David Warsh: Jury-rigged parts of ACA might succeed
BOSTON
For all the political controversy surrounding the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, the remarkable thing is how few persons are affected by it. The first annual period of open enrollment ended last week; 7.1 million persons have signed up.
Never mind the political bickering about the composition of the group – it is inside-baseball stuff, at least until plans begin setting their 2015 rates, early next year. Never mind the more interesting question of why the implementation of the program was so badly botched. (Why are governments, at least in the U.s, so generally bad at buying information technology?)
Even at its flood, expectations are that as few as 25 million previously uninsured persons will take advantage of the act.
In contrast, more than 150 million Americans are covered by insurance purchased by employers. Another 49 million persons are enrolled in Medicare, because they are 65 and older.
In other words, the ACA controversy is about bringing the poor and the relatively powerless into the health-care system, partly out of considerations of fairness, partly in hopes of reducing the overall cost.
So why the ruckus? Republicans have feared from the beginning that the measure is a Trojan Horse, concealing plans for a single-payer system run by the federal government. And indeed, many early supporters of the Obama administration’s health care restructuring initiative were hoping for just that.
For instance, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote last week that the ACA is “a Rube Goldberg device, a complicated way to do something inherently simple.” To extend Medicare-style insurance to the uninsured, he said, “the government could have simply sent a letter saying ‘Congratulations, you’re covered.’”
Instead, he noted, the ACA requires individuals and companies to go online or make a phone call and then make a complicated choice among options that depend on the presence or absence of subsidies. A lot of things could go wrong along the way, Krugman said.
More interesting to me is the camel’s nose that is the individual mandate. There is a big difference between giving citizens health care as a right and requiring them to buy it as a responsibility – and then subsidizing those who cannot afford the most basic plans.
The individual mandate was, you’ll remember, a major issue in the Democratic primaries in 2008. It had been the basis of Gov. Mitt Romney’s successful health-care reform in Massachusetts, three years earlier. In 2008 it was then- Sen. Hillary Clinton who proposed enacting an individual mandate, and then-Sen. Barack Obama who resisted the idea – until he won the nomination. Then he hired her advisers and took over her position.
Two years later, in 2010, the Democratic majorities in Congress passed the ACA. Citizens would have to show that they were insured, by their employer or by the government, or go to the exchanges to insure themselves.
The measure was eventually structured without a “public option” that would have allowed purchasers to simply buy into Medicare – a sop to the large and powerful private insurance companies that have grown up since World War II. It was then that Congress, reluctant to permit manufacturing companies to raise wages carefully regulated under wartime controls, instead doled out tax breaks to firms that offered workers health insurance.
Over the next 60 years, workers grew accustomed to generous company-sponsored health plans that seemed to cost them little, even though cash wages clearly were reduced somewhat as a result. And corporate benefit offices grew expert at negotiating with insurance companies, doctors and hospitals to keep costs down.
Here’s where the healt- care exchanges created by the ACA come in. From the beginning, there’s been a problem with the name. Massachusetts called its exchange “the Connector” (its organization, but not the name, became the model for the ACA). Jon Kingsdale, a high-level consultant who was its founding director, now prefers to call exchanges “marketplaces.”
An insurance exchange is “a virtual insurance store,” Kingsdale wrote in January in The New England Journal of Medicine. Like any retailer it must decide which products (qualified health plans) to offer, which suppliers (insurance carriers) to work with, how to market its wares, and how to help customers compare options and select a product.” It must seek to standardize plans so that they may be realistically compared, strive to keep administrative costs low, encourage competition, and endeavor to improve medical care. A tall order, considering the relatively small numbers of persons who will obtain their insurance through exchanges – at least at first.
But employers, no longer the powerful oligopolistic producers that they once were, have begun turning to private exchanges to relieve themselves of the expense of negotiating employee health plans – initially for their retirees. IBM Corp., DuPont Co. and Time Warner Inc. were among those that last year turned to a Utah-based Medicare supplemental coverage exchange to administer benefit plans for retired workers.
Through such private-public collaborations, state exchanges in time may garner as much power to negotiate with insurance carriers, hospitals and physicians as corporate benefit offices once enjoyed. Corporate health care plans, already shrinking, may eventually become much rarer – just as defined-benefit pension plan gave way to defined-contribution plans and 401(k) accounts in the 1990s.
