenway estate, in Greenwich, Conn.
“Who has connections to Connecticut?That’s where rich people go to live the rest of their lives in the woods.’’
— Patrice O’Neal (19690-2011), American comedian
Carpet of life
From “Messages from the Marsh—parts 4-6’’(video still), by Amy Kaczur, at Kingston Gallery, Boston, through Dec. 1.
Nov. ‘wind to bear’
“Wind-Beaten Tree,’’ by Vincent Van Gogh.
November
Besides the autumn poets sing,
A few prosaic days
A little this side of the snow
And that side of the haze.
A few incisive mornings,
A few ascetic eyes, —
Gone Mr. Bryant's golden-rod,
And Mr. Thomson's sheaves.
Still is the bustle in the brook,
Sealed are the spicy valves;
Mesmeric fingers softly touch
The eyes of many elves.
Perhaps a squirrel may remain,
My sentiments to share.
Grant me, O Lord, a sunny mind,
Thy windy will to bear!
— “November,’’ by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
Amherst in 1886. Dickinson spent her life in the famous college town.
So that’s where I left them
“ISLAND #2, 2024”, (archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle fine art museum etching paper, mounted on aluminum) by Susan Mikula, at Brattleboro (Vt.) Museum & Art Center.
Jonathan Krasner: The sometimes fraught Jewish experience on college campuses
Harvard President Abbott Lawrence Lowell in 1923. He moved to sharply restrict Jewish enrollment at the university.
From The Conversation
BOSTON
When Eliza arrived on her West Coast college campus in the fall of 2020, building community was difficult due to the raging COVID-19 pandemic. Yet over time she forged a network of friends, anchored by her sorority.
Three years later, those relationships were severely tested by events over 7,000 miles away: the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack in Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza.
Due to her support for Israel, she was ostracized by people she once considered close friends, including her sorority sisters. Walking around campus, she removed her Star of David necklace. To be clear, Eliza was not concerned about her physical safety. But she sensed a social penalty for being Jewish and wanted to avoid dirty looks and political confrontations.
As the civilian death toll in Gaza mounted, progressive campus activists, including some Jews, fervently adopted the Palestinian cause as an extension of their battles for racial and social justice. Opposition to the war has become a generational cause for earnest Zoomers, akin to the Vietnam War for baby boomers and opposition to South African apartheid for Gen Xers.
Critics contend that protesters are unfairly holding Jewish classmates accountable for the actions of the Israeli government – especially since Jewish Americans are not unified in their attitudes about the war and very few hold dual citizenship in Israel. Where protesters see manifestations of anti-Zionism – opposition to the existence of a Jewish nation state in present-day Israel – many Jewish students, staff and parents see antisemitism, pure and simple.
People attend a menorah lighting ceremony on the seventh night of Hanukkah in December 2023 in Harvard Yard. Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images
Eliza – a pseudonym, like all the student names in this article – was one of 36 undergraduates across the country whom I spoke with as part of a study of Jewish students’ responses to the conflict and its consequences. Their views on Israel and the war ran the gamut – but regardless, most felt unsettled by the death, abductions and destruction abroad, as well as the protests outside their dorms.
Many of them were surprised to find themselves wrestling with what it means to be Jewish in the U.S. and questioning their place in American society. But for more than 100 years, college campuses have been a testing ground for Jewish identity – and Americans’ acceptance of their Jewish compatriots.
Changing fortunes
The parents of today’s students, in particular, find themselves in a state of whiplash. Most attended college in the 1980s and ’90s, at the height of a golden age of Jewish life on American campuses. They view their children’s experiences not merely as a reversal but a betrayal.
“I went to college in the 1990s, and cannot recall a single moment when I felt uncomfortable as a Jew,” Sarah Hurwitz, a former speechwriter for the Obamas, recalled soon after the Oct. 7 attack.
Hurwitz’s alma mater, Harvard University, is embroiled in a lawsuit over allegations of antisemitism. Similar lawsuits were filed against Columbia University, UCLA and other schools. Meanwhile, federal investigations proceed over both antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents at dozens of colleges and universities.
