Spinning through summer

Crickets chirping at night, cicadas whining   in the afternoon's heat and the sunset noticeably earlier. We spin toward Labor Day.

Naked came the summer

 

"Study for Webster House Provincetown,'' by E. AMBROSE WEBSTER, in "Summer Salon,'' at ACME Fine Art, Boston through Aug. 15.

Chris Powell: Voters went where literacy did

MANCHESTER, Conn.

East Windsor's (Conn.) Democratic and Republican voter registrars asked the other day what may be the great question of public policy and life generally in Connecticut: Where have all the voters gone?

The registrars, Angelo Paul Sevarino and Linda Sinsigallo, put it in a letter published in the Journal Inquirer. They lamented that only 14 percent of East Windsor's voters participated in the recent town budget referendum.

"There is a growing disconnect between the individuals we elect to lead us and the electorate," Sevarino and Sinsigallo wrote. "Maybe it's the hectic schedule of today's parent. Maybe it's the changing family dynamic. Maybe it's just that too many of us are disillusioned with government and no longer believe that our vote matters."

Or maybe, as the philosophers of old might argue, it is simply the corruption of prosperity, the downslope of the rise and fall of civilizations, which rise from struggle to self-sufficiency to prosperity and greatness and then fall to self-satisfaction, entitlement, dependence, and financial and moral corruption.

Local budget referendums are actually the least of it. Adjusting voter participation in Connecticut for the 25 percent or so of the eligible adult population that doesn't even register to vote in the first place, participation in recent presidential elections has been only about 50 percent, in state elections only about 35 percent, and in municipal elections only about 15 percent.

Manchester provides an especially depressing example.

When it held its municipal election in October 1962, Manchester had a population of about 42,000 and about 12,500 people voted. In Manchester's most recent municipal election, in November 2013, only about 7,500 people voted, 5,000 fewer than in 1962, though the town's population had increased by 16,000 to 58,000. That is, over the last half century, as Manchester's population rose by about 38 percent, its municipal-election participation fell by about 40 percent, even after the voting age was lowered to 18.

Sevarino and Sinsigallo cite "the changing family dynamic." That may be a nice way of acknowledging that nearly half the children in Connecticut now are born outside marriage or do not live with both their parents, circumstances that correlate heavily with poverty, physical and mental illness, child neglect and abuse, educational failure, and crime. Two-parent households tend to have time for community participation. Single-parent households tend not to.

But the phenomenon of decline extends far beyond family disintegration. From half to two-thirds of Connecticut's high school seniors fail to master high school math or English or both but are given diplomas anyway and are even delivered at further public expense into remedial programs in college. Enforcement of educational standards now requires more political courage than society can muster.

Few high school graduates understand the country's history, government, and political system. They are largely oblivious to the struggles undertaken and sacrifices made through the ages to broaden democracy and facilitate the pursuit of happiness.

Government in Connecticut and across America has gotten far bigger than the civic virtue remaining available to manage it in the public interest.

This explains the explosion of corruption, as special interests take over not just education but market, business, and professional regulation and politics itself. Most of the diminishing number of people still paying attention are not really citizens at all but financial beneficiaries of thwarting the public interest.

Far more than the Internet, this collapse in civic engagement may explain the decline of newspapers. For no one in Connecticut can seriously engage with his geographic community without them; they remain the primary and often the only source of state and local news. But nobody needs them for keeping up with the Kardashians.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Good for sandy places -- Sahara or shore

 

-- -- Photo by C. Davis Fogg

"Ancient flip-flops,'' at Bowdoin College Museum, Brunswick, Maine.

Ethan Miller: The Millennials' financial-literacy crisis

Summer is a time of endings and beginnings. For most of the about  1.8 million people who just graduated from college, this season marks the end of at least 17 years of formal education and the launch of their careers.

My career started a little sooner than that. 

My first real job was as a student organizer during my senior year at American University, in Washington. Right before I graduated two years ago, when I filed my tax return, I was surprised to learn that I owed an extra $1,200 on the less than $13,000 I earned.

Why did I owe the  Internal Revenue Service so much? Because my employer misclassified me as an independent contractor, I owed self-employment taxes in addition to regular income taxes. And, because I had no idea I needed to pay these taxes every quarter, I owed a large lump sum that Tax Day.

It was a big wakeup call. As a 21-year-old soon-to-be college graduate majoring in economics, I was financially illiterate. Neither in college nor at  top-ranked Wootton High School, in Rockville, Md., did I learn how to manage my money beyond making sure I could budget for the basics.

When I talk to my friends about those tax troubles, I find that their grasp of personal finance is just as poor or worse. While we might feel ready to start our careers after graduation, we’re woefully unprepared to look out for ourselves in the economy.

And we aren’t alone. A recent Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) study showed that less than a quarter of millennials could correctly answer at least four out of five questions on a basic financial literacy quiz.

As the lackluster recovery from the Great Recession lumbers forward, personal finance matters more than ever. Some 53 million Americans — one in three working people — are freelancers. And according to software company Intuit, 40 percent of the workforce will be freelancing or working as an independent contractor by 2020. That’s a pleasant way of saying they lack job stability.

In the so-called gig economy, juggling multiple part-time or temporary jobs to make ends meet is commonplace. Unless they qualify for health care subsidies, people working in this sector pay for medical insurance completely out of pocket. If they manage to save for retirement, they have to do it alone.

Many millennials are learning the rules of the game as we’re playing it. But we’re actually a lot like our elders. The FINRA study showed significant rates of financial illiteracy among Boomers and Gen Xers as well.

The difference is that our generation faces a job market that’s nothing like the one our parents faced. Combined with the $1.2 trillion of student-loan debt currently owed, that means we need more financial smarts if we’re going to thrive in today’s precarious economy.

More public K-12 school systems across the country need to follow the example of states like Virginia by prioritizing students’ financial literacy and requiring a course in personal finance regardless of whether they’re college-bound or not. Everyone needs to know enough of the basics to fend for themselves.

