Promote your show

"The Breakfast Room" by Edmund C. Tarbell (1862-1938). This Boston area Impressionist painter eventually moved to New Castle, N.H.

New England Diary is always happy to receive images and accompanying explanatory text from exhibitions at art galleries and museums around the region. Please send to this new address:

rwhit6@yahoo.com

Providence’s College Hill on a beautiful fall day

Results of a stroll by New England Diary on Oct. 14

Chris Powell: Government employees above the law in Conn.

Not always? WPA poster from the Great Depression.

What happens when someone asserts that the compensation of members of state and municipal government employee unions, being the biggest expense of government in Connecticut, should be determined through the ordinary democratic process and not through secret negotiations between unions and politicians or by the decisions of unelected arbiters who answer to no one?

When that happens the unions shriek: You hate working people!

What happens when an academic study concludes that the compensation of Connecticut's state and municipal government employees is far more generous than that of most states because it is determined by a system that puts the government employee unions above the law?

The political allies of those unions, like state Senate's Democratic leader, Bob Duff of Norwalk, let loose the same shriek: You hate working people!

Such a study was published the other day by the Yankee Institute for Public Policy and Duff accused it of trying to "dismantle the middle class for the oligarchy" and to create an economy "where everyone works for a minimum wage."

Of course this shrieking fails to addresses the issues being raised. It aims to prevent those issues from being addressed. But thanks to the Yankee Institute study, at least those issues now are in the spotlight.

The study, "Above the Law," by Priya Abraham Brannick of the Pennsylvania-based Commonwealth Foundation for Public Policy Alternatives and F. Vincent Vernuccio of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, in Michigan, is indisputable in its basic points:

-- Connecticut law subjects to collective bargaining more of the compensation and working conditions of state and municipal employees than most other states do.

-- Binding arbitration of state and municipal employee union contracts in Connecticut prevents elected officials from exercising much authority over the terms of government employment. Indeed, that is the very point of binding arbitration: to diminish the authority of elected officials.

-- Connecticut law even allows state and municipal employee union contracts to take precedence over state law. For example, while ordinarily the disciplinary records of government employees are public records, union contracts can nullify the public's right to know so misconduct and incompetence on the public payroll can be concealed.

Nobody should feel sorry for Connecticut's elected officials because of this. They don't want authority over the biggest costs of government. They don't want to get caught between taxpayers and the government employee unions. As employee compensation cannibalizes the government, Connecticut's elected officials want to be able to shrug and say they can't do anything about it, though this inability to control the costs of government employment is a primary driver of the state's disastrous decline.

Democratic elected officials especially don't want the government to regain control of its employment costs, because their party is dominated by the government employee unions.

But collective bargaining for government employees and binding arbitration of their union contracts should be repealed because they destroy democracy and their premise is that the only working people are those on government's payroll, that people who merely pay taxes are properly slaves.

So why do Connecticut's government employee unions hate taxpayers so?


Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn., and a frequent contributor to New England Diary.

 

Robert Whitcomb: Unfair to ban fraternities

The controversy over alleged sexual assaults and their cover-ups at the University of Virginia has refueled the seemingly endless war over the role of fraternities at colleges and universities. Many colleges, of course, have fraternities, though sometimes they go by other names, such as Harvard’s Final Clubs and Princeton’s Eating Clubs.

Are things worse these days, with students more out of control? Or is there more extensive and intensive reporting of outrages? Or both? How does behavior in dorms compare with that in fraternity houses?

The news media and the public love stories about bad behavior at colleges, with “Animal House,” the over-the-top movie filmed at the University of Oregon and inspired by the purported hijinks at Alpha Delta Phi at Dartmouth in the early ’60s, the sort of aesthetic quintessence of this. That many of these stories turn out to be apocryphal tends to be forgotten as the news media and the citizenry move on to the next sensation.

In any case, trying to ban college fraternities is unfair and unwise. Smaller independent social units not controlled by a large bureaucracy serve as environments in which to develop supportive relationships. And most fraternities are safe organizations in which many people develop lifelong friendships. The few bad ones skew the numbers.

As Will Kamin, president of Chi Psi at Amherst College, told The New York Times, “For a lot of these guys, this [his fraternity] is the only place where they can talk openly about their lives and form strong bonds,” and he told CNN that membership “has taught guys about what it means to be a man and a good man at that.”

I confess to having been in a fraternity and, while I’m not a particularly outgoing person, found it to be an edifying experience, surrounded by young people who were, all in all, gentlemen. The majority have gone on to have productive and highly civilized lives. They were pretty nice people back then.

Many fraternities also perform civic good works such as raising money for charities (including for the colleges themselves). Dorm living is too amorphous to elicit much of such commitment. As Alexis de Tocqueville noted, the variety of social and civic organizations in America is one of our great strengths.