Her recollections reflect many competitive colleges’ conscious efforts to welcome Jewish students in the 1980s and ’90s, such as by building new campus centers, offering an array of new Jewish studies courses and providing kosher dining options. In the 1990s, about 25 percent of undergraduates at Harvard and Yale claimed Jewish heritage. The numbers were even higher at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania.
The trend was not confined to the Ivy League. Similar demographic stories played out at schools such as Boston University, Washington University in St. Louis and Northwestern University in Chicago.
Jews not wanted
It was not always so.
A century ago, first- and second-generation Jewish Americans flocked to higher education, seeing a degree as a ticket into the middle class. In response, elite colleges and universities notoriously restricted Jewish enrollment.
While other schools deliberated about their “Jewish problem” in secret, Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell publicly announced his university’s intention to admit fewer Jews, which made the front page of The New York Times.
Explaining the quota, Lowell essentially blamed the victims. Attributing a rise in antisemitic attitudes to Jews’ supposed “clannishness,” he argued that admitting too many Jews would impede Jewish assimilation and further heighten anti-Jewish sentiment.
Odious as his plan was, Lowell’s views were common. The “tribal twenties” was a time of widespread nativism and racism. As Harvard and other schools were instituting Jewish quotas, Congress passed a restrictive immigration law that reduced Jewish immigration to a trickle.
Antisemitism was fueled by multiple and often conflicting conspiracy theories that appealed as much to cultured elites as to the unschooled.
Genteel antisemitism
On campus, antisemitism often manifested as social snobbery. For example, Greek organizations routinely discriminated on the basis of race and religion.
Meanwhile, New York’s upper crust responded to an influx of Jewish students at Columbia by sending their sons to out-of-town institutions. Indeed, Lowell’s fear that Harvard would suffer Columbia’s fate and scare away the “Boston Brahmins” motivated his efforts to reduce his university’s Jewish presence.
Harvard students’ feelings about Jewish classmates were revealed in 1922 when a professor invited his class to share opinions about Lowell’s “race limitations” plan on their final exams. “The Jews tend to overrun the college, to spoil it for the native-born Anglo-Saxon young persons for whom it was built and whom it really wants,” one student wrote. “Jews are an unassimilable race,” concluded another, “as dangerous to a college as indigestible food to a man.”
Harvard ultimately adopted a more indirect but equally effective plan to curb Jewish enrollment that capped the number of undergraduates and emphasized geographic diversity. Specifically, it admitted fewer students from Northeastern cities with large Jewish populations, while expanding its program of legacy admissions. From 1921 to 1928, Jewish enrollment dropped from over 21% to Lowell’s original target of 10%.
Other schools followed suit. As late as the 1950s, universities were designing their own restrictive admissions policies.
Fitting in − or not
Jewish college students realized that the genteel antisemitism they experienced on the quad was a taste of the discrimination they would face on the job market. Many compensated for the prejudice around them by avidly Americanizing, even by legally changing their names. By midcentury, many Jewish teens and young women were “whitening” themselves by getting nose jobs and straightening their hair.
As much as they tried to blend in, many continued to feel disaffected. As historian Daniel Greene noted, they inhabited an in-between space: a conflicted middle ground between their American and Jewish identities, never fully at home in either world.
Others immersed themselves in Jewish life. Some were attracted to Zionism, then a relatively new movement that supported a Jewish national home in the region of Palestine, the biblical land of Israel. Many joined Jewish fraternities and sororities or campus groups. The first chapter of Hillel, presently the largest Jewish campus organization, was founded at the University of Illinois in 1923.
Jewish members of the armed forces from Columbia University prepare for a Passover Seder service at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in 1944. Bettmann via Getty Images
The climate for Jewish students improved in the late 1950s and ’60s, as elite schools, beginning with Harvard, adopted admissions policies that prized academic merit, reflected primarily in SAT scores. In the words of journalist Sarah Leonard, universities shed “a portion of academically mediocre bluebloods in favor of scrappier kids with impressive test scores.”
Now versus then
It is tempting to compare the contemporary experiences of Jewish students with those of a century ago. And there are similarities, to be sure. Inevitably, some students are galvanized to action, while others prefer to melt into shadows. Some turn inward and find comfort in community, while others challenge themselves to adapt to the disequilibrium.