Of course, if our nation’s employers took the high road and paid fair wages, provided health care and retirement benefits, and gave regular, reliable schedules, we wouldn’t have to rely so much on our own wits to get by. But if our bosses won’t look out for us, we have to look out for ourselves.

Many Millennials are struggling to pay our bills now, much less build a solid future. Just as I’ve had to educate myself financially, my entire generation needs to get up to speed on how the economy works (or doesn’t), so we can join together to make it more sustainable for everyone.

Ethan Miller (Ethan99@gmail.com), is a labor-rights activist  and a New Economy Maryland Fellow with the Institute for Policy Studies.  This originated at OtherWords.org.

Robert Whitcomb: Drawbacks of deregulation and DIY

  For years, deregulation and the Internet have been pulling us into a more decentralized and freelance economy, in which there’s wider consumer choice, albeit with stagnant pay and a decline in person-to-person service that forces us to do more tasks ourselves that were previously done by those dinosaurs called “employees’’.

Consider Uber. As I discovered when one of my daughters pulled out her iPhone a couple of years ago on a busy Manhattan street to summon an Uber driver, it’s sometimes faster to find one of these mobile freelancers than it is to find a regulated Yellow Cab in a big city.

But the cabs, being regulated, function as a public utility. They have to meet certain basic minimums of availability, cleanliness and safety that can’t be imposed on the likes of Uber, whose drivers are, of course, not obligated to provide services in the same way as cabbies. I don’t think that we want unregulated drivers to totally replace generally reliable and regulated cabbies.

Long before Uber, of course, there was the partial deregulation of the airlines. While this led initially to lower prices for many travelers, it has also made travel more chaotic and unpredictable. And deregulation, the “Hub-and-Spoke’’ system and relentless airline mergers mean that mid-size cities get shorted on flights.

While better electronics systems make planes less likely to crash these days than three decades ago, air travel itself is increasingly miserable.

In the old, tightly regulated days, figuring out airline schedules and fares was comparatively easy. Now it’s an ordeal, and conditions within airplanes are increasingly crowded and unhealthy. And as the airlines, like other businesses, seek to outsource service to computers so that they can lay off more people, addressing problems by communicating with customer-service humans gets tougher.

Then there’s the new do-it-yourself, deregulated and decentralized energy world. Consider that many affluent folks are saving money and reducing their carbon footprints by having solar panels installed on their roofs. Good in itself! But this takes business away from the utility companies, which could jeopardize the viability of the huge electric grids that utilities maintain. We’ll continue to need that grid to support modern society, with its ever-increasing supply of electronic devices.

Might not it be better if we put more focus on producing green electricity with huge solar-panel arrays and wind-turbine farms maintained by utilities that serve everyone – rich and poor?

xxx

The Obama administration has worked very hard to craft a deal with Iran to try to get it to at least postpone continued work on nuclear weapons.

But the administration’s effort will probably turn out to have been in vain. For one thing, the corrupt theocratic dictatorship that runs Iran will cheat and cheat as it evades inspections. It may receive technical help in this cheating from the likes of fellow police states Russia and China, two of the signatories to the nuclear deal, which will happily sell them militarily useful stuff.

Iran will almost certainly use the billions of dollars freed up by the ending of economic sanctions to increase its troublemaking. Iran’s regime seeks to dominate the Mideast – partly to protect and promote its fellow Shiites and partly because domination is fun and profitable for its leaders. And Tehran hasn’t really toned down its “Death to America and Israel’’ rhetoric.

Now we have made the mullahs more macho. No wonder Iran’s neighborhood is scared.

Some complain that America, as the first nuclear power, is hypocritical in trying to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of other nations. That seeks to make an equivalence between a democratic nation like America and a dictatorship like Iran. And remember why we started our nuclear-weapons program in the first place – to defend ourselves from Germany’s mass-murdering Nazi regime, which was working hard to create an atomic bomb.

Some say that expanding trade with Iran will somehow make it kindlier. They said that about Germany before World War I and China now. Nations have other reasons besides economics to be nasty – for instance, paranoia, power for the sake of power and religion.

Robert Whitcomb (rwhitcomb51@gmail.com) oversees New England Diary. He's also a Fellow at the Pell Center, in Newport, and a partner at Cambridge Management Group (cmg625.com), a healthcare-sector consultancy. He used to be the editorial-page editor of The Providence Journal, the finance editor of the International Herald Tribune and an editor at The Wall Street Journal, among other jobs.

B.I. wind farm and Lucky Sperm Club on Nantucket Sound

Why is construction starting on a wind farm off Block Island, R.I., while, despite 14 years of effort by Cape Wind developer Jim Gordon, nothing has gone up in Nantucket Sound?  And that's even with the Block Island project, Deepwater Wind, about three miles offshore while Cape Wind would be more than five miles offshore -- thus usually out of  sight from land in this hazy and windy region. Well, yes, the Block Island project is much smaller.

But the main  answer is  that Block Island project doesn't have as rich and ruthless a billionaire opponent as Bill Koch, from whose summer house in Osterville (which he only uses a very few weeks a year) you could see Cape Wind's turbines on a crystal-clear day. Mr. Koch, another member of the Lucky Sperm Club (his father founded the industrial empire from which Bill  Koch hugely benefits), has been willing to spend tens of millions of dollars to stop Cape Wind because he doesn't ever want to look at it.

He can take great pride in single-handedly stopping a project that would have provided about three-quarters of southeastern Massachusetts's electricity.

--- Robert Whitcomb

The short season of New England nudity

From the "Clothing Optional: A Figurative Show'' show at ArtProv gallery's show  Aug. 12-Sept. 25. ArtProv is in Providence's Jewelry District, now to a large extent dominated by  medically related things, along with plenty of artists and designers and a few sad law and accounting offices.

