Editorials from around New England

Excerpts of recent editorials of statewide and national interest from New England newspapers:

Norwich Bulletin (Conn.), March 6, 2017

If President Donald Trump’s boundless temerity hadn’t already tested and exhausted the tolerance of every American who doesn’t own a red hat, he probably alienated those last few holdouts on Saturday.

We hesitate to comment every time Trump tweets something stupid, for doing so would occupy a lot of time and space on this page. But his groundless assertion that former President Barack Obama had ordered his phones tapped before the election is a new low, and really a perfect encapsulation of his querulous disconnection from reality.

This latest bout of Twitter howling undermines what little credibility Trump has left, which stems not from his personal integrity but from the eroding authority of his office. It forcefully demonstrates just how low he will stoop, and with just how thin a factual case he will seek to vindicate himself, deflect and distract.

The assertion seemed to come from a report from Breitbart News, which itself was inspired by a conspiratorial rant by conservative talk radio host Mark Levin. Many media outlets have published explainers and analyses of the known facts, but Julian Sanchez, writing for the conservative Cato Institute, has the best one we’ve seen. It’s technical stuff, but Sanchez concludes that “both Breitbart and Trump have advanced claims far more dramatic than anything the public evidence can support.”

That evidence is that the FBI unsuccessfully sought authorization to surveil transactions between Russian banks and four Trump associates, and then months later was permitted to monitor only the banks. There is no evidence of direct involvement of Obama or any political appointee; of phone wiretaps per se; or of targeting of the campaign itself.

Trump makes a lot of assertions from the gut, or from conspiracy theories concocted and hyped by partisan media sources. That’s frightening when you think about the types of decisions presidents are typically called upon to make.

More concerning still is the probability that the FBI had sought wiretap orders targeting Trump associates, which suggests suspicions that rose to that level. A thorough independent investigation of the Russia connection- including the accusations about improper or illegal surveillance on Obama’s part, however unfounded -would, as we’ve said before, provide new clarity about this whole mess.

___

Online:

https://bit.ly/2nfU0mL

The Portland Press Herald (Maine), March 5, 2017

You would have had to have been in a coma for the last six years if you didn’t know that many, many Americans hate the Affordable Care Act, especially when it goes by the name “Obamacare.”

But you can be excused if you didn’t realize that they all don’t have the same reasons for hating it.

This is what Republicans in Washington are discovering, which is what is making it so hard to repeal and replace the ACA, the signature policy achievement from the Democrats’ brief two-year stint of controlling both the White House and Congress, the same levers of power that Republicans now hold.

For instance, people say they don’t like the program because of the cost. But what cost are they talking about?

Some Republicans are complaining about the taxes it collects from high-income individuals and companies that gained demand for their services in a subsidized market. But other critics are talking about the high premiums and deductibles on plans offered through the health care exchanges.

You can’t please both sides: If you cut the taxes, the plans will get more expensive. If you increase the subsidies to make the plans less costly, you can’t afford to cut the taxes. And, by the way, the ACA actually reduces the deficit, so repealing it would cost everybody more even as millions of people lost their coverage.

As President Trump himself said last week, “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated!”

That wasn’t the only thing the president said about health care. In his well-received speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, Trump spoke in slightly more detail about the shape that an ACA replacement should take, and listed five principles for a replacement plan. Each reveals another level of complexity.

“First, we should ensure that Americans with pre-existing conditions have access to coverage, and that we have a stable transition for Americans currently enrolled in the health care exchanges.”

Republicans will have to decide whether “should ensure . access” means the same thing as “should have coverage” and whether a “transition” means a transition to other coverage or to no coverage at all.

“Secondly, we should help Americans purchase their own coverage, through the use of tax credits and expanded health savings accounts, but it must be the plan they want, not the plan forced on them by our government.”

Tax credits aren’t free, and the president appears to be siding with the people who complain that health insurance is too expensive to buy under the ACA. But finding the money to pay for the subsidies is apparently Congress’ problem.

“Thirdly, we should give our great state governors the resources and flexibility they need with Medicaid to make sure no one is left out.”

This sounds like a reference to Republican efforts to turn Medicaid into a block grant program, which analysts predict will leave many people out, especially if the federal government caps spending.

Medicaid rolls grow and shrink along with economic cycles. When a recession hits and people lose their jobs, they become eligible; when they get back to work, they go off Medicaid. A flat amount from Washington would create a financial crisis in Maine every time we hit a period of high unemployment.