But there are also significant differences, including that Jewish Americans wield far more political power as a group than they did in the 1920s.
The spectacle of university presidents being hauled before a U.S. congressional committee in 2023 over accusations of antisemitism on their campuses may have been a political ploy by Republicans. In part, it underscored the GOP’s alliance with evangelical Christian supporters of Israel and its desire to attack institutions of higher education as “woke.” Yet it also signaled that Jews enjoy a level of influence in the halls of government that would have baffled their great-grandparents.
Many parents and students are dissatisfied with campus leaders’ responses to the anti-Israel protests. But their concerns have been afforded a level of consideration that was almost entirely absent in earlier times. Consider the swiftness with which Columbia dismissed three mid-level administrators in July 2024, after images of snarky text messages trafficking in antisemitic tropes were leaked to the media.
In recent months, some students like Eliza may be downplaying their Jewishness to diffuse tense situations. But that does not mean they are rejecting their identities.
Jewish students and allies hold a Shabbat event and prayer in solidarity with the pro-Palestinian encampment at George Washington University on April 26, 2024. Celal Gunes/Anadolu via Getty Images
Even Jewish students who support the campus protests often frame their concern for Palestinian life in terms of their Jewish values. Ava, a student I interviewed at an East Coast university, no longer feels comfortable attending Sabbath services, due to the campus rabbi’s pro-Israel politics. Yet she finds Jewish connection through a Jewish anti-Zionist organization led by students.
Ezra, a student leader at the Hillel chapter on a particularly volatile campus, bemoaned some protesters’ excesses. He had little patience for white progressive activists spouting slogans like “Globalize the Intifada!” without understanding their meaning. But he evinced greater sympathy for Arab and Muslim demonstrators, especially those who had been personally touched by the death and devastation in Gaza.
Ezra viewed their activism as a form of “punching up.”
“We have a Hillel house – probably one of the nicest in the country – and the ear of the administration through donors and alumni,” he explained. “We’re fighting to maintain our privilege while they’re fighting for representation.”
Jonathan Krasner, is associate professor of Jewish education research at Brandeis University.
He does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment
Design for sculpture?
“Seaver Dark Reflection” (watercolor) in Wendy Klemperer’s show “A Sculptor’s Watercolors,’’ at the Dublin School’s Putnam Gallery, Dublin, N.H., through Dec. 18.
Sculptor Klemperer shows her watercolors and drawings, offering a rare glimpse of an artist’s work across mediums.
The church and rotary in the center of Dublin, part of the Dublin Village Historic District. The town is headquarters of Yankee Magazine and its sister publication The Old Farmers Almanack.
Magicpiano photo
Two places show Boston as birthplace of the telephone
(New England Diary’s editor, Robert Whitcomb, is chairman of The Boston Guardian.)
Two different locations in Downtown Boston both claim to be the site where Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone.
Steps from City Hall, almost hidden in a courtyard between the John F. Kennedy Federal Building and Cambridge Street, a nondescript granite marker reads, BIRTHPLACE OF THE FIRST TELEPHONE.
Yet just half a mile away, embedded in the side of a building on Avenue de Lafayette, a plaque claims to mark the spot of the FIRST COMPLETE AND INTELLIGIBLE SENTENCE BY TELEPHONE.
So where in Boston was the telephone really invented? The answer, experts say, depends on how one chooses to define the term.
“I can see a convincing argument being made for either place,” said Peter Drummey, the Stephen T. Riley Librarian at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and one of the foremost experts on Boston’s history. “But it’s not particularly helpful that both markers are without a concrete explanation or any context at all.”
The root of these competing claims lies in Alexander Graham Bell’s paranoia that rival inventors would steal his design, according to Drummey and Vincent Valentine, director of The Telephone Museum in Waltham.
Originally from Scotland, Bell came to Boston to have his ideas prototyped by Charles Williams Jr., a manufacturer of telegraph equipment whose expertise turned Boston into a hotbed for inventors in the late nineteenth century.
Bell and his assistant Thomas Watson rented space in the attic of William’s factory at 109 Court Street, an address that no longer exists but roughly corresponds to the present day marker near City Hall. It was in that fifth floor lab that Bell and Watson were initially able to transmit sound over a wire, first a “twang” of a spring and then the indistinct sound of voices.