At that point, individual decision-making under the individual mandate may become a potent force in the market place, just as it is in the automobile-insurance market. I have never covered the immensely complicated health-care industry. But I know enough economics to think that locating the decision about which insurance to purchase closer to the ultimate consumer could ultimately be a good thing. Bronze? Silver? Gold? Platinum? Faced with an overall budget constraint, persons ordinarily can be counted on to choose what’s best for them. The individual mandate and private-public marketplaces that now seem jury-rigged may in the end turn out to be the most important parts of the mechanism.
David Warsh is principal of www.economicprincipals.com, an economic historian and long-time financial journalist.
Chris Powell: Groucho was right about 'student athletes'
By CHRIS POWELL MANCHESTER, Conn. Having led the University of Connecticut men's basketball team to an improbable national championship this week, point guard Shabazz Napier was defiant. "This is what happens when you ban us," Napier growled, referring to the National Collegiate Athletic Association's refusal to let the team participate in last year's tournament because of academic deficiencies. It's great for UConn fans that Napier and the other players who stayed with the team may have taken it personally, but they had not been the target of the ban; the university itself had been, for taking advantage of NCAA standards that were weak to begin with. Indeed, the academics of the two major college sports -- basketball and football -- are increasingly "academic" themselves. The whole starting lineup of the team the UConn men defeated for the championship, the University of Kentucky Wildcats, is expected to quit school shortly to enter the National Basketball Association draft, and all five are mere freshmen. Many of the best college basketball and football players give interviews signifying that they are challenged to assemble a simple grammatical sentence. They're not in college for the book learning but to earn a chance to get recruited for the professional leagues. Even the most NCAA-compliant colleges structure the curriculums of their top athletes to go easy on their minds and still surround them with tutors. For many of those who actually complete four years, the most that can be expected is a degree in sociology. This doesn't mean that the college players don't work. Most may work far harder than most other students. It's just not academic work but rather physical and character work resulting from enormous discipline -- and for many it may prove more valuable than anything they could have learned in class. That may be the lesson of the UConn men's basketball program under Coach Jim Calhoun and now Kevin Ollie. Few coaches graduated more players to professional and personal success than Calhoun did, whether or not they left UConn with a degree. Are college athletes being cheated -- cheated out of education or the money they help their colleges earn? If they are cheated out of education, it is a choice they made before they got to college, for which they bear responsibility. If sports beckon them too much, it is a mistake originating at home and in high school. As for being cheated out of money, there now is talk of unionizing college athletes as if they were college employees. This will bump up against the NCAA's tight restrictions on how players can be compensated -- restrictions that increasingly seem meant not to protect players against the taint and temptations of professionalization but rather to reserve all sports revenue for NCAA-member colleges themselves. For the colleges that are most successful in the most lucrative sports, the concept of the student-athlete is increasingly a myth. Maybe it gives the public some assurance about ideals in higher education, but no more so than it serves higher education's economic objectives. So why bother trying to sustain the myth? Why not acknowledge that college basketball and football are the minor leagues for the pros and let young men and women play in them without regard to their academic standing -- even without being students? An age restriction on players might accomplish as much as the pretense of academic restrictions. That pretense is getting old. It was old in 1932 when Groucho Marx portrayed a college president in "Horse Feathers" and scolded the resentful faculty: "This college is a failure. The trouble is we're neglecting football for education." If the alternative to football and basketball is going to remain mere sociology, Groucho was right. Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.
Spring flowers and money
"I Dreamt I Saw a Clown Dancing Over My Grave'' (brown photogram and monotype), by CHARLOTTE KAPLAN, at Brickbottom Gallery, Somerville in Brickbottom Artists Association Members' Spring Exhibition.
April 4, 2014
Gray and damp but definitely spring. I even saw some daffodils on a south-facing slope and some tufts of green grass encouraged by the warmth from the sidewalk next to it. Soon the pollen will have us wheezing.
New England is beautiful but can be so difficult to walk in during winter. As Bill Bryson, who moved from Hanover, N.H., back to England, notes that the latter's weather can be dreary but at least you can easily walk outside on most days. What a luxury to be able to stroll around outside just wearing a sweater (and pants, of course). And open sidewalks!
Now I see all the things that must be done in the yard -- last fall's brown, wet leaves to be raked up, the compost pile attended to, and so on. We're too poor to hire yard-work companies employing illegal aliens to do the work (or to get house cleaners to come in vacuum our decrepit house). We do have to hire people, at great expense, every two or three years to come in and attend to the basement after a heavy rainstorm. These deluges seem to be becoming more frequent.