Don Pesci: Political monopoly and the plight of young men

Hartford, Connecticut’s capital city, has been a one-horse town since 1971, when the last Republican mayor, Ann Uccello, was recruited by then President Richard Nixon to serve in the U.S. Department of Transportation. Since that time, more than 44 years, Hartford has languished in the grip of the Democratic Party hegemon. Hegemony always has and always will produce aberrant and corrupt government, largely because in one-party systems there are no political checks and balances, the administrative state is captive to an easily manipulable single party, and there are fewer eyes looking through the windows.

Former Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim, convicted and sent to prison on numerous corruption counts, once again is running for mayor in his old bailiwick; and three years after former Hartford Mayor Edie Perez had been convicted of corruption, an appellate court has overturned his hastily arrived at  conviction.

The Perez case now lies before Connecticut’s Supreme Court, three of whose justices have been appointed by Gov.  Dannel Malloy, the nominal head of Connecticut’s Democratic Party.

In addition, Mr. Malloy has appointed three justices to Appellate courts and thirty-nine judges to Superior Courts. The wheels of justice in Connecticut grind exceedingly slow, and so there is little chance that Mr. Perez will any time soon follow in the footsteps of Mr. Ganim and announce his candidacy for his old mayoralty seat.

More than four decades is a longtime for any hegemon. It seems proper at this late date – better late than never – to ask what progress, or regress, Hartford has made during these years of one-party rule?

Although Mr. Malloy and his crime czar, Under Secretary for Criminal Justice Policy and Planning Mike Lawlor, lately have  tried to take credit for a national drop in crime rates, Connecticut cities need much improvement. 

Based on the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report statistics released in September 2013, three Connecticut cities were listed among the top 10 most dangerous cities in the United States with populations fewer than 200,000: New Haven was second, Hartford fourth and Bridgeport sixth. Among the Top 101 cities with the highest percentage of single-parent households in a population of 50,000 plus, Hartford ranked number two, and we know from reliable studies that single parent households in urban areas link with disruptive social pathologies such as teenage pregnancies and the incarceration of young males.

Researcher Sara McLanahan,  at Princeton University, suggests that boys are much more likely to end up in jail or prison by the time they turn 30 if they are raised by single mother. Her study shows that even after controlling for differences in parental income, education, race, and ethnicity, boys raised in single parent households are more than twice as likely to be incarcerated than boys raised within a traditional intact two parent household. Hartford is now the murder capital of New England. As July gave way to August, Everett Scott, 47, was brought to Hartford Hospital with a hole in his chest, apparently another drug-related murder. He did not survive. The usual meeting was held, attended by the usual politicians, who promised to do something. In 2014, there were 19 homicides in Hartford; in the first seven months of the 2015, the death toll was 19.

From the back of the room, Pastor Sam Saylor called out, “We stand at the number 19... In 2012, on Oct. 20, a 20-year-old boy, my son, died. Here we are now at the end of July facing number 20." For the benefit of the politicians seated at a table at the front of the room, Mr. Saylor asked his audience, “How many of you have lost a loved one to gun violence?" Twenty five hands were raised.

The politicians -- among them U.S. Representatives John B. Larson, and Elizabeth Esty -- no doubt well intended, nodded empathetically. Fewer illicit guns among drug dealers might be helpful; the General Assembly already had promulgated to little purpose new gun laws regulating sales among the sort of people in Connecticut who do not join drug gangs, and such regulations obviously had not diminished the death tally in Hartford. More cops might help. Call in the National Guard?

For obvious political reasons, one is not likely to find among Democratic or Republican Party campaign planks measures that will redress this problem; the war on young blacks in cities is a hard political nut to crack, because it would require a courage and honestly politicians find it difficult to muster. It would require, among other things, an acknowledgement that all the palliatives we have over the years thrown at the problem have worsened the lot of young blacks and Hispanic boys.

The black protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, published in 1952, was a specter because people refused to see him. The plight of boys and young men in early 21^st Century is likewise invisible.

Don Pesci (donaldpesci@comcast.net) is a Vernon, Conn.-based political writer.

Long-suppressed film about Trump is now released

This press release, and links, are from my friend Libby Handros,  regarding the long-suppressed documentary about the rise of Donald Trump that's now being released. You'll laugh and cry and get mad.

-- Robert Whitcomb

To watch the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Qy75pRQKMU

To watch the film: www.trumpthemovie.com

DOCUMENTARY TRUMP SUPPRESSED TO BE RELEASED AFTER 25 YEARS

Trump: What’s the Deal? is an investigative documentary that was completed in 1991 --- but has never been seen by the national audience it was made for.  Trump took great pains to suppress the film, threatening networks, distributors, and the filmmakers.

Producer Libby Handros says: “Now that Trump is running for president, it’s time for the American people to meet the real Donald and learn how he does business. The old Trump and the new Trump? They're the same Trump.”

“While much has been written on Donald, few know how he built his business,” she explains. “This documentary, which we made at great personal cost over three years, is filled with vivid and dramatic commentary by Trump insiders and prominent outside observers, who expose how he operated as he rose to national prominence.”

NOT “SELF-MADE”

Trump has claimed to be a self-made billionaire. That’s the first myth this documentary punctures. Trump used his father's money and government connections in addition to taxpayer largesse to begin his empire.

“Donald is neither self-made nor anything like a true small-government conservative,” Handros says. “His father made huge profits off Federal Housing Authority loans, and with the help of his father’s friends in government, Donald used the same techniques to build what fortune he actually has.”

TRUMP’S “WEALTH”

“We also launched one of the first investigations into Trump’s finances to reveal that he did not have nearly as much money as he says he did—a pattern of deception and aggrandizement that continues to this day,” Handros says. “Of all the damaging things we uncovered about Trump, that’s definitely the one that upsets him the most and led to him going after our film so hard.”

