'Black parabolas'

“When the mink ran across the meadow in bunched

black parabolas, I thought

sine and cosine, but no —

the movement never dips

below the line.’’

— From “The Mink,’’ by Rosanna Warren (born in 1953 in Fairfield, Conn.), the daughter of the late novelist, literary critic and U.S. poet laureate Robert Penn Warren and writer Eleanor Clark. She graduated from Yale University with a degree in painting.

Mink have staged a comeback in New England in recent decades.

Route 1, aka the Boston Post Road, in downtown Fairfield in 1953, when Ms. Warren was three. Route i was the main drag or the Northeast back then, before the Interstate Highway System.

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Actually, GE's lights are still on

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric, by Thomas Gryta and Ted Mann, memorably describes how one of America’s  oldest, biggest and most celebrated companies started taking wrong turns under its charismatic (and probably over-rated) CEO Jack Welch and his successor, Jeff Immelt, and ended up much less profitable, smaller and weaker.

This is superb corporate history, with the right mix of historical context and big picture stuff and anecdotes that add spice to the tale of very smart, but sometimes very wrongheaded  and arrogant, execs making disastrous mistakes as well as, to be fair, achieving some surprising successes.  Overpriced acquisitions and mountains of debt played a big role in the burgeoning woes of the conglomerate, along with dubious creative accounting, which some have alleged verged on fraud.

It’s  a  sort of a mystery  story: How could such a huge and diversified company get into such trouble?

By the way, from all the negative news about GE in the investment community in the past couple of years you might not remember that it remains a very big company. Last year,  GE was ranked among the Fortune 500 as America’s 21st-largest firm as measured by gross revenue.

New Englanders in particular will want to read about the very human reasons that the company moved its headquarters to Boston after many years in Fairfield, Conn.

Trump serves them well

Indian Harbor Yacht Club, in Greenwich

 From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

There was a terrific article recently in The New Yorker magazine about how rich Republicans in Greenwich, Conn., once known for their moderate, modest, honest, civic-minded “Eisenhower Republican” ways, signed on as Trump supporters. For a simple, amoral reason: He promised to make these already rich people richer by cutting their taxes and slashing regulations and did so. And Trump and “Moscow Mitch” McConnell plan to offer them  even more goodies.  In short, it’s all about appeals to pure selfishness, which work very well with this crowd: Vast sums have been flooding into Trump’s campaign coffers from Greenwich plutocrats.

The author, Evan Osnos, who used to live in Greenwich himself, also noted the increasing separation of these people from their communities. Look at how so many of them in   places like Greenwich have installed  very high, menacing walls around their estates, replacing the low stone walls and picket fences that were common around mogul/CEO estates back before the rise of Baby Boomer mega-greed and wealth exhibitionism starting in the ‘80s. I  lived in Connecticut in the ‘60s and have noticed the change in Greenwich and other affluent Fairfield County towns since then.

Of course, pretty much all of us look out for Number 1 but some take that to extremes.

To read the piece, please hit this link.

Chris Powell: GE's exit from Conn. might be good for the state

MANCHESTER, Conn. Now that nearly a dozen other states are bidding for General Electric to move its headquarters out of Fairfield, Connecticut probably will lose the 800 jobs there. Merely to keep something it already has, Connecticut is far less able to pay and to justify paying GE's extortion than other states will be able to pay and justify paying GE to get something new.

Paying GE to stay would incur a financial loss for Connecticut. But a state that used cash grants and tax breaks to pay GE to relocate and promise to stick around for a while would gain jobs, personal-income and property-tax revenue from GE employees, and general commerce to offset the expense.

Connecticut might be able to justify paying GE to expand here. But GE isn't planning expansion. Rather, the corporation is upset about the "unitary tax" just enacted by the General Assembly and Gov. Dan Malloy, under which a corporation's worldwide income is subjected to state taxation. Many states have unitary taxation, but while it may be fair, Connecticut's avoidance of it had been an advantage in attracting and keeping businesses, just as the state's avoidance of an income tax was a draw until 1991.

Presumably Connecticut could mollify GE only by repealing unitary taxation or subsidizing GE in some way that in effect would reimburse the tax. But repealing the tax would require the governor and legislature to raise other taxes or cut spending, while reimbursing GE its new tax would invite all big corporations in the state to demand the same treatment even if they had to threaten to move out as GE has done.

If keeping GE induces Connecticut to repeal unitary taxation and start making policy changes to save money and start putting the public interest over the special interest, the corporation will have done the state a service. But the corporation also may do the state a service if it leaves, for then the state may start to realize that paying extortion to businesses is no substitute for ordinary good and efficient government in pursuit of the public interest.

With a little luck GE's departure from Connecticut would end state government's policy of pretending that mere political patronage is economic development.

xxx

New London's is the latest municipal government to "ban the box" -- that is, to remove from city job application forms the box asking if an applicant has a criminal record. State government already has done the same thing. It is said that the question discourages otherwise qualified applicants who are trying to rebuild their lives and that, if an applicant is considered seriously, a criminal records check will be done on him anyway.

This is politically correct but not persuasive. For the application forms with the "box" don't say that anyone with a criminal record will be disqualified automatically. Instead the forms with the "box" signify that a criminal record may be relevant to job qualifications, which is why applicants are supposedly to be subject to a criminal records check at some point before hiring.

That is, forms with the "box" tell the whole truth while forms without the "box" mislead.

Further, forms with the "box" deprive personnel departments of an excuse to forget to do criminal records checks. Forms with the "box" remind personnel departments to be conscientious.

That such reminders may be needed was demonstrated by the massacre in June at the church in Charleston, S.C. The perpetrator should have been disqualified from purchasing his guns because he recently had admitted a narcotics offense, but that admission was not properly recorded in federal, state, and local law-enforcement databases.

Since government databases can be mistaken and since personnel departments can be negligent, job applicants themselves should continue to be asked at the outset if they have criminal records. While it's politically incorrect, it's a lot safer.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.