Concerned about prying eyes at the Court Street labs, Bell and Watson began testing their devices at night in rented rooms at a boarding house at 15 Exeter Street, or what is roughly now the Avenue de Lafayette. It was in these rented rooms on March 10 in 1876 that Bell, according to the story, called to Watson after spilling acid on his prototype and the assistant heard him clearly in the next room.
“15 Exeter is where they first got it to work,” said The Telephone Museum’s Valentine. “That’s where the first voice was transmitted.”
Both Drummey and Valentine said that any debate over which site is truly the birthplace of modern communications is a matter of semantics. However, they also said that the lack of a universally agreed upon location to commemorate the achievement played a role in why such an important moment is often left off Boston’s historical pantheon.
For a city that obsesses over its own history and takes pride in its outsized influence and innovation economy, Boston all but ignores one of the most significant achievements to have occurred here.
“People don’t know this happened in Boston,” said Valentine. “When people think of Boston, all anybody seems to care about is Paul Revere, but the telephone was invented right there downtown. And it’s the telephone. I mean, Holy Christ, everyone has one.”
Impolite to stare at it
“Beyond 2’’(acrylic) by Nancy Hayes, in her show “Thought Translated Into Form,’’ at the Art Complex Museum, Duxbury, Mass.
She says:
“Painting permits direct access into my own personal laboratory where I develop forms and visual landscapes built from my imagination. I work with color, line, pattern and shape, arranging and rearranging until I am inspired to elaborate on a composition, going deeper into its texture, its biology.’’
Myles Standish Monument, in Duxbury.
Mulch more
Adapted from an item in Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24. com
November seems a good month to sleep in. The nights are long and the major colors outside are brown and gray. There are, it it true, a couple of holidays – Veterans Day (which we used to call Armistice Day, after the armistice that ended World War 1 – aka “The War to End War,’’ followed a couple of decades later by the worst war in history) and Thanksgiving, whose inconvenient placement on the last Thursday of the month tends to make it rather low key. I’ve long been impressed by the masochism of those traveling then. Then the Christmas/New Year’s mania sets in, with more travel masochism.\
Meanwhile, if you have a yard, resist the temptation to remove all those fallen leaves, leaving the ground looking like a putting green. Fallen leaves are good for the soil and the overall ecosystem. Mulching the leaves and spreading the result is particularly admirable. And yes, there are nonpolluting and fairly quiet electric mulchers. You can also put some lime on the leaves, mulched or not. This helps make such nutrients as nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and calcium more available to plants when the growing season resumes.
All this is good therapy for dealing with the political and cultural squalor that slob America has soaked itself in.
Chris Powell: Immigration-fraud racket in Bridgeport; The sad end of Peanut and Fred
The P.T. Barnum (as in the circus) Museum in Bridgeport.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Having stuffed absentee ballot boxes for Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim and the city’s Democratic machine only to be caught on surveillance video and charged criminally and belatedly fired from her patronage job as official greeter at City Hall, Wanda Geter-Pataky has found what may be a more lucrative racket.
The New Haven Independent reported this month that Geter-Pataky had become a marriage broker. She was bringing to City Hall in New Haven older foreigners, apparently legal but time-limited visitors, together with much younger U.S. citizens, getting them marriage licenses, and then, as a justice of the peace, performing marriages in the hall outside the office of Mayor Justin Elicker.
Connecticut's Hearst newspapers then reported that Geter-Pataky long had been doing similar business at City Hall in Bridgeport.
How much she has charged for these services is not known.
The couples involved have no obvious connection to their betrothed. According to The Independent, the 114 couples whose marriages Geter-Pataky facilitated in New Haven included many people from India and some from Tajikistan, Georgia, Turkey, Russia, Egypt and Jamaica.
Geter-Pataky told The Independent that the couples live in New Haven, but the newspaper found that only three included a city resident. When The Independent asked a young woman about to be married if she was being paid to do it, Geter-Pataky told her to say no.
If such a marriage is genuine, the foreigner would be entitled under federal immigration law to stay in the country. And if such a marriage is a fraud for evading immigration law, who in authority in New Haven or state government would care?