***
I think people are too excited about the Supreme Court's McCutcheon ruling this week opening up Washington to yet more campaign cash. For one thing, money will always flow around campaign-finance-law barriers, as water flows around rocks in a creek.
For another, this law makes it a tad easier for the political parties to raise money. That might mean that individual rich donors seeking to further enrich and empower themselves and their families yea unto generations might have relatively less power compared to the parties. And political parties, of necessity, must be coalitions and thus less extreme than the increasingly arrogant individual donors.
Toughen transparency laws! It's far too easy to hide contributions and so we often don't know who might be influencing our politicians. There should be tough penalties under the criminal code to discourage such hiding.
Go to a flat tax! Congress's propensity for endless complications of the tax code causes campaign-finance and other corruption as the powerful seek to manipulate and complicate it even more to their own benefit.
Finally, the biggest problem of all is civic sloth. The majority of people who could vote do not. Nor do they make the effort to educate themselves about politicians and policies, including which rich folks are buying influence, be it Wall Street bankers for the Democrats or coal executives for the Republicans. A good example is the Affordable Care Act. A large percentage of the population were ignorant of its most basic elements, especially the health-insurance exchanges, right up to this week, although it has been reported about daily since 2010 --- and intimately affects almost everyone.
By not rousing themselves for 20 minutes to vote they have left money and power (but I repeat myself!) to people with the energy to use it to increase their money and power even more. The latter all vote and can do things to get many others to vote in the oligarchs' interest.
xxx
via rwhitcomb51@gmail.com
There's a book of journal entries by Alan H. Olmstead from the '70s called Threshold: The First Days of Retirement, which I think reviews eloquently the confusions, joys and sadnesses (including the financial woes) of life after you leave your main job. One of the predictable but well written observations is that whatever one did over the decades of a "regular job'' had virtually no effect on the world. The pleasure of the job has to be just the act of doing it.
Another post-retirement rule is that you should never drop by your old workplace after retirement. To do so would be just another irritating distraction for the people still there, who are even more understaffed than when you left.
xxx
For a suspenseful, strange and brilliant conversation about life, death and religion, read Paul F.M. Zahl's latest book PZ's Panopticon: An Off-the-Wall Guide to World Religion.
Moment of truth for the West
At the Museum of Russian Icons, in Clinton, Mass., in the show "The Tsars' Cabinet,'' which highlights 200 years of decorative arts under the Romanov dynasty. Russian oligarchs around Vladimir Putin also love to collect these items.
(Respond via rwhitcomb51@gmail.com)
In September 1938, at the Munich Conference, Adolf Hitler promised French and British leaders, who felt compelled to appease him, that Czechoslovakia’s mostly German-speaking Sudetenland region would be ”my last territorial demand in Europe.’’ Within a few months, of course, the Nazis occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia and then invaded Poland.
Vladimir Putin is a power-mad political mobster of extreme cynicism and considerable paranoia, albeit not the world-historical sociopath that Hitler was. I have little doubt that the Russian dictator plans to try to seize more land in eastern Europe, perhaps part of Moldova and all of Ukraine and not just the eastern part, where, he and his associates like to say, they might need to “rescue’’ Russian speakers from virtually nonexistent “mistreatment’’. In the same way, Hitler often cited the need to “rescue’’ German speakers who lived in countries that Hitler wanted to seize in the pursuit of his “Thousand Year Reich’’.
Putin, like Hitler, seems obsessed with “encirclement’’ by perceived foes. Of course, most people in neighboring nations, who see close-up what goes on in Putin’s kleptocratic police state, would certainly not want to be absorbed by it. Meanwhile, why don’t more journalists and others note that Russia is far and away the largest country by square mileage. Without the powerful vector of Russian imperialism (which includes Soviet imperialism), it might seem passing strange that Russia would want/need to get even bigger.
But for a thug, no power or money or acreage is enough. Thus former KGB official Putin called the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th Century.’’ He’s talking about a regime that murdered tens of millions of people and that for a couple of years was a Nazi ally.
But a regime as nasty as Putin’s is not exactly good for business investment, and so Russia, for all its size, remains remarkably weak, if aggressive. Of course, the Chinese regime is also corrupt and brutal, but China has an entrepreneurial and disciplined people who have made the country an economic powerhouse anyway. The Russians, burdened by bad government and the associated alcoholism, despair and fatalism, and thus without a vibrant, diversified entrepreneurial culture, don’t have it. Without copious supplies of oil and gas, they would hardly have an economy at all.