“Fourth, we should implement legal reforms that protect patients and doctors from unnecessary costs that drive up the price of insurance- and work to bring down the artificially high price of drugs and bring them down immediately.”

Medical malpractice reform is perennially popular during campaigns, but studies show it would have limited impact on health care costs. Prescription drugs, on the other hand, are a major driver of health care costs, putting coverage out of reach for millions of Americans. If Trump could get Republicans in Congress to give up their historical objection to regulating drug prices, he might indeed make coverage affordable without high subsidies.

“And finally, the time has come to give Americans the freedom to purchase health insurance across state lines- which will create a truly competitive national marketplace that will bring cost way down and provide far better care.”

This has been part of Republican orthodoxy for decades, but there is no evidence that it would drive costs down. It’s not just state regulation that keeps insurance companies from setting up shop in Maine- it’s also the underlying cost of caring for people here, because our population is older and sicker than those in other parts of the country.

The most complicated problem Trump faces is political. Republicans have run for office for years claiming that repealing Obamacare would be easy: It’s not, and not just because 20 million more people have health insurance than had it before.

Even Republicans don’t agree on why it is that they hate the program, so they can’t agree on how to fix it.

Until they do, it would be irresponsible to go any further down the road to repeal.

___

Online:

https://bit.ly/2mbxduA

The Standard-Times (Mass.), March 5, 2017

A habit worth acquiring by anyone interested in understanding Donald Trump- as president, CEO, celebrity or human being -is the continuous cultivation of patience. The imprecision of an entertainer’s vocabulary versus a politician’s, we are learning, frequently requires amplification before learning, for example, that DACA dreamers won’t be targeted by the Justice Department, at least not right away.

The president’s address to Congress last Tuesday offered some clarity on several issues, including immigration, a top concern of Trumpism.

The president recently called the children brought into the country by parents who do not have legal immigrant status- dreamers -“these incredible kids,” promising to approach the issue with “great heart.”

In the address to Congress, he began to clarify his administration’s approach to the campaign promise to deport millions of undocumented people: Let’s start with the criminals, and work our way through the rest; then let’s stop admitting uneducated or unskilled immigrants- even legally. Even terms like “great heart” are insufficient to remove the concerns of many Americans over this strategy.

“Switching away from this current system of lower-skilled immigration, and instead adopting a merit-based system, will have many benefits: It will save countless dollars, raise workers’ wages, and help struggling families- including immigrant families -enter the middle class.”

There are reasonable interpretations of the words President Trump shared on Tuesday, but, as we suggest above, without patience we may find ourselves shocked when the words don’t align with government action. Not only must we keep in mind the messy, unconstitutional travel ban rolled out barely two weeks into the new administration’s governance, but we must remember the clearly expressed value system of those advising the president. Until there is a significant change in the West Wing, the undercurrent of prejudice, nationalism and white nationalism are in the DNA of the policy process.

To apply this locally, and to place it in the convenient context of the anniversary of the Bianco raid, we must be on guard as we see the immigration enforcement assets increasing in our backyard, specifically at the Bristol County House of Correction. Sheriff Thomas M. Hodgson’s agreement with the Department of Homeland Security to train his officers as Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents is fraught with opportunities for neglect or abuse. Even though the sheriff’s rhetoric is often reasonable and defensible in terms of public safety, the public has no eyes into his ICE facility. The public will not be able to see whether the undocumented individuals the new ICE agents take in were encountered passively through law enforcement agencies or through aggressive actions by correctional officers. The public won’t know if the potential good of identifying those who are threats to public safety, and then fairly adjudicating their cases, is perverted to the point that the ICE facility is seen as a profit center.

The federal government pays just under $100 a day for each detainee the sheriff has in the ICE facility, and it brings in nearly $6 million per year for the commonwealth’s General Fund. The agents will have the ability to detain non-violent immigrants and the accountability needed to observe and respond to that appears to be lacking.

As we must wait to see what actions spring from President Trump’s rhetoric, locally, we must seek out ways to monitor what the feds- and the sheriff -are doing in SouthCoast.

___

Online:

https://bit.ly/2mHVf1o

The Providence Journal (R.I.), March 3, 2017

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to travel around the moon?

Next year, two people will reportedly be taking this trip of a lifetime. What they will see and experience on the mythical celestial object that orbits our earth is anyone’s guess. Until now, only highly trained astronauts have done it.