After all, New Haven is a "sanctuary city," Connecticut a "sanctuary state," and a New Haven city clerk who got suspicious about similar marriage licenses early this year and told immigration authorities was suspended for violating the city's "sanctuary" ordinance. (So much for "If you see something, say something.") The clerk retired rather than be fired.
After The Independent discovered Geter-Pataky’s racket in New Haven she moved it back to Bridgeport City Hall. Though she is awaiting trial in connection with the latter racket, she remains vice chairwoman of the city’s Democratic committee.
As The Independent was compiling its report about the racket conducted in the hall outside his office, Mayor Elicker issued a statement lamenting Donald Trump's election as president.
"Just like when Donald Trump was president before, we will once again come together as a city to stand up for what is right and just," the mayor said. "We will continue to work together to ensure New Haven is a city where all are welcome and where all can thrive."
By "all" the mayor presumably means even those who contrive and profit from fake marriages to break immigration law. How "right and just"!
Three Republican state senators reacted to the Independent’s story with alarm. (Democratic state legislators seemed to ignore the story.) The Republicans urged state Attorney General William Tong to investigate the matter. Journalists at the state Capitol should press Gov. Ned Lamont about it too.
But since, like the segregationists of old, the governor and attorney general seem happy to be nullifiers, maybe they will construe Geter-Pataky’s racket as a great new way for Connecticut to boost tourism, as with abortion.
R.I.P., PEANUT AND FRED: People not on government's payroll may say a prayer of thanks for social-media star Peanut the Squirrel and Fred the Raccoon, the indoor pets of animal rescuer Mark Longo of Pine City, N.Y. As the country prepared to vote for president, Peanut and Fred were seized from Longo’s home in a five-hour raid by six agents of the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, killed, and tested for rabies, which they almost surely didn’t have.
Their martyrdom has given the country what I see as a metaphor for its government -- assiduously intervening in trivia while failing catastrophically with its most important responsibilities, such as immigration and public safety.
Yet some people still wonder where all those votes for Trump came from.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net.)
A poem for this time
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
“The Second Coming,’’by W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)
‘An easy business’
Oliver Ellsworth in an engraving.
“When we become ignorant, vicious, idle, our liberties will be lost — we shall be fitted for slavery, and it will be an easy business to reduce us to obey one or more tyrants.’’
— Oliver Ellsworth (1745-1807), of Connecticut, a U.S. Founding Father and the third chief justice of the United States,in which position he served in 1796-1800.
Most appreciated in winter
“Ram Island Ledge’’(acrylic on linen), by Gail Spaien, in her show “Light in Every Room,’’ at Moss Galleries’ (in Maine) Portland gallery through Jan.4
—-Photo courtesy of Luc Demers
Ram Island Ledge Lighthouse, in Casco Bay
Month’s loveable mud and the cleanest skies
November’s days are thirty:
November’s earth is dirty,
Those thirty days, from first to last;
And the prettiest thing on ground are the paths
With morning and evening hobnails dinted,
With foot and wing-tip overprinted
Or separately charactered,
Of little beast and little bird.
The fields are mashed by sheep, the roads
Make the worst going, the best the woods
Where dead leaves upward and downward scatter.
Few care for the mixture of earth and water,
Twig, leaf, flint, thorn,
Straw, feather, all that men scorn,
Pounded up and sodden by flood,
Condemned as mud.
But of all the months when earth is greener
Not one has clean skies that are cleaner.
Clean and clear and sweet and cold,
They shine above the earth so old,
While the after-tempest cloud
Sails over in silence though winds are loud,
Till the full moon in the east
Looks at the planet in the west
And earth is silent as it is black,
Yet not unhappy for its lack.
Up from the dirty earth men stare:
One imagines a refuge there
Above the mud, in the pure bright
Of the cloudless heavenly light:
Another loves earth and November more dearly
Because without them, he sees clearly,
The sky would be nothing more to his eye
Than he, in any case, is to the sky;
He loves even the mud whose dyes
Renounce all brightness to the skies.
— “November,’’ by Edward Thomas (1878-1917), English poet. He was killed on the Western Front in World War I.