Those fossil fuels give Russia a lot of power to get temporizing Europeans to tolerate Russian imperialism. It’s yet another reason to move faster to home-grown renewable energy – and gas exports from the U.S. What will it take to get the Germans, etc., to accept some short-term pain in return for the long-term security that would come from the demise of Putin’s dictatorship? That short-term European pain could include a cutoff of Russian gas supplies in response to sanctions on the Putin regime.
Many of Putin’s cronies and maybe the dictator himself have Riviera real estate, bank accounts, money-laundering operations and other assets in the West. Indeed, something that the West has going for it now that it didn’t have in Soviet days is that the Russian regime and the former Soviet functionaries who stole state assets under the drunken Boris Yeltsin have so much property abroad. And Russian oligarchs like to travel in and indeed live in the West. They should be squeezed very hard.
The Russians have far more to fear from tough Western sanctions than the West has to fear from the Putin regime. The question is whether the West has gone too soft and complacent to act firmly.
The sanctions by the Obama administration to squeeze some of Putin’s fellow mobsters are a start but far from enough. And the Europeans have not yet shown much backbone. Rhetoric is cheap. Western security demands that everything possible be done to weaken Putin’s regime. Now.
When George W. Bush did little when the Russians invaded tiny Georgia, a democracy, and stole some of its land, it emboldened Putin, who, like most bullies, is quick to sense weakness. He probably laughed his cynical laugh when Bush said early in his presidency that he had “looked into his {Putin’s} soul’’ and saw a man he could trust.
NATO must step up its military assistance to members Poland and the Baltic Republics and provide arms, air-defense technology, military intelligence and other defensive military support to Ukraine to make Putin think twice before marching on Kiev.
In 1956, President Eisenhower did virtually nothing when the Russians moved in to quash the Hungarian Revolution, killing tens of thousands of people. In 1968, President Johnson did nothing when the Russians quashed Czech attempts to wrest themselves from Soviet/Russian dictatorship. In 2008 President G.W. Bush did virtually nothing when the Russians invaded Georgia and stole some of that democracy's land. But these days, we do have potent weapons to discourage further Russian expansionism. But they require our will and patience.
Meanwhile, many Ukrainian leaders must profoundly regret that their nation gave up its nuclear arms in 1994 in return for security guarantees from the U.S., Britain and Russia. The hope then was that Russia would not go back to its traditional oriental despotism. One of Russia’s fellow tyrannies, Iran, which is hurrying to make nuclear bombs, will take a lesson from the Ukrainian crisis.
Robert Whitcomb (rwhitcomb51@gmail.com) is a former editor of these pages and a Providence-based editor and writer. He runs the www.newenglanddiary.com site. He is a former editor at the International Herald Tribune and The Wall Street Journal.
Harbor in waiting
"A Saturday in March: Chatham, Cape Cod, Massachusetts,'' by BOBBY BAKER (copyright Bobby Baker Photography).
You must like gray and brown in these weeks just before the spring greening.
Tough flowers; facing Putin's fascist mobocracy
March 22, 2014 rwhitcomb51@gmail.com
The ground is mostly open, if brown, except for some old clumps of dirty snow. Last year's oak leaves crinkle in the big old ugly trees, waiting to be pushed out by the new crop. Anyway, if we get two days of 60 degrees, the greenery on the ground will explode. The stuff higher up will take longer, of course.
It never ceases to amaze me that even with it below freezing at night, the green shoots of bulb flowers keep pushing up. On a south-facing slope two weeks ago, I saw crocuses starting to bloom even though it had been 10 above a couple of nights before.
The older I get, the more I like walking in the very early morning, not long after dawn. It's so quiet and unpeopled that the direction of one's life and even the world in general suddenly becomes clearer.
I think about geo-politics, and these days about how the Cold War never really went away (not that I thought it did) -- and that some countries, such as Russia, are run by gangsters who make plans with the assumption that nations that should be their forthright foes will put off a strong response to the gangsters with the always doomed hope that they can be satisfied. For gangster leaders, no quantity of power and money is ever enough.
More attention should have been paid to Putin's statement a few years back that the collapse of the Soviet Union "was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th Century.'' The Soviet Union was responsible for killing tens of millions of people. But then, there's little indication that former KGB man Putin has anything against killing, whatever the retention of power requires.