This incredible excursion is the brainchild of Elon Musk. The world renowned engineer/inventor is one of the cofounders, and current CEO, of Tesla Inc. He’s also helped start up several other businesses, including X.com- which later merged with Confinity in 2000, and became PayPal.

Musk’s company, SpaceX, has worked hand-in-hand with NASA’s Commercial Crew Program to develop the Dragon 2 spacecraft that will take these two people around the moon. (NASA provided most of the funding for this part of the project.) The spacecraft will use the Falcon Heavy rocket, which has already been successfully tested on several occasions, including Feb. 19 at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center.

According to SpaceX, next year’s liftoff will occur at “Kennedy Space Center’s historic Pad 39A near Cape Canaveral- the same launch pad used by the Apollo program for its lunar missions.” This trip, it says, “presents an opportunity for humans to return to deep space for the first time in 45 years and they will travel faster and further into the Solar System than any before them.”

SpaceX has been mum about the identities of the two space travelers-to-be.

All we currently know is that they paid “a significant deposit” for this impending flight on Dragon 2 and, according to Musk’s recent conference call, the big spenders include “nobody from Hollywood.”

This trip sounds (and will be) out of this world, but is the whole venture believable? Based on Musk’s impressive track record, especially with Tesla’s electric cars that run on lithium-ion batteries, it’s pretty hard to bet against him.

And yes, because SpaceX is a private company, Musk must ultimately obtain a license from the Federal Aviation Administration before sending Dragon 2 into orbit. The FAA is within its rights to say “no,” but based on the excitement this unique project has generated, its answer will probably be a resounding “yes.”

If this excursion comes to fruition, and is successful, it would radically transform the way space travel is conducted.

While the cost per individual would be astronomical at this point, as more people take this trip, it could gradually become economical. The rich would get to see what other humans can only imagine, and have the greatest boast yet about what they did on their vacation.

Private space flight could also increase the possibility of setting up a Moon colony, giving human beings a chance to live on this astronomical body for short or long periods of time, and enhance scientific study and exploration of our solar system.

Finally, this promised flight could prove that a private company has the technology, creativity and ability to move us further ahead in the modern space race than we ever thought possible.

We await the Dragon 2 spacecraft’s launch in 2018 with eager anticipation, and wish Musk much success in his quest to enable private citizens to soar around the moon. That would be, to quote Neil Armstrong when he became the first person to walk on the moon in July 1969, one giant leap for mankind.

___

Online:

https://bit.ly/2m3Q0Wo

The Concord Monitor (N.H.), March 8, 2017

Republicans are killing the planet. We say that because President Donald Trump was their nominee and they own him- golden locks, who knows what stocks and barrel of childish tweets.

March 7 brought the news that 52,000 square miles of permafrost- an area about six times as large as New Hampshire -in Canada’s Northwest Territories has melted, choking rivers with sediment and releasing vast volumes of methane.

Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, from 25 to 84 times worse by one estimate.

What did the Trump administration do as the permafrost was melting? It stopped requiring that the oil and gas industry, a powerful emitter of methane on its own, submit comprehensive data on the amount of methane it is releasing.

Last month, some 50 American cities set all-time-high February temperatures. On Feb. 24 it was 72 degrees in Boston; on Feb. 23 it was 65 in Concord, a record for the capital city. In each of the past three years the planet has set a new record average annual temperature.

What did Trump do? Pick career EPA foe and climate change skeptic Scott Pruitt to head the environmental agency and climate change denier Ryan Zinke to head the Interior Department.

Trump and his allies are gnawing away on the Clean Power Plan designed to curb carbon emissions from power plants, lifting or weakening regulations on coal mining and mountain top removal, and rolling back auto industry emission standards.

Trump’s promise to put the nation’s coal miners back to work, the New York Times says, is as likely to happen as the return of Nantucket’s whaling fleet.

Somalia, Kenya and other East African nations are suffering their worst drought in half a century. Millions are threatened by famine and the death toll is growing. Climate change is believed to be a factor.

Trump proposed cutting foreign aid and the State Department’s budget. He wants to reduce the EPA’s workforce by 20 percent and defund the agency’s climate change and clean energy programs.

Last year, the Alaskan village of Newtok voted to relocate. Rising sea levels, raging storms and melting permafrost had made its existence tenuous. Rising sea levels and more intense storms threaten many of the world’s coastlines and coastal cities, including Portsmouth.