Jim Hightower: Let mobile-home residents buy their parks, as in Maine
Via OtherWord.org
Even in a barrelful of rotten apples, you might think there’d still be a few good ones. But don’t get your hopes up looking into barrels labeled “private-equity investors.”
These esoteric, multibillion-dollar Wall Street schemes rig the marketplace so “high-net-worth individuals” can grab fat profits and special tax breaks to buy up doctors’ offices, hometown newspapers, child care centers, etc.
Consider America’s humble but beneficial mobile home parks. Homeownership has become so pricey that these affordable manufactured units now make up 10 percent of all single-family home sales.
But while the buyers own the houses, they must rent lots from mobile park owners. This has generally been a square deal — at least when park owners live among the renters, providing decent services at reasonable rates. One such park is Linnhaven Center with some 300 mobile home residents in Brunswick, Maine.
But these homes for millions of people have become a quick-buck target for Wall Street’s equity profiteers.
Waving cash at longtime trailer-park owners, private-equity investors have been snatching up thousands of these lots. Without warning, people’s homes are literally being bought out from under them. The absentee predators then raise rents to drive out residents, clearing the spaces for high-dollar renters or buyers.
But there’s good news for a change.
A new law in Maine gives mobile home residents a chance to buy their park — and community cooperatives exist to help arrange financing. That’s what the modest-income people of Linnhaven have now done.
Such a big leap isn’t easy, but give people a fair chance and they can make it work. As one Linnhaven woman put it, the community effort was much more than a property deal: It felt like “a chance to control your own destiny.”
Jim Hightower is a long-time columnist.
Llewellyn King: Myths about Musk and Trump will unravel as electricity crisis grows
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
I would like to lay before you two powerful myths that are very present in the United States in this post-election hiatus.
The first is that business people, because they have had a record of making money, will be good at running the government.
The second is that because one has been a successful inventor, one can fix everything.
No president, including Donald Trump in his first term, has been able to apply the harsh lessons of business to the infinitely complex task of taking care of all of the people.
Equally, inventors can’t invent the nation out of every challenge; they fail more often than they succeed. If Elon Musk had launched his Boring Company before Tesla, he likely wouldn’t be known today.
No one should underestimate the entrepreneurial genius of the man and the brilliance of his engineers. Just think of the engineering feat of Musk’s SpaceX “catching” the first-stage booster of its Starship mega-rocket as it returned to the launch pad after a test flight.
But that doesn’t mean that Musk is qualified to overhaul the government or that he will have a simpatico relationship with Trump for long. Trump has suggested that Musk will be the architect of a new streamlined government. Maybe.
The Trump-Musk entwining of two myths isn’t likely to endure.
Trump, always used to getting his way, will come into office with the knowledge of where he failed the first time. He will take control as though he had won the nation not at the ballot box, which he assuredly did, but in a takeover battle, and he will do with the company he has bought what he will. He found that hard to do the first time, but he is better-equipped this time with a substantial mandate that he will employ.
Even though he has been designated by Trump as an agent of change, Musk is unlikely to last.
Musk won’t bow to Trump for long. He is like Rudyard Kipling’s cat: He walks by himself, alone and capriciously. He embodies many of the strengths and limitations that marked the late Howard Hughes: vision and willful eccentricity.
Trump has disparaged electric cars and renewable energy, two of the cornerstones of the Musk empire. Musk is a man who dreams of a future that he can invent, with automated cars, space habitation, and solar power dominating electric supply.
Trump’s vision is not soaring. It is a backward look to a time that has passed. It is a vision that recalls the Reader’s Digest view of America in the heyday of that magazine, wholesome, patriotic, simple but fundamentally unreal.
The first crisis that might divide the two men, and challenge the Trump administration, is energy.
An electricity shortage is bearing down on the nation and there are no easy fixes. Trump has laid out an energy policy that would emphasize oil and gas drilling and environmental controls and curbs on the rate of wind generation deployment.
None of that will get us through the impending crisis as the demand for more electricity is surging. It is driven by more electric vehicles, greater use of electricity in manufacturing, and by the huge and seemingly limitless demands of data centers being built across the country to serve the needs of a data-driven, AI economy and its relentless electricity demand.
The fixes for the electricity shortage are all just over the horizon: new nuclear plants, more solar and wind, more transmission, and a more efficient use of the generation we have at hand.
