With the release of Cape Wind, a book co-authored by the Projo’s Robert Whitcomb, about rich and influential people, ostensibly with socially appropriate environmental consciousnesses, and their fight to kill an environmentally friendly energy project involving water-based windmills, the example on the grounds of the Portsmouth Abbey that I pass twice a day caught my attention more than usual today:
Maybe there’s something in human nature that wind-driven motion sooths, but whatever the reason, I think it would add to, rather than detract from, the scenery if there were more of them around — whether waving to passing commuters or appearing as dots in the waterviews of the hoity-toity.
[Open full post]… or does it seem as if things are starting to roll, just a bit:
Denouncing as “outrageous” the 145.99-percent markup the state has been paying a private company to staff the traffic-monitoring center across the street from the State House, Governor Carcieri yesterday initiated an inquiry into “all state contracts that involve the retention of professional services.”
He also announced that the company, Vanasse Hangen Brustlin, had agreed after a telephone call yesterday from state transportation director Jerome Williams to slash its overhead-and-profit rate to 22.5 percent for those among the 36 workers doing largely “administrative” tasks — including the “typist” for whom the state had been paying the company the equivalent of $102,858.
Saying he was unaware of the VHB staffing contract until it was brought to light by The Providence Journal this week, Carcieri said he has now asked Gerald Aubin, the former deputy Providence police chief who heads the state Lottery, to lead a task force charged with finding out whether any other “similarly outrageous arrangements might exist in other departments of state government.”
The governor said he had asked Aubin “to review all these contracts to determine if the state is paying similar overhead rates in any other instance, to compile a comprehensive list of these contracts and their costs, and to determine what, if any, work would better be performed by state employees.”
Not to assume too much about a man whom I don’t know, but I get the impression of faux cluelessness from this:
Asked yesterday for comment on Carcieri calling for an investigation of professional-services contracts, Sen. J. Michael Lenihan, the East Greenwich Democrat leading the Senate inquiry, said:: “Well quite honestly, it’s an absurd situation. It merits investigation.
“I guess my question is, whatever the role of the federal government in terms of mandating this kind of thing, didn’t somebody have the common sense somewhere along the line to say — ‘Wait a minute. This is absurd.’ — and call it into question. Apparently that didn’t happen.”
It didn’t happen because government employees in Rhode Island — including those whom we elect — see their role as ruling the state, not representing the interests of its citizens. The real question is whether enough of those citizens will wake up before too many flee to avert catastrophe.i
[Open full post]I agree with the Providence Journal that it is “perverse” for the CEO of a health insurance company to make one-and-a-half times the entire payroll of a 2,000-employee hospital. Considering how often Republicans and conservatives are saddled with the ideological blame for these supposed excesses of the free market, that admission may surprise some readers. We’re not talking an ideological paradox — or even run-of-the-mill self-contradiction — though.
Such stark comparisons should actually lead one to question whether we’re seeing evidence of capitalism unbound or capitalism unwisely bounded. The fundamental differences between modern economic philosophies (e.g., between Keynesianism and supply-side economics) sometimes seem to come down to conflicting opinions about how to get the rich to keep their money moving (e.g., as corporate profits or as private income) — indicating a general understanding that those who control wealth will tend to try to take as much as possible for themselves. It is reasonable to suggest, therefore, that the encouragement of competition is perhaps the most effective means of placing natural, market-driven limits on the amount of wealth that it is reasonable for the rich to siphon away from productive ends. Try to grab a $100 bill from somebody, and he’ll hold it out of reach, dodge left, dodge right, and run you in circles; offer somebody else a profitable opportunity while the first guy is hoarding his cache, and that $100 bill might not be so difficult to liberate.
The healthcare industry is plainly not an example of a free market, what with regulations, coverage dictat’s, and the insurer/customer relationship’s being all tangled up with the customers’ unrelated careers. as much money as $124 million might be, throwing it away is apparently not a competitive handicap in the face of high barriers to entry and high costs of doing business once a company has entered the industry.