What does the Trump administration do? Speed the permitting of the Dakota Access Pipeline to carry oil to Midwestern refineries and order the completion of the Keystone XL pipeline to carry Canadian tar sands oil to refineries in the south.

Both measures will lead to increases in greenhouse gas emissions and global warming.

The horrific condition of the nation’s air and water caused a public clamor that led to the creation of the EPA in 1970. Insidiously, the Trump administration wants to silence critics and prevent public outcry by controlling the information the public can see or not collecting it in the first place.

Trump issued a gag order barring EPA employees from releasing any data or studies to the public prior to their review by political appointees. Similar prohibitions were imposed on other agencies.

Gone from the White House website is any mention of climate change. Nationally, banks of researchers, data experts, computer code writers, librarians and other volunteers are working to archive as much of the agencies’ research and scientific data, paid for with public funds, as they can before it’s hidden or destroyed.

Trump’s war on the environment and information itself is underway. Republicans own that, too.

___

Online:

https://bit.ly/2mkPLau

The Times-Argus (Vt.), March 8, 2017

The bar is open for the Great Donald Trump Regulatory Kegger, and there is no shortage of industries bellying up to the bar to place their orders as federal rules- including many designed to protect consumers and promote transparency -are being rolled back at a dizzying rate.

As The New York Times reported, the Trump administration has overturned, delayed or suspended more than 90 federal regulations aimed at everything from the environment to the Social Security numbers and browsing history of internet customers.

And that’s likely just the beginning. Requests for dozens more are in the pipeline, the Times reported.

So why should you care?

Start with the fact that some of those rules are part of a system designed to prevent the sort of economic calamity that befell the country in 2008. Maybe you heard about it- the Great Recession? The one where taxpayers wrote a $700 billion check, courtesy of our friends in Congress, to prevent the collapse of the country’s economic system after Wall Street’s unregulated financial derivatives bender. The country was left with a $700 billion hangover, millions of people’s life savings were flushed away and not a single Wall Street titan went to prison.

Yes, that recession.

One of the rules that came about as a result of that dark time requires investment banks to collect additional money from pension funds and other customers as a cushion to cover possible future losses- just on the off-chance that history repeats itself.

The banks objected, wouldn’t you know it, and now the Trump administration has decided not to enforce that particular provision. So if the economy teeters again on the brink of collapse due to Wall Street’s love of (still unregulated) credit-default swaps and other ultra-high-risk investments, taxpayers will again be left holding the bag.

The Great Recession also focused a lot of attention on the pay of company CEOs, many of whom were living like kings and collecting obscene bonuses while their workers were just scraping by. The so-called pay-ratio rule was adopted that requires publicly-traded companies to make public the ratio between what the CEO of a company makes and what the average employee at that same company is paid.

That rule has resulted in an actual embarrassment of riches for some CEOs- including more than a few who collected bonuses as their companies lost money -who would rather not have it made public that they are paid exponentially more than the people who do the actual work.

Rather than continue to suffer through that sort of scrutiny and the predictable public ridicule that goes with it, business groups have sought to have the pay-ratio rule overturned, and it appears that the Securities and Exchange Commission is likely to go along.

Telecom giants are feeling the Trump love, too. Verizon and Comcast filed objections to a Federal Communication Commission rule that requires broadband providers take “reasonable measures” to protect people’s private information from being hacked or accidentally released.

Who knew taking reasonable measures could be so . unreasonable?

The Trump administration, apparently, which has moved to repeal the rule.

The financial-services industry, meanwhile, has ordered up a repeal of an Obama-administration rule requiring financial advisors who offer retirement advice to act in the best interests of their clients. The Trump administration has directed the Department of Labor to review the rule with an eye toward overturning it.

Mining interests have also gotten in on the action. They asked the Trump administration to strip out a proposed rule requiring them to set aside money for future cleanup of mines. Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt agreed to delay the rule’s implementation. Mining companies also objected to the “stream protection rule” that prohibited them from dumping their waste into streams. The request was forwarded to Congress, which passed a resolution- signed by the president -that overturned it.

Donald Trump got elected on a promise to “drain the swamp” in Washington.

He may get around to that, but he has apparently decided that the alligators are entitled to a feeding frenzy first, with consumer protections being the main course.

___

Online:

https://bit.ly/2m0z7Lu