The most immediate fix is a so-called virtual power plant that coordinates energy saving with new sources, like rooftop solar and surplus self-generation at industrial facilities, under the rubric of distributed energy resources. That is already underway and beyond that looms the potential of blackouts.
California and Texas, along with parts of the Midwest, are precariously balanced. Any severe weather interruptions, such as extreme heat or extreme cold, and the electricity supply could fail to meet demand.
Trump is likely to react with fury and to lash out at renewable energy (solar and wind) and electric vehicles. In a way, he will be blaming his new best friend, a principal creator of the current electric landscape, Elon Musk.
The myths will unravel, but the underlying truth is that we are going to have five or more years of acute electric shortage without a quick fix, from an inventor or a businessman.
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS.
White House Chronicle
David Warsh: Trump’s second-term chaos may give foes a break; secular time and political time
`1940 movie poster
SOMERVILLE, MASS.
Aside from Donald Trump, the biggest winner in the Republican blowout may be a Yale University political theorist by the name of Stephen Skowronek. Little known beyond circles of political science and legal scholarship, Skowronek is better able than anyone else I know to explain what just happened.
In 1982, Skowronek published Political Leadership in Political Time, soon after the presidency of Ronald Reagan began. Ever since, he has argued the significance of “political time,” by which he means cyclical time, as opposed to “secular time,” time measured by the calendar. The durability of his essay is underscored by the appearance of a third edition in 2011.
Skowronek identified five major systems that unfolded in the years since the American Civil War, each driven by the ambitions of a strong political leader at their beginning: the presidencies of Abraham Lincoln to Grover Cleveland, 1861-1897; William McKinley to Herbert Hoover, 1897-1933; Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson 1933-1968, Richard Nixon to George H. W. Bush 1969-93; and Bill Clinton to Joe Biden 1993-2025. Each may be described by their ideological commitments and coalition support.
“Political time” time is different from calendar time that measures the term of each president because it is, by its nature, both dynastic and progressive, meaning nothing more than that it moves steadily toward an end-state quite different from what the Founders who wrote the Constitution intended. The election of a strong leader who promises sweeping change in the way things are done marks the beginning of each new cycle.
Succeeding presidents seek to follow his (or her) lead, but are increasingly constrained by emerging coalitional issues, until finally each episode ends with a whimper, a president deemed weak who is unable to sell the program of the original strong president to the voters. Another strong leader emerges. A new cycle begins.
In less democratic nations than ours, we call this “regime change.” In democratic America, we call it “realignment.” In fact, President-elect Trump already has called it just that.
In Skowronek’s reading, each new cycle has revolved around ever-more expansive interpretations of the U.S. Constitution, tending inexorably towards what he calls a “unitary executive.” Unconstrained by a lap-dog Congress and a Supreme Court of his choosing, the president has all the power.
In current circumstances, then, Skowronek’s scheme might predict administrations of populist presidents, backed by “the base,” stretching well into the future. These administrations might begin with J.D. Vance, giving way gradually to ever-more constrained presidents until at last the pale imitation takes the helm, is defeated, and the promised renewal begins. In this view, 2044 may be the time to begin to look for the next chance to re-set the political clock.
For those with a taste for such things, Skowronek elaborated the intricate theory underlying his analysis in an essay in the Harvard Law Review that I can’t link normally but you can find it easily enough via Google. (or try this https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-122/the-conservative-insurgency-and-presidential-power-a-developmental-perspective-on-the-unitary-executive/ It took me 30 minutes yesterday to read it. Something like the same point was made recently by the superb columnist of the Financial Times Janan Ganesh.
Sounds pretty bleak, doesn’t it? There is, as always, a hitch. Donald Trump probably isn’t a strong leader. He seems more like a unstable man with a good political intuition now coming apart. The likely chaos of his second term may give the Democratic Party an opportunity.
If the Dems come up with new leadership, and strong candidates, who swiftly learn the lessons Trump taught about appealing to voters of wide-ranging identities, they just might be able to defeat J.D. Vance in the next presidential election, after the mid-term congressional elections return them to power in the Senate.
Who knows? Today it is just a comforting thought. But today is the time to start.
David Warsh is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com.