So no, I don’t support a system of such gargantuan inequalities. I support a system in which competition puts the avaricious in danger of eating themselves.
There has been much media and internet speculation on the subject of whether incoming French President Nicolas Sarkozy could become France’s version of Ronald Reagan. But isn’t a comparison to Richard Nixon equally, if not more, valid…
- Domestically, just like Nixon, Sarkozy was clearly the law-and-order candidate.
- In foreign policy, the analogy is less perfect, but like the Richard Nixon of the Vietnam era, Sarkozy’s promise is to help his country, shaken by some foreign policy missteps and unsure of its place in the world, develop better relations with a superpower that no one expects to go away any time soon.
But even if Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel aren’t going to be updated versions of Reagan and Thatcher, the fact that French and German electorates have chosen the unabashed pro-American candidates a fact worth noting. The downside to the observation is the ray of hope it gives to Socialists in Europe and elsewhere — they might begin to experience more electoral success if they ever decide to drop their reflexive anti-Americanism! [Open full post]
I was reading an article in the current issue of City Journal by Sol Stern about the state of Catholic Schools in general and of New York City’s Rice High School in particular when I came across these sentences that startled me a bit…
When I went unannounced into classrooms [at Rice High School], I encountered teachers standing at the front of the class and students working quietly at individual desks, aligned in straight rows. (This method of direct, teacher-centered instruction is, of course, anathema to progressive educators, but it surely works.)Any of the teachers, students, or parents in the audience have any idea what Stern is talking about, and/or any comments on the state of “direct, teacher-centered instruction” in the state of Rhode Island? [Open full post]
The election of center-right Nicolas Sarkozy as president of France prompts Ralph Peters to observe, “I never thought I’d see it in my lifetime.” Election of a real reformer, that is. More:
Sarkozy is the first top-level French politician who openly accepts that the United States possesses virtues from which France might take a lesson. While Sarko’s attraction to things American can be overstated – he sees our system’s deficiencies, too, and won’t always agree with our foreign policy – he’ll be a leader who examines issues on their merits, not on the basis of shopworn Left Bank slogans.
What’s striking about this victory is Sarkozy’s bluntness. Instead of mumbo jumbo about la gloire, he speaks frankly about the mess in which France finds itself.
Peter’s also provides a few quotes from Sarkozy’s book, “Testimony,” to provide a window on the man’s policies:
* “The best social model is one that creates jobs for everyone, and this is obviously not ours since our unemployment level is twice as high as that of our main partners.”
* “I admire the social mobility of American society. You can start with nothing and become a spectacular success. You can fail and get a second chance. Merit is rewarded.”
* “France is no longer the country that comes up with new ideas.”
And Sarkozy offers some hard truths to those Americans who mindlessly praise the imaginary social justice and “better” quality of life in a France they know only from privileged vacations that tend to avoid the Muslim slums and collapsed industrial areas:
* “The French have never spoken so much about justice while allowing so much injustice to prevail . . . The reality of our system is that it protects those who have something, and it is very tough on those who don’t.”
* “France has been discouraging initiative and punishing success for the past 25 years. And the main consequence of preventing the most dynamic members of society from getting rich is to make everyone else poor.”
* “It is hard to exaggerate the damage done to France by the 35-hour workweek. How can anyone think that you’re going to create wealth and jobs by working less?”
* “Thirteen percent of retired women live below the poverty line, and a further 25 percent are barely above it . . . The unemployment rate for unskilled workers is 15 percent . . . It is 22 percent for those under 25 and nearly 40 percent for low-skilled youth who live in [immigrant ghettos].”
Froma Harrop also weighs in, and cogently observes:
A conservative, Sarkozy has summoned the French to work harder and longer, but one has to understand the context. The French can work harder and longer without working particularly hard or long, by our standards, anyway.
Ha!
