Sunday, November 09, 2025
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Robert Whitcomb, Columnist PHOTO: Bill Gallery
“Implacable tranquillity
That searches out the naked heart,
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Touches the quick of anxiety
And breaks the world apart.’’
— From “The Window,’’ by May Sarton (1912-1995), Belgian-American novelist, poet and memoirist
“If people think Nature is their friend, then they sure don’t need an enemy.’’
— Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), American novelist
“Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the grand climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust.’’
— Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007), French sociologist and philosopher
The wind in November often seems colder than January’s because it’s more moist. But there are still spots of color from frost-killed wildflowers.
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PHOTO: GoLocal
There are compensations as we head into deeper fall, such as the glow as the slanting afternoon sunshine pours onto trees that still have many of their yellow, orange, and red leaves. Spectacular!
Don’t plan to fly anywhere for Thanksgiving unless you know for sure that the government shutdown will be over. Flying isn’t safe now. The unpaid air-traffic controllers are exhausted, and more and more of them are calling in sick. And the airports are filled with frustrated people. Come to think of it, you might want to put off your flights indefinitely as private-sector layoffs surge and the fragrance of a possible recession starts to waft over us.
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I’m all in favor of capitalism and have only worked in the private sector. But I increasingly think that certain organizations, such as hospitals, should only be nonprofit because of their essential public services. (Of course, too many officially nonprofit entities pay their executives gargantuan salaries and benefits.)
Consider that another for-profit company, Prime Healthcare, might buy Our Lady of Fatima Hospital, in North Providence, and Roger Williams Medical Center, in Providence, from the mismanaged Prospect Medical Holdings, now under bankruptcy protection. Prospect had been controlled by the asset-stripping private-equity firm Leonard Green & Partners.
Among other issues, Prime is known for slashing some less profitable services, such as chemotherapy and maternity wards, engaging in dubious real estate schemes that drain operating revenues and occasional Medicare billing fraud. None of this is particularly unusual in the for-profit hospital sector.
Meanwhile, here’s a U.S. Senate report on the role of private-equity firms in hospitals:
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Will Newport decide to try to buy most of the about 25 acres of state land made available by the Newport/Pell Bridge ramp realignment? If so, what to do with it? Open and wetland spaces? Housing? Other? Very important location.
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The City of Providence plans to sell the closed fire station at 155 Humboldt Ave., on the city’s East Side, for private development. How about a grocery store, or my favorite, loft housing?
Backlash
The Democrats’ sweeping victories in last Tuesday’s elections were, above all, an expression of frustration about the economy, especially inflation, and the rejection, in the case of far too many voters, belated, of the predictably most corrupt and incompetent (except in such specialties as lies, bribe-taking and demagoguery) administration in American history.
And it showed that Trump’s foes are toughening up. Perhaps the most significant vote was Californians’ approval– by a two-to-one margin! — of a referendum measure to redistrict congressional districts to try to offset the outrageous national right-wing gerrymandering movement that came at Trump’s order. That started in the Texas legislature, and came without a vote by the public there. Californians realized that bringing a squirt gun to a fight with fascist Trump cultists with knives doesn’t work.
And I think some of the vote was to stick it to Silicon Valley’s far-right “Techbros,’’ who see democracy as too inconvenient.
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New York City PHOTO: Florian Wehde, Unsplash
The most-watched race resulted in 34-year-old Zohran Mamdani’s decisive victory in the New York City mayoral contest. He calls himself a “democratic socialist,’’ but that term is a bit misleading. He’s really a European-style social democrat, but incoherent about it.
Leaders of other cities will be carefully watching New York City to see how Mr. Mamdani’s proposals work in practice. That he seems to be an ignoramus about economics in general, and small and large business in particular, and lacks management experience, is not heartening. But he’s smart, and one hopes that he’ll be a fast learner in the capital of American capitalism.
The economic model that has does the greatest good for the greatest number of people is a capitalism carefully regulated in order to prevent widespread suffering and to fight fraud while taking care that very rich do not take over government and run it entirely for their own benefit, as some would like to do. All this takes constant oversight.
Mr. Mamdani won because of his charisma, campaign organizing skills, social-media savvy, the nasty behavioral baggage of his major opponent, Andrew Cuomo, and the frustration of many New Yorkers that “the system’’ is far more interested in further expanding the wealth, and political power, of the very rich and sometimes arrogant Wall Street crowd than of improving the lives of low-and-middle-income people through addressing affordability, especially of housing. They haven’t been able to drink much from “trickle-down economics’’.
What a grotesque Gilded Age we live in, where the extreme selfishness of the rich and powerful all too often triumphs!
Anyway, most of Mr. Mamdani’s promises can’t be fulfilled anytime soon, if ever, and some would have negative effects. Consider that expanded rent control would lead some landlords to shut their properties, and discourage some housing developers from undertaking new construction. And housing costs have been driven up by massive immigration, much of it illegal, and supported by Mr. Mamdani, a (legal) immigrant himself. Certainly cutting Gotham’s byzantine regulations that block and/or slow housing construction would help.