Scott Van Voorhis: Half-empty Boston buildings won’t get tax break
The Charles River in front of Boston's Back Bay neighborhood, in 2013
New England Diary’s editor, Robert Whitcomb, is chairman of The Boston Guardian.
Boston’s top office towers lost a combined $450 million in value, the Boston Business Journal reported last week, noting it was not as “significant” as earlier forecasts.
Yet the hit to Boston office building values amid the shift to remote work is likely far greater than what the numbers in city records currently suggest.
Boston’s assessing department appears to have obscured the full extent of the decline through its aggressive pushback against requests for tax abatements from owners of struggling older office buildings, often half or even mostly empty, critics contend.
The assessing department’s efforts, in turn, come against the backdrop of a larger effort by Mayor Michelle Wu, who is up for reelection next year, to downplay the severity of the collapse of the office market on city finances.
Boston faces a looming, $1.5 billion revenue gap over the next few years, the Boston Policy Institute has estimated.
Paying the price for this exercise in political damage control have been the owners of Boston’s older office addresses, some of whom have just received quite the surprise on their estimated tax bills for the coming year.
These so-called Class B buildings have borne the brunt of the exodus of office workers from downtown Boston, with the market value of their properties at times just a fraction of what they were once worth.
Yet in several cases, city officials have assessed the value of these hard-hit buildings at the exact same amount, with the exact same tax bill, as the year before.
One example is 95 Berkeley Street in the South End. Just 12 percent of the 107,000-square-foot office building is leased. The Los Angeles-based owner is looking to convert the building to residential under a city program and has put it up for sale.
Even so, city assessors have pegged the value of the 1899 building at $22.5 million, the same as last year, and more than $3 million more than what it was worth in 2019, before the pandemic and the rise of remote work.
Another example is 123 North Washington Street, an old and tired office building near North Station that is just 28 percent leased and is being sold, with the new owner planning a residential conversion.
One thing that hasn’t changed is the building’s assessed value, pegged at $8.6 million. Then there’s 179 Lincoln Street near South Station, which recently sold for just $10 to Synergy Investments, who assumed the building’s $76.5 million mortgage, Universal Hub reported back in March. That, however, is far below the $155 million that the previous owner had paid for the building in 2020.
But the city has assessed its value at $86.3 million, the same as last year, records show.
One possible common denominator is that the owners of the abovementioned buildings have filed abatement requests challenging the prior year’s assessment.
That should have no impact on the assessment for the current year. However, in the view of one expert on tax assessments, it has the look of a negotiating ploy, or even the exertion of leverage, by city assessors against the owners of struggling office buildings.
“It’s startling,” the tax assessment expert noted, adding the values “are way out of line.” In fact, if Boston’s assessing department was to persist and forge ahead with these estimated values, they would likely open the city to a lawsuit.
These odd assessments are not an isolated incident. City assessing officials raised eyebrows earlier this year when they rejected hundreds of abatement requests by downtown office building owners.
In the end, they only a granted a handful of those requests, with just one from a for-profit office tower owner.
It’s pretty clear the Wu administration is doing all it can to deny abatement requests and to take a hard line on assessed values, which have the benefit of reducing any decline in city revenue.
The mayor’s press office, the Boston Planning Department and the City Assessor have not responded to calls and emails.
At some point, market reality and the legal system will catch up, possibly as it did back in the late 1970s, when a much poorer Boston was struggling with a host of problems, including a big drop in the value of older office buildings and other commercial properties. Mayor Kevin White’s administration took a hard line, ignoring the protests of building owners and insisting on effectively overassessing their value to keep the tax money rolling in.
Eventually, a fed-up office building owner named Norman Tregor took the city to court and forced Boston to cough up millions to compensate for the city’s policy of over taxing their properties.
To pay the Tregor judgement and deal with the fallout from the then newly passed Proposition 2 1/2, Boston had to borrow $80 million, the equivalent of nearly $320 million today.
“The B buildings are in far worse shape. It reminds me of the 1970s,” said Larry DiCara, a former Boston City Council president and one of the city’s top lawyers. “Inevitably, just like Mr. Tregor almost 50 years ago, they will seek relief.”
Scott Van Voorhis is a l