A HOST OF REVELATIONS

• Trump’s mob-connected contractor used illegal immigrant labor, provided with no safety equipment, to demolish the building that stood in the way of Trump’s first signature building: Trump Tower
• Trump hired a company that specialized in psychological attacks and blackmail to move tenants out of a building he wanted demolished.
• Trump was a major factor in the implosion of the United States Football League, and made a failed bid to “buy” Mike Tyson.
• Trump was in bed with the Mafia to buy the land for his first casino, Trump Plaza; he had ongoing associations with known mob figures and drug dealers in Atlantic City.
• Trump’s compulsion, then and now, to verbally abuse his wife and other family members as well as his colleagues and employees.
• Trump bad-mouthed three top executives of his Atlantic City casinos after their death in a company helicopter crash, blaming them for the near collapse of his empire.
• Trump’s manipulation and lying to the press… and their complicity in making him the force he is today.
• Trump’s long battle to move the  airport farther away from his mansion in Palm Beach.

And much, much more…

The film was a production of The Deadline Company and produced by Al Levin, an award-winning documentary film producer, (now deceased) and Libby Handros. When the film’s executive producer Ned Schnurman passed away, Handros inherited the piece.

Trump: What’s the Deal? was recently called “an unforgettable investigation into the mating of commerce, corruption and celebrity in America's latest Gilded Age. It explodes the Trump mythology and his presidential campaign with it.’’

Please recycle us

"Envoy (OTBF #10)'' (ash clay, acrylics, vintage bathroom scale top), by GWEN MURPHY, at  the "Reincarnation'' show at Gallery in the Woods, Brattleboro, Vt., through Oct. 3

The gallery says:

"Reincarnation is more than a person or animal in whom a particular soul is believed to have been reborn—it's also a new version of something from the past. So in a sense, reincarnation and recycling are from similar foundations and the current exhibition at Gallery in the Woods explores this fundamental concept.''

Border-jumping cougars in N.E.

---- U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service photo

By BILL BETTY for ecoRI News

Sue Morse is an expert in natural history and one of the top wildlife trackers in North America. A recent article about her caught my attention. She believes the northern counties in Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine and New York would be ideal places for migrating cougars to reoccupy. These areas have what pumas need to survive: prey, open space and cover.

Morse, the founder of Keeping Track, believes that South Dakota cougars will spread to Manitoba and then to Ontario. Their descendants will eventually reach New England.

Besides Ontario, it’s likely the origins of these recruits to New England will be from Quebec and the Maritime Provinces. Mountain lions have already been identified there. Ontario has them as well, and Morse’s Manitoba trekkers will only add to the number of free-ranging North American genotype cougars now  found in the province. Since all North American subspecies are virtually indistinguishable, this will hardly make any difference in their genetic makeup.  And we’ll still call them eastern cougars no matter what anyone says.

The Ontario Puma Foundation has estimated the number of mountain lions at 550. One has been shot, another captured and about 24 confirmations have been made. Nearly 500 pieces of evidence have been recovered. Despite this, obstructionists continue to issue denials, suggesting that all of these cougars are males — hence no natural reproduction.

Studies by Marc Gauthier and Anne-Sophie Bertrand during the past two decades have confirmed 19 mountain lions in New Brunswick and Quebec. Gauthier’s latest estimate of an existing population in Quebec is 10 to 100 pumas. Three mountain lions have been killed in Quebec, including a lactating female cougar that was hit by a truck near the New Hampshire border.

Advocates who favor restocking the Northeast by releasing Western cats into the region reject any suggestion that natural reproduction is taking place in the East because it undermines their raison d'être.

Five Nova Scotia events would be categorized as “class II” discoveries elsewhere, including the 1986 incident where the Bower family carried an unconscious cougar to the side of the road — similar incidents have happened in New England. Nova Scotia officials have classified this knockdown as “virtually certain.”

In addition, a number of provincial employees, including the head of the province’s Endangered Species Division, have reported sightings or found evidence.

In short, what we have sitting across the Canadian border is  Montana is an enormous tract four times the size of Texas where mountain lions are present in sufficient numbers to persist. If pumas can drift down here from Ontario, they can just as easily wander into northern New England from Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.

Many dispersers from eastern Canada will not go very far and will end up establishing home ranges nearby, but a few of these young cats will head south and trickle into New England. For a mountain lion, the Northeast is a hop, skip and a jump from New Brunswick, Quebec, Nova Scotia and Ontario, as opposed to the Black Hills, which are 1,800 miles away and a 22-month cat walk.

Morse and I hold similar views on this subject. Eastern Canadian migration is, in fact, what I have been suggesting for the past decade. She believes this dispersal of cougars to New England and New York may take as long as 30 years for a breeding population to return. Judging by the number of reports recorded and the evidence collected in the Northeast, it’s my view that this migration has been ongoing for decades. It’s possible that we already have a number of mountain lions in New England with ancestry from Quebec or nearby provinces. Others here may be from Michigan and other Midwest states.

Northern New York, New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont have brutal winters, deep snow and the lowest deer population in the Northeast. If Morse believes  that these are ideal are conditions for puma, then what about Spencer, Mass., Pomfret, Conn., or Stanford, N.Y.? They all have relatively moderate weather, less snow, more deer and plenty of open space. These places also have farms, gardens and orchards. It’s where people have chosen to live, and now mountain lions are being seen there.

Maurice Hornocker, the dean of mountain lion researchers, has a simple theory that explains the urban cougar phenomenon. He believes “people attract deer” by providing food for them in the form of flowers, vegetables, fruits trees and the like, and the “deer in turn attract cougars.” Hornocker told me  that he thought cougars would “start showing up in New England.”

Much of the evidence confirming lions has been discovered near settled areas. In 2011, a cougar was road killed on the Merritt Parkway, which runs through Connecticut’s Fairfield County. A million people live there. So do 30,000 deer. Pumas have been discovered in places such as Greenwich, Conn. Cougars of the Valley, a nonprofit based in Canton, Conn., has enlisted the help of local houndsmen to locate cougars using specially trained scat dogs.