Why punish all fraternities for the actions of a few of their members?

There is also the little matter of freedom of association, which a diverse democracy must protect. I suppose that colleges have the right to ban their students from membership in certain groups as a condition of being registered students, but at the risk of undermining the “diversity’’ that leaders of higher education always assert that they favor. (Of course, diversity in colleges doesn’t always include diversity of opinion.)

Individual fraternities vary about as widely as humans do. As with any organization, it depends on who is in them, particularly their leaders. And the prevention of bad behavior depends on the willingness of college administrations as well as fraternity and sorority leaders to report possible offenses to the police and cooperate with outside authorities in criminal cases. But all too often, crimes by students at colleges are treated as “internal matters.”

Indeed, over recent decades, many college and university administrations have acted to shield students from outside law enforcement. What college administrations should have been doing is to immediately call the police (not the campus cops) if they think that a crime has been committed. Such a stance will, over time, make students much less likely to commit them. Perpetrators must be made to realize that they will be punished.

Any institution with large numbers of young people is particularly susceptible to excessive drinking and sexual assault. The Nov. 30 New York Times article, “In the Company of Men: Why is it so hard to prosecute sexual assaults in the military?” detailed the very serious problems of inadequate reporting and prosecution of sexual assaults in the U.S. military. Some of the cases sound similar to recent fraternity incidents. As in other institutions where these problems persist, vigilant reporting and tough prosecution are essential to achieve long-term improvement.

College administrations and faculty should, of course, lecture students on the perils of heavy drinking, sexual assault and so on. Most students, after all, are late adolescents and are presumably in college to learn about how to be responsible adults, and not just from academic courses. But shielding criminal students from the police goes too far. A crime is a crime, whether in the military, in a dorm, in an on-or-off-campus fraternity or anywhere else.

Robert Whitcomb oversees New England Diary.

Robert Whitcomb: Ignore 'inverson'; marina people; Tughill Plateau

Corporate “inversion’’ involves a previously U.S.-based company merging with a foreign one, reincorporating abroad and, by so doing, taking advantage of foreign corporate income-tax rates generally lower than ours. Many public companies are not paying anywhere near the 35 percent federal corporate income-tax rate because of assorted tax breaks; some companies pay no income tax because of loopholes. Still, all in all, our corporate rate is not competitive with our major foreign competitors’.

Some have called companies using inversion “unpatriotic.’’ I disagree. The senior executives and members of the boards of directors making these decisions are legally maximizing their and the company’s wealth in a partly capitalist system that, for all its faults, fuels innovation and prosperity for the entire country — over the long haul. Most individual taxpayers also try to optimize their tax situation.

And, as I have long argued, the corporate income tax is stupid, except for the lobbyists it enriches. It encourages maneuvers such as inversions. It sends jobs abroad. It supports a lobbying system in Washington that spawns corruption and makes the world’s most complicated tax system ever more complex and inefficient as corporations seek tax breaks from elected officials.

Anyway, in the end companies’ customers, employees and shareholders pay the corporate income tax. Companies just pass along the cost.

We need to end the corporate tax and enact a value-added (consumption-based) tax. We should also put personal earned income and capital gains on a more equal tax basis and maintain substantial estate taxes. The aim should be to help streamline and detoxify our tax system, encourage economic growth and at least mildly mitigate the growth of a permanent plutocracy based on inheritance.

* * *

Automation and information technology are now rapidly wiping out well-paying jobs. They’ve long been wiping out low-paying ones. Indeed, those automatic store checkout machines are starting to make inroads into one of the last few fallbacks for those with only a high-school education.

The line is that somehow the economy, blessed by ever-increasing productivity, will create a whole new wave of well-paying jobs to replace the ones killed. We’re still waiting.

Even upper-middle-class jobs are in peril. Consider lawyers, much of whose routine work can be done through computers and low-paid (by our standards) people, in, say, India. And medical equipment, nurse practitioners and ever-better prescription drugs will undermine physicians’ affluence.

Then there’s finance. Many college undergraduates, especially at elite institutions, career plan as if Wall Street were the only sure way to fortune. But they may be guessing wrong. Just because finance was the big thing in the last three decades doesn’t mean that it will be in the next 20. Many young people could find their Wall Street jobs as redundant as many jobs in manufacturing became in the ’70s. We tend to fight the last war.

Some futurists suggest plausibly that such service jobs as plumbers, electricians, gardeners and maids, along with home health-care and social workers and other counselors, may have the best chance of survival. In some fields, even the middle class will still demand personal service.

To reduce social disorder, will the government eventually establish a minimum income for those millions who truly can’t find work?