With Putin's promises not to invade more countries, I think of Hitler's vow at Munich in September 1938, as the British and French were giving him Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland -- "This is my last territorial demand in Europe.'' He marched into the rest of Czechoslovakia a few months later and invaded Poland in September 1939.
Of course, as with Putin "rescuing Russians'' who didn't previously seem to need rescuing by the mobster Russian regime, Hitler had to "rescue'' the German speakers in the Sudetenland and put them under the "protection'' of his psychopathic regime. Putin is eyeing the rest of the Ukraine and the Baltic Republics for similar rescues.
Because of his vast narcissism, cynicism and power drive, Eastern Europe has much cause to be worried unless the soft European Union shows some backbone. But there is one thing that the current Kremlin has much more to fear from than the Soviet regime did. The Russian government and the billionaire oligarchs (but I repeat myself!) have far more investments in the West than the Soviets had. And despite the oligarchs' claims of being Russian (or at least Putin) patriots (claims necessary to avoid being brought down, or even dumped in the river, by Putin's boys) they'd much rather have their money in the vibrant West than under the current cold Russian fascist dictatorship where policies are set by the whim of Putin and his associates. Russian businessmen and pols (and they are often the same thing) can be squeezed hard if the West has the will to do so.
I also think that the Russian aggression should help pull European heads out of the sand on renewable energy. The Europeans import far too much gas and oil from Russia, which is so corrupt and inefficient, and so lacking in the rule of law, that extractive industry comprises most of the profits in its economy. It is less and less an attractive place to do business. Loyalty to Putin, not creativity, is what counts.
So the more Western and Central European renewable energy the weaker the mobsters in Moscow.
In his brown study
"Under the Chandelier'' (gouache on paper), by KARL ZERBE, at the Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham, Mass.
Just before the greening
"Plum Island" (acrylic on panel), by CARA GONIER, at Alpers Fine Art, Andover, Mass.
Those overrated old mills; defending fraternities
Some can be renovated for artists’ lofts and small businesses and their owners can make a profit — often with special tax breaks. The mass of taxpayers must make up the lost tax revenue. And some owners are big tax deadbeats. Consider the owners of Hope Artiste Village, in Pawtucket, who owe the city $124,690 for the current tax year, or those of The Thread Factory, on the Pawtucket-Central Falls line, who owe Pawtucket $366,306 and Central Falls $410,000. There may be similar examples around the state.
It is hard to quantify how much Rhode Island has gained or lost from trying to preserve old mills because people think that they’re quaint. Many can never be retrofitted to make a fair (without tax breaks) profit. Preservationists (not a few of whom are financially secure and don’t have to worry too much about finding a job in the sluggish Rhode Island economy) fiercely fight to save as many of these mills as possible, once built for economically logical reasons that disappeared decades ago. Indeed, the Ocean State has not exactly become a boom town during all these years of trying to keep old factory buildings that don’t make anything anymore except the occasional arsonist.
Then there’s that Art Deco tower the Industrial Bank Building, which, because of its stepped-back structure and location in not exactly thriving Providence, has little chance of being a full-scale office building again. Maybe it would work for residential — but again with tax breaks to be paid for by people not benefiting from its redevelopment.
A rather similar stepped-back famous Art Deco skyscraper is the gold-roofed United Shoe Machinery Corporation Building, at 140 Federal St. in downtown Boston, which for many years was New England’s tallest building. It had been slated for demolition in 1981, after “Shoe,” as the once huge company was long called, disappeared. But Boston was/is a major financial center. The quantity of local money and tax breaks made retrofitting it attractive, and the building is now filled with Class A offices.
Providence doesn’t have that critical mass. Other than nostalgia, there’s little to justify taxing the public to maintain the now remarkably inefficient “Superman Building.” Anyway, Providence had its heyday before it was built and could have another after it’s gone. And even Chartres Cathedral will one day disappear. As Ira Gershwin wrote, “In time the Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble ... ”
The South Bronx, the famously poor and crime-ridden section of New York given up for lost 30-40 years ago, has enjoyed a revival in part because so many of the old buildings were torn down (often after arson) and new buildings put up in the newly available acreage. Perhaps Rhode Island should move away from its love affair with old factories that do nothing (or worse) for the macro-economy. New buildings can be beautiful too. Are old mills over-rated?