Michael Keveny at Clark University analyzed potential sites for cougar reoccupation in Massachusetts and concluded that many parts of the state had adequate habitat for pumas to survive. Some like Cape Cod and Bristol County, Mass., he considered the “best.” Sport hunting zones around Boston have kill totals that are five times higher than those from the state’s three western counties.

In New York State, it’s much of the same story. John Laundre has identified the Adirondacks as a potential site for cougar reoccupation. He believes that the area could support as many as 390 pumas. Western New York could support a lot more. Deer kills in some southern and western New York counties, for example, are more than 10 times higher than in the Adirondacks. With a million whitetails, New York is a fertile hunting ground for apex predators.

Maine’s highest deer harvest was reported in the Midcoast region, where many  of the state’s residents live. Deer kills in these five districts far exceed those from the interior. In fact, 100 northern townships had zero sport hunting kills last year. One person who presumably is watching all of this is Nathan Webb, a carnivore specialist and mountain lion expert with Maine’s Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife, who was recruited from Alberta, Canada.

If Burlington, Vt., and Lake Placid, N.Y., are ideal habitat for mountain lions in Morse’s opinion, then the towns and cities in New England and Atlantic Canada surely meet the definition of cougar heaven. There have been reported sightings of large cats in Rhode Island. The urban/woodland interface on the outskirts of coastal settlements have everything  that mountain lions need to survive: numerous whitetails, small mammals, song birds and waterfowl; adequate edge habitat in the form of fields and clearings; and abundant patches of woods and brush that provide excellent cover.

Ontario dispersers will show up in New England or New York at some point if they haven’t already. It’s possible some of the recruits that establish home ranges in the Northeast will be migrators from Nova Scotia, Quebec or New Brunswick. A few that pass through northern New England will probably continue on to more hospitable places such as New Milford, Conn., or Rochester, Mass. Their arrival will not go unnoticed by other members of their species.

Alan Rabinowitz, CEO of Panthera, lives in Connecticut. He believes there is a small population in the region that is maintaining itself and breeding. He doesn’t accept the explanation that every cougar wandering the edges of suburbia is a former pet that managed to escape. If he’s right, then some local mountain lions must be border jumpers that found their way to southern New England from their natal ranges in eastern Canada by following rivers or hugging the coast.

We should celebrate the arrival of mountain lions in New England. Vermont has done so by putting the face of a catamount on its license plate. The Massachusetts Division of Fisheries & Wildlife has taken a step in the right direction by stating that “a large cat would be safeguarded under state statute — a welcome visitor, like any other indigenous animal (other than threat situations).”

Acknowledgement of mountain lions in their jurisdictions will be the next step for all of the New England wildlife agencies. I’m not optimistic  that it will happen soon. Some states have sent officers to tracking schools in Wyoming or exchanged personnel with western states to learn firsthand about pumas. Others have circled the wagons. Money and manpower are issues.

The odds of this apex predator surviving and reproducing along the coast in Maine, Connecticut and Rhode Island or in the rolling hills in southern Vermont or New Hampshire are much better than in the hinterlands of New England. Abundant resources make these locations a predator’s paradise. And you don’t have to be one of the puma illuminati to figure this out.

Bill Betty is a Richmond, R.I., resident.

Cool water, warm rocks, swift summers

 

"Sunday Afternoon'' (oil on canvas), by GAY FREEBORN, at the Patricia Ladd Carega Gallery, Center Sandwich, N.H.

One of my fondest memories is taking my young children to float on the White River or on the little lake spanned by the Floating Bridge, both in eastern Vermont, at this time of year.

It was for a  week or two each summer for perhaps four years, until they wanted wider and wilder society, and high childhood was over.

--- Robert Whitcomb

Llewellyn King: Obama's nuclear-waste fiascos

  When the Obama administration came into power, one of its first actions was to end work on the Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste repository, in Nevada. In so doing, it delivered a shuddering blow to the U.S. nuclear industry, trashing the project when it was nearly ready to open. The cost to taxpayers was about $15 billion.

Now the administration is going through the motions to suspend another costly nuclear-waste investment when it is about 67 percent complete. Money expended: $4.5 billion. Shutdown cost: $1 billion.

The object of its latest volte face is the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) on the Department of Energy’s Savannah River site in South Carolina. Work started on the facility in 2007, with a 2016 startup envisaged.

But unlike Yucca Mountain, few people outside of the nuclear industry know about the genesis and purpose of the MFFF project.

The project was initiated as a result of a 2000 agreement with the Russians, later amended, in which both countries agreed to dispose of no less than 34 metric tons of excess weapons-grade plutonium — the transuranic element that is the key component of a modern nuclear weapon, and remains radioactive essentially forever.

The DOE’s plan was for the facility to mix the plutonium with uranium to create a fuel for civil nuclear reactors to produce electricity. This recycling technology, developed in the United States originally, has been used in France since 1995.

The DOE has not yet taken a wrecking ball to the MFFF, but it is taking the first steps toward demolition. On June 25, the DOE issued a press release that the industry read as a precursor to a death warrant. The department announced that it was creating a “Red Team,” headed by Thom Mason, director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Oak Ridge, Tenn., to review “plutonium disposition options and make recommendations.”

The DOE statement said the team would “assess the MOX [mixed oxide] fuel approach, the downblending and disposal approach, and any other approaches the team deems feasible and cost effective.”

Industry sources say the choice is between the MOX approach and so-called downblending. In that application, the plutonium is not burned up but is spiked and mixed with a modifier that makes it unusable in weapons.

Then it would be disposed either in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, in Carlsbad, N.M., or in a new repository, if one is commissioned.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science has been pushing the downblending option. But it is using numbers that many believe to be extremely speculative. They come from a private consulting firm hired by the DOE, Aerospace Corporation.

