GoLocalProv | News | Whitcomb: McKee's Tax Tips; Iran as Show Biz; Vending Machine for Those in Trouble; SCOTUS on Trans

"I said to myself: three days

and you'll be seven years old.

I was saying it to stop

the sensation of falling off

the round, turning world.

into cold, blue-black space.

But I felt: you are an I,

you are an Elizabeth....''

- From "In the Waiting Room,'' by Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), American poet.

"Memories are like corks left out of bottles. They swell. They no longer fit.''

-- Harriet Doerr (1910-2002), American writer. She published her first novel when she was 74.

"First, they fascinate the fools. Then, they muzzle the intelligent.''

-- Bertrand Russell, English philosopher and mathematician (1872-1970), on how Fascists gain and consolidate power

I see many dark-skinned people coming and going at some of these churches in their Sunday best. Are some worried about ICE? The Third World has more enthusiastic Christians than you find in most of America.

It's the age of disbelief around here, in part because of the general acceptance of the idea that we should seek hard evidence, respect science and practice rationality as much as we emotional and erratic creatures can, rather than taking refuge in death-denying theologies.

What a difference from many places in the South and Midwest, where you can find thriving evangelical churches even at old shopping malls -- lots of free parking! There, you can find many who believe, or want to believe, in the inerrancy of the Bible, despite its many translations' innumerable contradictions and in such ideas as that God created the world about 6,000 years ago.

Election-Year Tax Cuts and Hikes

Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee's election-year pitches include at least three dubious ones.

One is to impose a 3 percent surtax on incomes over $1 million. While taxes on the rich are too low, this should be addressed at the federal level. States have to be competitive, including in the state-thick Northeast. (It would be nice if New England created one unified tax system for the region, but New Hampshire would block such a thing.)

Another dubious idea is to reverse the recent 2-cent hike in the state's gasoline tax that was imposed to help address the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority's budget deficit. The increase merely boosted how much you'd pay at the pump to 41 cents a gallon from 39 cents. Seems a pretty modest thing to help keep our essential public transportation going, providing transport for a wide range of people, especially of course, poorer and/or disabled people, and the elderly, while reducing a bit of the wear and tear on the roads from car traffic and air pollution.

The governor also wants to eliminate state income taxes on many oldsters' Social Security income. I'm not sure how much that would drain the state budget, but what is clear is that it's a pitch to the highest-voting population. While it's true that some old people are impoverished, the elderly as a group have the highest net worth. They also enjoy Medicare and some other services unavailable to younger people.

But wait! There's more! Rhode Island residents 67 and older are already exempt from Social Security tax if their total income is less than $107,000 a year, or $133,750 for joint filers. So the governor's pitch is to more affluent filers.

Implementing Mr. Chippendale's approach would, of course, be very politically difficult. Most citizens seem to want more government (if it favors their group) and lower taxes.

Newport This Week reports that "the Newport Prevention Coalition is gauging interest in installing a special vending machine in the city that will provide supplies designed to help people in emergencies.''

The paper says that such machines, which are "customizable by location and locked by a client code," can feature nasal Narcan, fentanyl test strips, syringes, hats, gloves, scarves, safe-sex kits, hygiene packages, ponchos, blankets, and backpacks, along with referral cards with resource information.

This is a service that in a better world would be directly provided by medical and social-service professionals.

"It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may 'ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.'"

-- Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, in his letter of Aug. 18, 1792, replying to a July 29 letter from President George Washington on the menace of demagogues.

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Now, why would Trump attack Iran again? He cites the human rights of protesters being shot at by the hideous religio/military/fascist regime that has been ruining that large country. But since when has our own would-be tyrant shown any credible interest in human rights, at home or abroad?

Trump's goals seem to include turning oil-rich Iran into a U.S. client state while at the same time pleasing our client state Israel, since the 1979 Iranian revolution, a nemesis of the ayatollahs running Iran. And there's the Trump regime's "flooding the zone'' approach to everything to distract the oft-naïve and willfully ignorant American public from the MAGA regime's extreme corruption, push toward tyranny, and the economic and other results of its lie-saturated policies. And military actions pump up the image of the Orange Oligarch as a great leader among the millions of weak and anxious Americans who want the comfortable feeling that a strongman will take care of them, or at least slam those they resent.

Still, Trump is known for suddenly reversing himself. He may decide that making peace with this Iranian dictatorship, or the one that follows, is okay, especially if it means that the Trump Organization can profit from it. Trump Tower in Tehran!

By the way, the Iranian regime's nasty Revolutionary Guards, in the forefront of repression, remind me in some ways of our very own "Christian Nationalists''.