* * *

I just visited the gorgeous Thousand Islands, on the St. Lawrence River. We cruised for parts of two days in our host’s powerboat, which he keeps in a roofed marina in Clayton, N.Y., another one of those small Northeast towns whose downtowns seem to be regaining a bit of their old energy as big-box stores lose some allure to an aging population.

The vast majority of boats remained in their slips, rather than being taken out on the river, on a beautiful summer weekend. This can be explained in part by fuel costs but more, I think, by the marina’s social role. Most of these boat owners, whose age generally ranges from 50 to 80, primarily see the marina as their summer colony, with the boats (most with sleeping space for from two to eight people) as their summer bungalows.

During the short North Country season, they relentlessly schmooze with their neighbors and derive some meaning from endless boat maintenance. They live in a cozy waterborne village. What most of these people would not have liked back home — living cheek-by-jowl — they thrive in for a few weeks every summer.

* * *

We drove home through upstate New York’s Tughill Plateau, which has hundreds of wind turbines. The white wind turbines and the vivid green of the countryside, with its view of the Adirondacks, create a spectacular, if a bit eerie, landscape. Most of the farms are far better kept up than I remembered from years before — because of the fees paid to them by the utilities. A very green cash crop and no cash paid to the Mideast!

Robert Whitcomb (rwhitcomb51@gmail.com) oversees New England Diary. He is also a senior adviser and partner at Cambridge Management Group (www.cmg625.com), a health-care consultancy,  a former finance editor of the International Herald Tribune, a former editor at The Wall Street Journal, a former  editorial-page editor and vice president at The Providence Journal and  currently a Fellow of the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy.

Philip K. Howard: Infrastructure repairs drown in regulatory molasses

  To our readers: This column also ran in a pre-renovation version of  New England Diary a few weeks ago. As we seek to import the pre-renovation archives, we will rerun particularly important files, such as  Philip Howard's piece here.

-- Robert Whitcomb

By PHILIP K. HOWARD

NEW YORK

President Obama went on the stump this summer to promote his "Fix It First" initiative, calling for public appropriations to shore up America's fraying infrastructure. But funding is not the challenge. The main reason crumbling roads, decrepit bridges, antiquated power lines, leaky water mains and muddy harbors don't get fixed is interminable regulatory review.

Infrastructure approvals can take upward of a decade or longer, according to the Regional Plan Association. The environmental review statement for dredging the Savannah River took 14 years to complete. Even projects with little or no environmental impact can take years.

Raising the roadway of the Bayonne Bridge at the mouth of the Port of Newark, for example, requires no new foundations or right of way, and would not require approvals at all except that it spans navigable water. Raising the roadway would allow a new generation of efficient large ships into the port. But the project is now approaching its fifth year of legal process, bogged down in environmental litigation.

Mr. Obama also pitched infrastructure improvements in 2009 while he was promoting his $830 billion stimulus. The bill passed but nothing much happened because, as the administration learned, there is almost no such thing as a "shovel-ready project." So the stimulus money was largely diverted to shoring up state budgets.

Building new infrastructure would enhance U.S. global competitiveness, improve our environmental footprint and, according to McKinsey studies, generate almost two million jobs. But it is impossible to modernize America's physical infrastructure until we modernize our legal infrastructure. Regulatory review is supposed to serve a free society, not paralyze it.

Other developed countries have found a way. Canada requires full environmental review, with state and local input, but it has recently put a maximum of two years on major projects. Germany allocates decision-making authority to a particular state or federal agency: Getting approval for a large electrical platform in the North Sea, built this year, took 20 months; approval for the City Tunnel in Leipzig, scheduled to open next year, took 18 months. Neither country waits for years for a final decision to emerge out of endless red tape.

In America, by contrast, official responsibility is a kind of free-for-all among multiple federal, state and local agencies, with courts called upon to sort it out after everyone else has dropped of exhaustion. The effect is not just delay, but decisions skewed toward the squeaky wheels instead of the common good. This is not how democracy is supposed to work.

America is missing the key element of regulatory finality: No one is in charge of deciding when there has been enough review. Avoiding endless process requires changing the regulatory structure in two ways:

Environmental review today is done by a "lead agency"—such as the Coast Guard in the case of the Bayonne Bridge—that is usually a proponent of a project, and therefore not to be trusted to draw the line. Because it is under legal scrutiny and pressure to prove it took a "hard look," the lead agency's approach has mutated into a process of no pebble left unturned, followed by lawsuits that flyspeck documents that are often thousands of pages long.

What's needed is an independent agency to decide how much environmental review is sufficient. An alteration project like the Bayonne Bridge should probably have an environmental review of a few dozen pages and not, as in that case, more than 5,000 pages. If there were an independent agency with the power to say when enough is enough, then there would be a deliberate decision, not a multiyear ooze of irrelevant facts. Its decision on the scope of review can still be legally challenged as not complying with the basic principles of environmental law. But the challenge should come after, say, one year of review, not 10.