The first number is that the life-cycle cost of the MFFF would be $30 billion, while the life-cycle cost for downblending would be only $9 billion. These numbers are contested by the contractor building the facility, a joint venture between the construction firm Chicago Bridge & Iron Co. and the French nuclear technology giant Areva. They point out that plutonium has never been downblended and that the WIPP in New Mexico has had its own problems.

On Feb. 5, 2014, the plant closed after a salt truck caught fire; there was an unrelated radiological release nine days later. The plant is still closed.

It is believed that Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz favors the MFFF approach as a permanent and scientifically attractive solution, rather than burying the plutonium in New Mexico or elsewhere. However, he may be overruled by the White House and the military chiefs, who know that they are going to have to raise money on a huge scale for nuclear weapons modernization, in light of the deteriorated relationship with Russia and China’s continuing military buildup.

If the MFFF is canceled, it will join a long list of nuclear projects that the government has ordered up and canceled later, often with a huge waste of public money. Another negative is the wastage of engineering talent. Families move to sites, buy houses and send their children to local schools. Then come the pink slips and years of demanding engineering effort are nixed by policy, politics and general incoherence.

Llewellyn King (lking@kingpublishing.com), host of White House Chronicle on PBS, is a longtime publisher, editor, columnist and international business consultant.

Stupidly blocking two badly needed hotel projects

The exasperation of trying to get things done in Providence! One hotel project,  to replace a falling-down and ugly office building across the street from the Rhode Island Convention Center(!), is being held up because some people on the City Council don't want to offend one union; the other big union involved in the controversy desperately wants the hotel built, as do almost all Providence residents and visitors who know about the present dangerous eyesore. And the collapsing structure  is hurting business in the neighborhood.

Another outrage is the idiotic and seemingly endless blocking by some rigid officials of hotel proposals that would finally fill the ugly and dusty or muddy (depending on the weather)  long-vacant triangular lot near the U.S. District Courthouse and the downtown post office. The officials complain  that the proposals  are too  "suburban.'' But the vacant lot shouts to people entering the heart of downtown DERELICTION!

For that matter  this barren mini-steppe lot reminds us of the back of abandoned big-box store in the suburbs.

Please, please officials, drop your political alliances and aesthetic obsessions and get building going again in downtown Providence, for everyone's good.

Thank God there's some movement on developing the Route 195 relocation land.

-- Robert Whitcomb

Pond life

 

Photo from current Clare Mowbray show of underwater photos, "Under White Oak Pond,'' at Patricia Ladd Carega Gallery, Center Sandwich, N.H. White Oak Pond is in Holderness, N.H., in the foothills of the White Mountains.

The beauty of bronze

"Vietnamese Bronze Vessel 1,'' by Mark Cooper, Vu Duc Hieu and Nguyễn Văn Hải. Mr. Cooper is represented by Samson Gallery, Boston.

Cleaning up the Blackstone River naturally

Living Systems Laboratory built in 2013 for progress and profits cleans 10,000 gallons of river water daily.

BY CATHERINE SENGEL, for ecoRI News

SOUTH GRAFTON, Mass.

The heads of a few dozen turtles bob up from the waters surrounding a floating island along a verdant stretch of the Blackstone River. Five years ago, this expanse beside the Blackstone Canal and below the Fisherville Pond Dam was a dead zone, devoid of aquatic life.

But thanks to an experimental Living Systems Laboratory built in 2013 on the former site of the historic Fisherville Mill, 10,000 gallons of water are cleaned daily of the contaminants that once choked all living matter. By reintroducing the biological diversity once part of the ecosystem, the operation is restoring vitality to the river at a pace a thousand times faster than nature.

In addition, owner and developer Gene Bernat hopes it will offer an unparalleled education on our relationship with our environment.

“All of the different biological kingdoms that we employ here provide natural solutions to more than 200 years of incremental problems,” Bernat said during a recent tour of this lab. “It’s a visual roadmap of how we get from an extractive economy to a sustainable economy, and the premier experience in ecological literacy that you can find in the Northeast.”

Part of a string of mill villages in the valleys below the river’s headwaters in Worcester, Fisherville was home to one of the largest mills on the Blackstone River, supplying wool to the world from the early 1700s. In the mid-19th Century, a network of 48 granite locks and steps channeled flow along the Blackstone Canal, allowing the visionaries of America’s Industrial Revolution to power their mills and move goods in and out between Worcester and Providence.

Over the centuries, the river went from supplying food and canoe transport between communities for Native Americans and early settlers to providing energy for manufacturing and finally a convenient disposal place for waste.

In 1999, the 300,000-square-foot Fisherville Mill burned, sending deposits of asbestos to coat yards as far away as Hopedale and adding to an already toxic legacy. When talk turned to cleaning up the remaining pile of mill rubble after eight years, Bernat’s Fisherville Redevelopment Co. teamed with the town of Grafton to apply lessons learned elsewhere about resource restoration combined with an economic incentive.

The land would be cleared for Mill Villages Park, a development of 240 residential units with 60,000 square feet of commercial space. Site remediation was just finishing when the market collapse put a halt to building, but work on the Living Systems Laboratory moved forward.

Bernat, from three generations of textile makers, grew up dividing his summers between work in the Bernat yarn mill in Uxbridge and the woods of the family farm in Grafton. His time in forestry had sparked an interest in natural systems and resource management. To his reasoning, there was no question that the property would be a long-term durable asset for the Blackstone Valley and the community, with or without housing and shops.

Situated within the Blackstone River  Valley National Heritage Corridor, the Fisherville Mill site is on one of largest existing water areas on the Blackstone Canal, with remnants of historic locks, a 200-foot-wide step dam and a continuous perennial waterfall from days of industrial development. Fisherville Pond is one of the last mill ponds on the river, and a premier migratory waterfowl nesting site.

In addition to large expanses of mostly untouched floodplain, the surrounding area includes still-intact mill villages, including mill housing. Two other yarn mills within a quarter mile, in Saundersville and Farnumsville, put Mill Villages Park and Pavilion at their center.