The city by itself can’t afford “free” bus service, and city-owned grocery stores seem implausible; among other problems, such stores would hurt existing small grocery stores, such as New York’s famous bodegas. Faster and more reliable bus service, however, would be a big help to all New Yorkers (and Rhode Islanders!). It would boost the economy, and could be achieved over a couple of years.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has signaled that she’d be open to having the state help finance “free” bus service and universal day care in the city, also on the Mamdani wish list. Private day care is fiendishly expensive. Free day care would be a boon for some New York businesses that help subsidize their employees needing this service and could make their workers less stressed and so more productive – that is, the ones whose jobs aren’t killed by artificial intelligence.
Mr. Mamdani wants to boost the city’s personal-income tax on the richest New Yorkers and raise the city corporate-income tax to help pay for his proposed programs. But he’d need the state’s approval for these taxes, which he won’t get. (I’ve always opposed corporate-income taxes because they lead to lobbyist-led corruption and reduce efficiency.)
Trump will try to make life as miserable as possible for the Mamdani-led New York, including by illegally cutting off already appropriated federal funds. The Orange Oligarch will proceed on the basis of knowing that most Americans ignore that the city’s wealth and dynamism subsidize Red States.
MAGA will try to make Mr. Mamdani the “communist’’ face of the Democratic Party, but that won’t work because most Americans at least realize that New York City is sui generis. And he’ll govern far more moderately, with innumerable compromises, than his campaign rhetoric suggested. He’ll have to. As the late New York Gov. Mario Cuomo (Andrew’s father) famously said:
“You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.’’
I suspect that Mr. Mamdani’s regime will turn out to be far less, er, exciting than you might expect, as was “democratic socialist’’ Bernie Sanders’s very pragmatic leadership of Burlington, Vt., when he was mayor there. Reality bites!
I’m glad the incoming mayor wants to keep the current and very able police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, of the very rich Tisch family and that he and his transition people are talking to a wide range of people, including billionaires.
In any case, the Democrats need to start winning in some Red regions, not just Blue and Purple, if they’re going to again be America’s main governing party. It’s no time for them to be euphoric.
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What was the late Dick Cheney’s biggest influence in recent history? Even beyond promoting the disastrous Iraq War, and treating burgeoning budget deficits to pay for wars and tax cuts for the very rich as no problem, it was his work for GOP presidents, from Nixon on, to relentlessly expand presidential power. The Founding Fathers, while realizing the need for a strong executive, would have been made anxious if they could have seen how far things have gone. It’s a little ironic that Trump’s tyrannical actions drew Mr. Cheney’s stern criticism in the last few years.
A physical representation of this is the creation of huge presidential libraries and adoration centers such as the one going up in Chicago to worship Barack Obama. You can well imagine what sort of gilded pile will be erected to honor our malignant narcissist-in-chief. It will drive up the price of gold.
Take a look at the Obama monument! I thought we lived in a federal republic, not the pharaohs’ Egypt.
Germany and Nigeria
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, whose moderate conservative coalition faces intense pressure from the anti-immigrant far-right Alternative for Germany (which includes some neo-Nazis), says hundreds of thousands of Syrians who fled their country in its civil war should return there from Germany now that the war is over and the murderous Assad regime has been ousted.
He’s right. The cost to Germany in social services and social tension to host those people, which former Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed in a brave humanitarian policy, has been hefty. It should be said that many of these Syrians were middle-class and well-educated, and have come to contribute economically and otherwise to Germany. But it’s just those people that Syria needs in order to rebuild.
It’s unclear how many of these people will/can be deported. Of course, while the German immigration situation differs in some crucial ways from ours, U.S. officials will watch it carefully.
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Trump, about the least “Christian” character you can think of, threatens to go into Nigeria, “guns blazin’,’’ to “save’’ Christians in the northeast of the country. Bloomberg News describes what’s really going on there well:
“{T}he reality is that ethnic violence in Nigeria is driven by access to resources, such as land and water, and terrorism by the likes of Boko Haram and the Islamic State – that largely kills Muslims….while there is religious violence in Nigeria, most of it is based on resources and criminality.’’
What’s happening is that Trump endlessly seeks distractions from domestic political challenges. (See illegal U.S. attacks on boats allegedly carrying drugs from South America.) In the Nigeria case, it’s also to appeal to evangelicals, a major part of his MAGA base.
Our Very Different ‘Nations’
Does New England have more in common with Ontario, Quebec and the Maritime Provinces than with, in particular, the Deep South? I’d say yes.
Which gets me to Colin Woodard’s new book, Nations Apart: How Clashing Regional Cultures Shattered America.
The book’s most interesting themes are how old and entrenched these cultural, political and economic differences are, and that they’re unlikely to be bridged. Knowing the backgrounds of those who took over these regions from the Native Americans is crucial in understanding these “nations.’’ Think of New England’s Puritans, New York’s Dutch and Appalachia’s Scotch-Irish. Mr. Woodard eloquently discusses why the richest, and what you might call the most “civilized’’ and humane, parts of the U.S. do so well and Appalachia and the Deep South so poorly.
Maybe it’s time to get it over with and split up the country.
Robert Whitcomb is a veteran editor and writer. Among his jobs, he has served as the finance editor of the International Herald Tribune, in Paris; as a vice president and the editorial-page editor of The Providence Journal; as an editor and writer in New York for The Wall Street Journal, and as a writer for the Boston Herald Traveler (RIP). He has written newspaper and magazine essays and news stories for many years on a very wide range of topics for numerous publications, has edited several books and movie scripts and is the co-author of among other things, Cape Wind.
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