***
The cover story in this month’s Atlantic is titled “The Fraternity Problem: It’s Worse Than You Think.” The article, surprisingly, spends a lot of ink on a nasty fraternity at very liberal/PC/“Little Ivy” Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Conn., where various outrages involving booze, sexual assault and so on have taken place. (Harvard also has fraternities, called “Final Clubs,” where, as a guest, I have witnessed grotesque behavior fueled by alcohol and other drugs.)
Busybodies and other social engineers cry out for closing all fraternities, though legally that would be impossible.
Speaking as a past member of a fraternity, I object. At most of these clubs, while drinking goes on sometimes, as it does at many social organizations, activities are much tamer than the “Animal House” cliché. And they play the healthy role of providing a closer sense of community than can the wider and anomie-ridden college or university community. Indeed, fraternities are frequently the venue for the start of lifelong friendships. Many college administrations should monitor these organizations with more rigor and call in the police (the town cops, not the campus cops) when necessary, of course, but, still, fraternities all in all do more good than harm. And without a modicum of freedom of association, society would be very dreary indeed.
I recently got a note from a group that was in the fraternity house I was in in the late 1960s. They’re planning a reunion for next October. As I saw the names, the years peeled back. Dozens are coming, out of (mostly lapsed) friendship and even morbid curiosity.
Robert Whitcomb (rwhitcomb51@gmail.com), a former editorial-page editor of The Providence Journal and a former finance editor of the International Herald Tribune, is a Providence-based writer and editor and a director of Cambridge Management Group (www.cmg625.com)., a health-care-industry consultancy.
Our polarities with other animals
"Nothin for You Here" (acrylic on canvas), by JANE O'HARA, in the "Beasts of Burden'' sh0w at Harvard Allston Educational Portal through May 5.
Artscope reports: "Both the individual and collaborative efforts within the exhibition speak to the polarities of the human-{other}animal relationship, covering every length of the spectrum from deep love and respect to a palpable sense of anxiety, guilt and even outrage regarding crimes perpetrated against the defenseless species.
Putin's energy lesson for Europe; new green media empire
The Russian seizure of the Crimea is an example of how reliance on fossil fuel makes people captive of dictators. At this point, other than spouting mostly empty rhetoric, it appears that the Europeans can/will do little or nothing to halt Putin's expansionism, which will not stop with Crimea. The main reason is that they're afraid that he will cut off their gas.
The more that the Europeans and others have their own locally created renewable energy, the less their policies will be captive of such dictators as Putin.
Meanwhile, I note that Peter Arpin, Edward Catucci and their colleague at Renewable Now have created a nifty multi-media operation devoted to sustainability and renewable energy.
Ike, LBJ and GWB also didn't act
March 7, 2014
Milder today, with even a touch of the sweet melancholy of spring. I think that when spring (that you can feel) really arrives, maybe next month, there will be an usually exuberant explosion of green. And maybe a particularly hot summer. The meteos predict much warmer weather starting later this year as El Nino gets cooking. Good, this year's heating bill have just about bankrupted us.
First, a reminder that Eisenhower did not do a thing when the Russians invaded Hungary in 1956 and killed about 30,000 people; Johnson didn't do anything when the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, and George W. Bush didn't do anything when Russia invaded and stole part of Georgia.
Fascist Russian dictator Putin still occupies Crimea and it looks at this point that not much will be done about it, at least in the short term. The Europeans fear that Putin will turn off their gas supplies; they have also essentially disarmed. This shows yet again how being dependent on fossil fuel from dictators is a dangerous thing. The more local, renewable energy you can get, the safer you are.
Will Obama continue to look and act weak in the face of this thug? Or now that he has learned that sweet talk doesn't work with tyrants, maybe all of a sudden get tough, as happened when the scales feel from Jimmy Carter's eyes about the Soviets in 1979, when they invaded Afghanistan (helping to elect Ronald Reagan in 1980)?
Obama's retaliation so far is a joke -- suspending some visas and freezing some assets of people who weren't really in charge of the invasion of Crimea. In fact, this was all done at the order of Putin. It is the assets of Putin and the people around him, including the economic oligarchs of the astonishingly corrupt current version of the Russian Empire, that need to be frozen.
By the way, one reason that Putin decided to seize Crimea is that the Soviet/Russian port there has been used to constantly resupply with armaments his fellow dictator Bashar Assad and other thugs around the world.