The Revolutionary Guards (tasked with enforcing anti-women and other rules of Islamic Fascism) also recall a little bit Tof rump's ICE. That outfit, rather than acting within clear legal boundaries, often operates with few curbs and with fear as its main weapon, via poorly trained and ill-disciplined masked agents, some clearly with rage problems; pre-dawn raids; damage to property, and a disinclination to confirm immigrants' or perceived immigrants' (go by skin color!) legal status before assaulting them.

They are mostly sent to spread terror in Democratic-run cities. As we approach the mid-term elections, which the Trump cabal is already hard at work trying to steal, ICE will be increasingly used to suppress voting.

Good news for New England: Congress is finally pushing back on Trump's disastrous-for-the-country plan to slash federal spending on scientific research by 22 percent, to $154 billion from $198 billion. Now it seems likely that Congress will only cut such funding by 4 percent, even with most Republican legislators' nauseating fear of offending their Fuhrer.

They know how important scientific research is to our economy, health and international competitiveness and security. Since New England, with its famed universities, is a global center for research, the unusual Republican pushback is particularly gratifying for us.

The Supreme Court seems very likely to let states set limits, or outright bans, on medical procedures for young people who want to be another sex than the one they were born as. A ruling would presumably cover such related things as banning youths born asmales from playing in school sports as females.

If adults want to "change their sex," through surgery and drugs, that's their business, but people under, say, 18 are too young to be allowed to make such irreversible decisions. And letting a "former male" be on a female team is grossly unfair because "former males" still retain some masculine attributes that gives them advantages in strength, speed and power.

Some folks are willing to suffer the complexities of overriding Mother Nature for what they hope will be a happier future. In any event, this issue has been successfully hyped by MAGA, even though only about 1 percent of the U.S. population can be called trans.

Trump's election-year pitch to force financial institutions to charge no more than 10 percent interest on credit-card debt would result in millions of consumers having their cards cancelled. That's because banks would lose billions of dollars on this unsecured - and thus very risky - debt if the rates were set this low.

The rates are set so high on credit cards in order to cover the lenders' risk, which is much higher than with, say, loans for cars and real estate, which have real physical assets as collateral. Trump's plan would force the financial institutions to stop peddling credit cards to many people lest the institutions' profits take a big bath.

Trump wants the Federal Reserve to set all interest rates lower, though that would accelerate inflation. Among other things, this would be to boost the very rate-sensitive real-estate sector. (That increasingly includes those massive data centers being put up by Trump's tech bros supporters.) That's the core of his wealth, along with the money-laundering swamp called crypto.

He basically wants to heat up the economy to win the midterms, however much this would damage the economy in the long term. His outrageous persecution of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell is part of this campaign to strengthen his already toxic power. He's been turning the Justice Department into the Department of Political Retribution.

Despite Trump's tariffs, China had a record trade surplus last year, as other nations took up the slack from Americans buying less from the Middle Kingdom as a result of the tariffs. As for U.S. exports, major American trading partners, seeing us as an unreliable/unpredictable nation to do business with, are gradually expanding their trade and other relations with China and other nations to mitigate how they might be hurt by the swelling chaos of our economic and foreign policies.

Much of our memory is composed of a collection of vivid incidents, some sad, some happy, the remembrance of which is to a greater or lesser degree revised by the passage of time and subsequent events. Long stretches between the incidents are blurs.

Thus it is with Edward Hirsch's (born in 1950) wonderful, sometimes sad, sometimes very funny, often ironic, memoir of growing up in a middle-class Jewish family in Greater Chicago. The unusual structure My Childhood in Pieces: A Skokie Elegy consists of short anecdotes, almost, as he says, like those of stand-up comedians. Call them microchapters.

The book is replete with strong characters, some of them crooks and semi-crooks, but most of them basically honest as they tried to make it in our anxious, driven, capitalist, class-conscious society. At least America generally offered more physical security than in the menacing anti-Semitic Europe that their families had fled, though politicians and others have long cynically exaggerated socio-economic mobility in the U.S., which lags that in many other nations.

"I guess I started by trying to capture the people around me that I remembered so well - first, my parents and all my uncles and aunts and my grandparents. And they were very funny, quick, bit harsh. And I started writing down - just remembering things they'd said. The first thing I wrote was something my mom said to me when I was 8 years old. And I said, you know, you really shouldn't make fun of me. You're my mother. And she said, 'Don't be so sure, kid.'''

While my family background was quite different, Mr. Hirsh's book evoked for me a lot of the feelings of being young in the '50's and '60's, which was far from the golden age that some younger politicians and others make it out to be, though it had its golden moments and hours amidst the leaden.

This is a bit of a self-interested ad. Bill Perna, of Perna Content, has come out with another gorgeous book about the Maine Coast, but it's also effectively about seacoasts everywhere, especially regarding the effects of global warming and relentless shoreline development. It's called Rising Tides: Adapting to Coastal Maine's Future.