Rather than dwell on impediments to park progress, Bernat began to consider the entire area as a living, teaching landscape.

A consortium of area universities, including Brown, Clark, Tufts and Worcester Polytechnical Institute, along with the Blackstone Headwaters Coalition, Blackstone Heritage Corridor Coalition and Mass Audubon, joined Bernat to launch the Living Systems Laboratory. John Todd Ecological Design (JTED), a global pioneer in the use of natural systems to remove contaminants from water, was enlisted to help customize operations to the challenge at hand.

On the premise that one organism’s waste is another organism’s food source, JTED used a combination of tanks and aquatic cells in its bioremediation to mimic natural processes.

Bins of wood pellets and water support the growth of fungi that consume petroleum hydrocarbons.

In a temporary, riverside greenhouse, water from the Blackstone is pumped through a series of bins. Filled with wood pellets and water, they support growth of a variety of fungi that consume oil residues.

From there, the water moves through a progression of six tanks, or “aquatic cells,” where native plants, shrubs and trees hang on fiberglass racks, roots reaching down to support worlds of algae, zooplankton and other microorganism which in turn nourish snails, clams and fish.

“By introducing the contaminants, we’re telling nature to try and use them,” Bernat said.

The older the system, the more mature and diverse the biology, the better it is at treating waste products, according to Bernat. Species purposely excluded in construction of the ecological incubator introduced themselves into bins and tanks, he noted, proving that every species has a purpose in nature.

The concept is new and radical and has enormous potential. The first year of operation saw a more than 95 percent drop in petroleum hydrocarbons in water samples from input to outflow back into the river. Water clean enough to drink is now packed with beneficial organisms and life forms that digest oils, dyes and contaminants, and returned to the Blackstone River.

Canal restorers made of bamboo and local vegetation float on the Blackstone, supporting ecosystems once abundant in the river.

Taken together, bins and tanks create a circulating loop — a stream within the stream in which water is purified at a rate of 10,000 gallons a day and the canal is re-seeded with healthy ecology. In the river, constructed bamboo “canal restorers” — some surrounded by oil booms to collect slick — float upstream of an old granite bridge collecting and consuming additional pollutants.

“Everything that occurs in here in this greenhouse is happening in the natural world around us without our intervention,” Bernat said. “But with our intervention, we make it over a thousand times as effective in cleaning up contaminants as the natural world does itself.”

The site has already received both local and international attention for its community-designed Mill Villages Park and the chemical-free remediation. Beyond the value of an ecological wastewater treatment system, Bernat champions the educational potential of the operation.

From the obvious to the microscopic, there are centuries of historical, cultural and biological lessons on the past, present and future for levels from preschool to Ph.D.

Students from Worcester Tech are duplicating the process in a greenhouse they built at their high school to study bioremediation. Senior fellows, researchers and policymakers from the University of Rhode Island Coastal Institute visited to learn about the system’s EcoMachine™ design.

In December 2014, the town was awarded a $10,000 grant by the Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor for the Fisherville Mill Redevelopment site. The money will be used to create a teaching landscape, build a more permanent greenhouse, and develop educational materials and programs focused on the ecology and industrial history of the Blackstone River Valley.

Students from the Conway School of Landscape Design created a vision plan for the site that will, in time, include nature paths, a boat launch, an amphitheater, exhibit space and a model of cross-discipline education. Plants are being introduced into aquatic labs in the hope that flowers can be grown and sold commercially as an added economic component.

“What we learn here and teach here is applicable to the environment no matter where,” Bernat said. “Rather than a scholastic understanding of how things work, you should be able to walk through the site and really begin to grasp the miracles of nature and how we help that process or how we’ve damaged that process through our past activities.

“If you look at rivers almost without exception in the industrialized world, they really are the sewer system of our society.”

One of the many lessons the river offers is that there is no such thing as “away” when it comes to waste. Whether buried in a landfill or dumped in a river to be carried out to Narragansett Bay and beyond, that garbage still exists along with its long-term consequences.

“There’s an intimate dynamic between humanity and our environment ... we are all canaries in a coal mine,” Bernat said. “We see animals dying and habitat being destroyed and we just think it’s the price of progress.”

The Living Systems Laboratory is a vision for progress and profits without environmental cost, according to Bernat. He’s excited to announce that frogs finally returned to the river this year.

“If we’re going to survive, we have to start looking at water in a completely different way,” he said. “The park vastly improved South Grafton, and now we have the potential to do so much more.”

David Warsh: Scott Walker: Political asset stripper

SOMERVILLE, Mass..

This appeared in economicprincipals.com last spring.

Republican Party business interests and  centrists have rallied around Jeb Bush. Tea Party conservatives so far seem to prefer Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker to the rest of the list of would-be contenders – Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul, Rick Perry, Marco Rubio, and Rick Santorum. {Editor's note: This was written before the recent rise of Donald Trump.}

The first state primary is still  months away.  But to understand the appeal of Bush and Walker to their respective constituencies, it helps to know something about the situation on the ground in Wisconsin.

Walker, 47, who rose from state legislator in 1993 to county executive for Milwaukee to governor, achieved national prominence in 2011 when he successfully campaigned to strip the state’s public unions of most of their collective bargaining rights.  He survived a recall election and, in 2014, won a second term.

Recently he picked a new fight with organized labor when he said he would sign “right-to-work” legislation on the verge of passage in the Republican-led legislature. The measure would deprive unions of their right to charge non-member workers the equivalent of dues.

Robert Samuels, of The Washington Post, spent time in the state recently and found the public unions reeling. Describing an ill-attended meeting in a union hall in a small town in central Wisconsin, his report began:

The anti-union law passed here four years ago, which made Gov. Scott Walker a national Republican star and a possible presidential candidate, has turned out to be even more transformative than many had predicted.

Walker had vowed that union power would shrink, workers would be judged on their merits, and local governments would save money. Unions had warned that workers would lose benefits and be forced to take on second jobs or find new careers.