It is also important to change the Balkanized approvals process for other regulations and licenses. These approvals are now spread among federal, state and local agencies like a parody of bureaucracy, with little coordination and frequent duplication of environmental and other requirements. The Cape Wind project off the coast of Massachusetts, now in its 12th year of scrutiny, required review by 17 different agencies. The Gateway West power line, to carry electricity from Wyoming wind farms to the Pacific Northwest, requires the approval of each county in Idaho that the line will traverse. The approval process, begun in 2007, is expected to be complete by 2015. This is paralysis by federalism.

The solution is to create what other countries call "one-stop approvals."  Giving one agency the authority to cut through the knot of multiple agencies (including those at state and local levels) will dramatically accelerate approvals.

This is how "greener" countries in Europe make decisions. In Germany, local projects are decided by a local agency (even if there's a national element), and national projects by a national agency (even though there are local concerns). One-stop approval is already in place in the U.S. New interstate gas pipelines are under the exclusive jurisdiction of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Special interests—especially groups that like the power of being able to stop anything—will foster fears of officials abusing the public trust. Giving people responsibility does not require trust, however. I don't trust anyone. But I can live with a system of democratic responsibility and judicial oversight. What our country can't live with is spinning our wheels in perpetual review. America needs to get moving again.

Philip K. Howard, a lawyer, is chairman of the nonpartisan reform group Common Good. His new book, "The Rule of Nobody," will be published in April by W.W. Norton. He is also the author of, among other works, "The Death of Common Sense''.

The way he wanted life to look

Norman Rockwell (1894-1978), “The Bridge Game,” 1948, oil on canvas, published by Saturday Evening Post, May 15, 1948 cover Image Courtesy of National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI., cover image © SEPS: www.curtispublishing.com.

There’s another picture below.(Rerunning this posting from the pre-renovation version of New England Diary a few weeks ago.)

The New York Times seems to be on a Norman Rockwell kick, with a long review of a new book out about him and a travel piece about Arlington, Vt., where he lived for a long time.

That was before he moved to Stockbridge, Mass, in the Berkshires, to, among other things, be closer to Austen Riggs, the mental hospital identified with many celebrity patients.

As Deborah Solomon (who also wrote the travel story) writes in “American Mirror: The Art and Life of Norman Rockwell,” his life was far more complex and darker than most of his beautiful art. That he was a troubled man (who ain’t?) is not news, but Ms. Solomon puts it together very well indeed.

He was apparently conflicted about homosexual longings, had three troubled marriages and was a lifelong hypochondriac. The Thoreau line about “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” comes to mind. Still, he obviously found much comfort and joy in his studio. Do too many writers these days make too much of sexual conflicts? Maybe a highly creative person’s biggest trauma is the difficulty of finding meaning in a seemingly chaotic world, a torturous search for ultimate meaning.

Some of this reminds me of the strange story of Robert Frost, whose public image as a sort of quaint, folksy, friendly rural poet was so false. In fact, Frost, a kind of Modernist, used his New England settings to explore existential quandaries; and he could be a very nasty man.

Many of his poems were dark, dark, dark. Take a look at his poem design “Design”.

But, in part because his folksy image got him many lucrative lecture gigs, he played along with it, to a point (while winking).

But then, behind almost family’s door is conflict and mental illness of varying seriousness. In some way, maybe imaginative repression and diversion, Rockwell got great popular art done despite, or because of, his problems, through vast technical skill, knowledge of other masters’ work and a rich visual imagination.

The Rockwell renaissance also reminds me of how much many of us miss the golden age of magazines, such as The Saturday Evening Post, for which Rockwell did so much work. The weekly arrival of pubs such as The Post and Life magazine was a joy that I, anyway, have never found with TV, the Internet and newspapers (with the possible exception of the beautiful old New York Herald Tribune).

That is probably ungrateful, since newspapers paid for most of my upkeep for almost 44 years.

Speaking of the past, I was pleasantly surprised to see that John Wilmerding, my art-history professor of almost a half century ago at Dartmouth, was the reviewer of Ms. Solomon’s fine new book. Mr, Wilmerding, an heir to great Havemeyer sugar fortune in New York, also has one of America’s greatest collections of American art, much of which he is giving away.

The best places to see Rockwell work are the National Museum of American Illustration, in Newport, and, the Norman Rockwell Museum, in Stockbridge.

Norman Rockwell (1894-1978), ”Volunteer Fireman,” 1931, oil on canvas, published by Saturday Evening Post, March 28, 1931 cover image Courtesy of National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI. Saturday Evening Post cover image © SEPS: www.curtispublishing.com

Under construction!

To New England Diary followers. The site is being expanded and improved. The changes will be completed within a couple of days and archived material will reappear. Thank you for your patience.