But reminder in all this: Eisenhower did not do a thing when the Russians invaded Hungary in 1956 and killed about 30,000 people and Johnson didn't do anything when the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968.
rwhitcomb51@gmail.com
We'll stick with hate then
"A Love Like This" (archival inkjet print), by CORINNE SPENCER, at Samson gallery, Boston, through August. She says "the artist forces the viewer to feel uncomfortable as she imposes bodily distress upon herself.''
Interesting business model.
Memento mori, et al.
"Enduring Ephemera Series: Installation #2'' (detail, mixed media, plant/animal material, hair), by ERICA WESSMANN, in her "Memento'' show at Fountain Street Fine Art, Framingham, Mass., through March 30.
Prepare for industrial agriculture in maple-syrup business
The big story in The Boston Globe today is:
"Experiments at the University of Vermont’s Proctor Maple Research Center show that maple sap — the raw material that sugar makers boil into syrup — can be efficiently vacuumed from the decapitated trunks of saplings, sharply increasing syrup production. That’s a radical departure from the centuries-old practice of inserting a small tap a few feet above the base of a mature tree, relying on the force of gravity and internal pressure to draw off the sap.''
There's goes the romance of March-thaw maple-sugaring, albeit there will be a windfall for industrial agriculture in the North Country. The baby maples would be grown in tight rows, like corn or Christmas trees.
Respond via rwhitcomb51@gmail.com
Ukraine and the Sudetenland
March 2, 2014
Gray but at least not very cold morning. A little bit of drizzle. A couple of layers of rock salt and sand on the roads. Some of the ground around the trees unfrozen. Stored-up heat from yesterday's sunlight?
Lots of potholes on the roads. Will Providence's mayor, Angel Taveras, fill enough of them fast enough to avoid lethally damaging his run for governor? How many broken axles can he take?
Happy to hear that we won't get the snowstorm that had been promised for tonight and tomorrow. But heard little birdsong this morning. No bright sun to get the feathered bastards excited.
In some years, plenty of crocuses out by now in sunny spots. But on this year's tundra, we will have to wait, I would guess, until the end of next week. Perhaps the big rainstorm that some meteos see coming up the coast at the of end of this week will unfreeze the ground enough to speed things along.
Meanwhile, about five more degrees this morning and the worms will be wiggling in the compost bin.
Russian dictator and former KGB official Vlad Putin is doing to Ukraine what Hitler did to Czechoslovakia: Using the excuse of "rescuing'' his "compatriots'' (if that's what Russian-speaking Ukrainians are) to try to bring a whole democratic country to heel.
In Hitler's case, he used the bogus "plight'' of ethnic/linguistic Germans living in the Sudetenland strip of democratic Czechoslovakia as an excuse to take over that country after it was betrayed by France and Britain as then-isolationist America looked on.
Now we have further proof that Putin's occasionally murderous regime is also an imperialist and fascist one. We had plenty of proof already.
Will the European Union do anything? Has the Europeans' relentless military disarmament emboldened the Russian dictator to follow Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin and create a new empire, or rather reconstitute the Soviet one in the form of a fascist and xenophobic one?
As when the Russians invaded Hungary in 1956 (when Republican Eisenhower was U.S. president) and Czechoslovakia in 1968 (when Democrat and Vietnam-distracted Lyndon Johnson was president) to impose its will, so apparently it is doing now in Ukraine.
Of course, whatever the rhetoric, the West can do little in the short term to stop the Russians, though it would be nice to think that we could ship the Ukrainians some arms. But then, other than risk World War III, we could do little immediately in '56 and '68, despite the demands of conservative Republicans that we "roll back the Iron Curtain.''
But the Russian economy, whose only really successful part is oil and gas exports, is very vulnerable to long-term economic sanctions -- if the Europeans can summon up more courage and persistence that they have shown lately.
The first thing powerful thing we can do is to start freezing Russian assets in the U.S. (much of them produced from criminal activities anyway) and revoke the visas of Russian officials and businesspersons. Hit the Putin regime very hard in the pocketbook.
And let's hope that we not only take strong measures to thwart cyber-attacks on the Ukrainians, the Western Europeans and us during Russia's invasion of Ukraine but also go on the offensive to do everything possible to make Putin's invasion painful to his regime, which presides over what is in many ways a very fragile, if geographically vast, nation.
Of course, with Putin pal and Moscow resident Edward Snowden probably continuing to feed U.S. systems information to the Kremlin that will be more difficult than it would have been a couple of years ago. (Why oh why has Snowden, who took his information first to the Chinese communist dictatorship and then to the fascist one in the Kremlin been presented as some sort of a hero? )
But America, as an innovative and open society, has far more creativity than does the profoundly corrupt and paranoid Russia ruled by Putin. In the end, we can outsmart it.
respond via rwhitcomb51@gmail.