Many of those changes came to pass, but the once-thriving public sector unions were not just shrunken — they were crippled….

The state branch of the National Education Association, once 100,000 strong, has seen its membership drop by a third. The American Federation of Teachers, which organized in the college system, saw a 50 percent decline. The 70,000-person membership in the state employees union has fallen by 70 percent.

The story artfully hints at the disparities in job security, wages, and benefits that exist between union and non-union jobs.  Statistics are hard to come by, but where government workers 50 years ago routinely accepted lower levels of compensation in return for greater job security and reliable pension benefits, anecdotal evidence suggests that government salaries in recent decades have tended to equal and often surpass comparable private-sector employment opportunities.

Samuels writes,

While some union members have been energized by the fight, they say they notice a new, more vocal animosity toward them. It has been particularly pronounced in rural areas, where public-sector jobs were some of the most prized gigs in town.

In King [Wis], population 1,700, [union steward Terry] Magnant said she couldn’t change a sign at the union hall without someone giving her the finger. Farther west, in Stanley, prison workers said they ditched their favorite pizza pub because the owner stood by while other customers called them “leeches.”

In Reedsburg, that tension surprised Ginny Bourgeois, 52, who clerks at a local Kwik Trip. The community had always been divided, defined as much by the factories manufacturing car parts as it was by cornfields now blanketed in snow. Still, it was a place where the community got together for spaghetti and corn feeds and filled bleachers to watch the Reedsburg Beavers play. Now, she said, people were fighting over politics at gas stations.

Still, she felt unions needed to sacrifice.

“Everyone knows teachers’ insurance was some of the best you could get,” Bourgeois added. “They do fairly well around here, and they do a good job teaching. But everyone in this town has had to tighten their belts. They should too.”

Judy Brey, a 58-year-old speech therapist who taught in the community for 22 years, said such sentiment hurt teachers’ morale. She said she grew up admiring her dad, who put six children through college on his union-supported job as a forester. “I don’t make a lot, but we’ll be okay with retirement, ” she said he told her. That, she was taught, was the reward for public service in Wisconsin.

“Now I’m always nervous that everyone will think they’re moochers,” Brey said. “That I’m a moocher.”

The history of the union movement can only be understood in the larger context of American business in the 20th Century – but it seldom is,   Even the broad outlines of the story of American business are not well understood.

Alfred Chandler, the great historian of business, who spent his last 40  years at  Harvard Business School, worked tirelessly to demonstrate the importance for economic growth of giant corporations – not just in the US, but in Britain, Europe and Japan, too.  First in Structure and Strategy: Chapters in the History of American Industrial Enterprise (MIT, 1962), then in The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business, (Harvard, 1977) and finally in Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Harvard, 1990), Chandler described and analyzed the stability that arose when industries became oligopolies, markets dominated by a handful of first-movers, each with substantial power to set prices, all determined to compete on other grounds.

But when the time came for an international conference in 1994 to celebrate what was clearly a triumph of empirical economics, Big Business and the Wealth of Nations (Cambridge, 1997), European unions were barely mentioned. and American unions had no place at all in the index. Moreover, it was already apparent that market conditions had changed dramatically since the 1970s  – that the twin forces of innovation and globalization were undermining familiar arrangements of enterprise that had begun taking shape more than a hundred years before.

No comparable economic history of the labor movement exists, though Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Harvard, 1998), by Daniel T. Rodgers, of Princeton University, made a very good start.  Steven Greenhouse, for  19 years a labor reporter for The NewYork Times, contributed The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker (Knopf, 2008) before he retired earlier this year to begin another book. In the mid-1950s, 35 percent of American workers belonged to unions, Greenhouse writes; in 2008, the number was 12.1 percent and declining, just 7.5 percent in private sector unions -- the lowest proportion since 1901.  But those numbers come toward the end of the book, not the beginning.

The story of the last  40 years has been one of pell-mell corporate  restructuring in industrial economies and newly industrializing ones around the world.  Call it what you like: deregulation, a Big Bang, the Leap Outward, Perestroika. Private unions have been intimately affected by the turmoil, public unions somewhat less so.

In the US, the   Employment Retirement Security Act of 1974, known as ERISA, spelled out rules under which companies could legally freeze their pension plans.  Few have hesitated to do so.

But no such measure was undertaken for public pensions.  As Mary Williams Walsh, the dean of pension reporters, wrote recently inThe New York Times,  cracks have started to appear in the legal foundation of government pensions, the  doctrine of “vested rights:”

First in Detroit, then in Stockton, Calif., now in New Jersey, judges and other top officials are challenging the widespread belief that public pensions are untouchable.

Walker is clearly part of this evolution.  He should be seen to have begun doing something that needs to be done – albeit in an especially combative way.  Just as corporate restructuring called forth a gallery of types over the years – entrepreneurial geniuses and private equity kings, roll-up artists and spin-off wizards, merger mavens and makeover masters – so the restructuring of labor markets eventually will be seen to have produced a few basic sorts of innovative leaders.  Walker is one such rxample..

Among corporate chieftains, the lowest rung is reserved for those known as asset-strippers, a term of no great precision, except that the community knows one when it sees one —  raiders who borrow heavily and then sell off assets to pay down debt with no clearer goal than the accumulation of riches. My hunch is that is the category in which Walker will come to be placed – a political asset-stripper of uncommon ambition, who sought to convert a policy of smug confrontation to personal gain.

It’s Wisconsin, a state of sharply divergent traditions, not Indiana or Michigan; maybe it could not have been done any other way. But Scott Walker is very unlikely to become the Republican nominee, much less president of the United States.

David Warsh, proprietor of economicprincipals.com,  is a  longtime economic historian and financial journalist.

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Cleavage and creation

"Cleavage'' (woodcut), by ANTHONY PILLA,  at Alpers Fine Art, Andover, Mass.