[Open full post]Michael Barone in the Wall Street Journal:
It has become a commonplace to say that population has been flowing from the Snow Belt to the Sun Belt, from an industrially ailing East and Midwest to an economically vibrant West and South. But the actual picture of recent growth, as measured by the 2000 Census and the census estimates for 2006, is more complicated…. What I found is that you can separate [population centers] into four different categories, with different degrees and different sources of population growth or decline. And I found some interesting surprises.
By far, the biggest population losers are the “Coastal Megalopolises”
Americans are now moving out of, not into, coastal California and South Florida, and in very large numbers they’re moving out of our largest metro areas. They’re fleeing hip Boston and San Francisco, and after eight decades of moving to Washington they’re moving out. The domestic outflow from these metro areas is 3.9 million people, 650,000 a year. High housing costs, high taxes, a distaste in some cases for the burgeoning immigrant populations–these are driving many Americans elsewhere.
The result is that these Coastal Megalopolises are increasingly a two-tiered society, with large affluent populations happily contemplating (at least until recently) their rapidly rising housing values, and a large, mostly immigrant working class working at low wages and struggling to move up the economic ladder. The economic divide in New York and Los Angeles is starting to look like the economic divide in Mexico City and São Paulo.
I would have thought that Providence would fall into the “Coastal Megalopolis” category. Not so:
The fourth category is what I call the Static Cities. These are 18 metropolitan areas with immigrant inflow between zero and 4%, with domestic inflow up to 3% and domestic outflow no higher than 1%. They seem to be holding their own economically, but are not surging ahead and some are in danger of falling back. Philadelphia makes the list, and so do Baltimore, Hartford and Providence in the East.
Surprisingly, some Western cities that boomed in the 1990s are in this category too: Seattle (the tech bust again), Denver, Portland. In the Midwest, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Kansas City, Columbus and Indianapolis are doing better than their Rust Belt neighbors and make the list. In the South, Norfolk, Memphis, Louisville, Oklahoma City and Birmingham are lagging enough behind the Interior Boomtowns to do so. Overall the Static Cities had a domestic inflow of just 18,000 people (.048%) and an immigrant inflow of 2%. Politically, they’re a mixed bag, a bit more Democratic than the nation as a whole: 52% for Kerry, 47% for Bush.
Not losing, but not gaining. All in all, Barone concludes:
[Open full post]Twenty years ago political analysts grasped the implications of the vast movement from Rust Belt to Sun Belt, a tilting of the table on balance toward Republicans; but with California leaning heavily to Democrats, that paradigm seems obsolete. What’s now in store is a shifting of political weight from a small Rust Belt which leans Democratic and from the much larger Coastal Megalopolises, where both secular top earners and immigrant low earners vote heavily Democratic, toward the Interior Megalopolises, where most voters are private-sector religious Republicans but where significant immigrant populations lean to the Democrats. House seats and electoral votes will shift from New York, New Jersey and Illinois to Texas, Florida, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada; within California, House seats will shift from the Democratic coast to the Republican Inland Empire and Central Valley.
A quick point about the Albanian terrorists who were arrested for plotting to wreak havoc at Fort Dix. They were initially discovered because of the vigilance of a local video store owner:
On or about January 30, 2006, a representative of a retail store informed officials of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”) that an individual had brought a video to their store to be duplicated into a digital video disk (“DVD”). That DVD depicted conduct–recorded as having occurred on January 3, 2006–that the store representative described as disturbing. FBI agents reviewed the DVD in question. The DVD depicted 10 young men who appeared to be in their early twenties shooting assault weapons at a firing range in a militia-like style while calling for jihad and shouting in Arabic “Allah Akbar” (“God is Great”). The FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Force (“JTTF”) immediately commenced an investigation into the activities of the men depicted in the DVD.
We need to remember that–whether or not we want to or not–we may one day find ourselves thrust onto the front line of the war on terror. Be ready.
[Open full post]As the last remnants of the Rocky Point Amusement Park are demolished and removed, one wonders if it would have survived longer had it maintained a look more like this:
Now, there will be a discussion over how much to develop and how much to devote to open space. Time marches on.
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