Our weather narcissism
By ROBERT WHITCOMB
Inevitably, some politicians and entertainers (e.g., Rush Limbaugh) are having great fun with the cold and snowy winter in the East and Midwest, saying that this shows that “global warming” is a fraud.
But they are extrapolating from immediate experience and anecdote, not science. I suspect that most of these people know better, but, hey, they’re in show biz.
Actually, January, for instance, which the news media lamented for its cold, snow and ice, has been rather severe in the eastern U.S. because of a huge dip in the jet stream that has brought cold (though not unprecedented cold) to the Upper Midwest and the Northeast while out West, including Alaska, it’s generally been very warm and dry for this time of year. Northeasterners and Midwesterners have endured temperatures 10, 15 or more degrees below normal; Alaska and California have been 10-15 degrees above. And the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that January was, on a global basis, the fourth-warmest on record.
That the Northeast is so densely populated and that much of the national news media are based in New York and Washington mean that the idea that this winter is particularly bad has particularly strong currency. It recalls E.B. White’s funny 1954 essay “In the Eye of Edna,” in which he noted that the nation lost interest in Hurricane Edna after it moved beyond Boston’s radio and TV stations to wallop White’s comparatively remote Mid-Coast region of Maine.
Then there are such relatively new weather-news outlets as the Weather Channel and Accuweather. These commercial outlets will die if they fail to constantly dramatize such old weather phenomena as “The Polar Vortex” — a low-pressure area in upper latitudes that now is presented almost as a new and lethal threat to civilization. Weather events that would have seemed par for the course of a season a half century ago are now characterized as world-historical events.
Changes in the route of the jet stream from time to time bring cold air deep into the eastern part of the United States while the other side of the country becomes much warmer than usual as the jet stream brings in mild, Pacific air from the southwest. The jet stream’s position, of course, can vary widely but it can sometimes get stuck, meaning warm, “open” winters for us some years and cold ones in others. The general trend, though, is for milder winters. The trouble is that we confuse events in our areas that are part of weather’s natural variability with global climate change.
The confusion of one’s particular circumstances with the wider reality reminds me of the heartening rise in recent years of “evidence-based medicine” as opposed to the more traditional “expert-based medicine.” I am simplifying, but evidence-based medicine relies much less on individual physicians’ experience, values and judgment and much more on cold, hard data derived from rigorous collection and analysis of information from broad populations. As with medicine, so with climate, follow the data.
Anyway, New Englanders have suffered through another week of below-normal weather and are heartily sick of it. That the population is aging and that old people, in particular, find winters wearisome may reinforce the winter fatigue of younger people, too.
In some winters, snow drops and crocuses would be popping out of south-facing slopes about now. It looks as if we’ll have to wait a while for them this year. Still, a gradual change in the mix of morning bird song and that there’s bare ground around the base of trees where there was snow a week or two ago reminds us that the sun is getting stronger by the day: Some birds are coming north again and there’s more solar energy for the trees to absorb. And on one of our recent, and for this winter, rare mild days, I found the worms wiggling enthusiastically in our compost bin, whose contents seem to have been frozen solid a couple of days before. Worms: A reminder of the cycles of death and life.
***
The Feb. 23 New York Times business section story “Loss Leader on the Half Shell: A national binge on oysters is transforming an industry (and restaurants’ economics)” was heartening for a coastal New Englander. It implied that our estuary-rich region could benefit a lot from much expanded shellfish aquaculture. Unlike, say, casinos, which are a net subtraction from a region’s economy, or local businesses that recycle money that’s already here, aquaculture, because it has exportable physical products and brings people here from far away to buy them in our eateries as local specialties, increases our region’s wealth.
And the business, with its demands for clean water, prods us to keep our coastal environment cleaner.
Robert Whitcomb (rwhitcomb51@gmail.com), a former Providence Journal editorial-page editor, is a Providence-based writer and editor and the overseer of www.newenglanddiary.com. He is also a director of Cambridge Management Group (cmg625.com).
The NSA enlarges some fingerprints
"Black & White #3 (Chine-colle relief print), by BRYAN NASH GIILL, in his very wide ranging "The Process of Discovery'' show , at Heather Gaudio Fine Art, New Canaan, Conn., through March 22.