Carolyn Morwick : Vermont's Food Fight Fund, etc.

  The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org), on whose editorial advisory board I used to serve, does a very useful review of legislative action in the New England states.  Here's the first of the six we will run, with many thanks to NEBHE -- Robert Whitcomb

Vermont lawmakers  in their session this year passed a $5.5 billion budget along with $5.5 million in new taxes.

Property taxes were raised 5%. Spending overall increased by 4.1% over the prior year. The budget included a 1.6% increase in reimbursement rates for health care providers who accept Medicaid payments, which will cost $2.6 million. Lawmakers also increased the cigarette tax by 13 cents.

The budget includes:

$3.5 million from supplemental property tax relief fund to pay for educational data initiatives. $4.5 million to the Enterprise Incentive Fund to retain jobs in Vermont. $500,000 for Vermont Economic Development Authority for entrepreneurial lending program. $2.2 million for raises for newly unionized home health care providers. $1.5 million for working land investments. $19 million total for Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)—a 1% increase. 1% increase for Vermont State Colleges. The backbone of Vermont’s heritage and economic viability is the “working landscape” consisting of agriculture, food system, forestry, and forest product-based businesses. About 20% of Vermont’s land is used for agricultural purposes and 75% as forestry. In 2012, the Legislature passed the Working Lands Enterprise initiative for the management and investment of $1 million into agricultural and forestry-based business.

Session Highlights

With the support of Gov. Peter Shumlin, lawmakers raised Vermont’s minimum wage from $8.73 an hour, which is nearly a dollar above the federal minimum, to $9.60 in 2016, $10 in 2017 and $10.50 in 2018. Beginning in 2019, the minimum wage will be indexed to inflation.

Lawmakers also passed a comprehensive economic development bill, providing support for start up, expansion and retention of high tech companies that offer good wages in Vermont. It creates the Vermont Strong Scholars and Internship Program to assist families with access to a college education and adds $500 million to the Vermont Entrepreneurial Lending Program, which already has $1 million in federal funding.

In the area of genetically modified organisms (GMO), legislators passed a law requiring that food produced totally or partially produced from genetic engineering be labeled as such. The Vermont General Assembly established The Vermont Food Fight Fund to be used for implementing the requirements of the law. Private donations will be accepted for the fund, which will help Vermont establish its labeling law and address anticipated legal challenges. The attorney general shall report to the General Assembly in January 2015 regarding whether milk products will be subject to a labeling requirement of the law.

Lawmakers also passed a comprehensive package of bills aimed at curbing addictive drugs. The bills include implementing standards for doctors to consult the Vermont Prescription Monitoring System to ensure patients are not “doctor-shopping”—obtaining controlled substances from multiple health care practitioners without the prescribers’ knowledge of the other prescriptions.

The legislation also creates a pilot program for wider distribution of a drug that reverses opioid overdoses. The law also:

Implements participation in a national database to track the sales of non-prescription, over-the-counter chemicals used in the manufacture of methamphetamines (this real-time monitoring can prevent the excessive sales of those chemicals to a purchaser). Establishes an unused drug disposal protocol so unused prescription medications don’t fall into the wrong hands.

  Creates an outreach program through the Department of Public Safety to educate pawnshop owners and precious metal dealers about laws dealing with the purchase and sale of precious metals that might have been stolen in drug-related robberies. Vermont banned the use of hand-held cell phones while driving, beginning Oct 1, 2014. Under the final bill, first violation for driving while using a hand-held device carries a fine up to $200, with steeper fines and points assessed against a driver’s license for subsequent offenses.ands-free use is permitted under the law. The penalty for texting while driving carries a fine and two points against a driver’s license. Accumulation of 10 or more points in a two-year period results in automatic license suspension.

Efforts to consolidate school districts failed despite efforts by members of the House and Senate Education committees. House bill 883 would have reduced the number of school districts from 270 to 50 over a six-year period. (Vermont has the smallest number of students per school district in the U.S. The average school district has 313 students, according to a report made to the legislature in 2009.) The Senate Education and Finance committees’ proposal for consolidation included a package of incentives for school districts to voluntarily merge. Lawmakers chose in the end to pass House Bill 876, which includes a process to develop a statewide hearing on the issue of school district consolidation.

Higher Education Legislation Enacted

Vermont Strong Scholars and Internship Program

The Vermont Strong Scholars and Internship Program is part of a larger economic development bill. It establishes a scholarship program, which provides for high school graduates to attend up to two years of college for free. The law forgives a portion of student loans for eligible students issued by VSAC. The loan- forgiveness program is open to Vermont residents enrolled in a qualifying postsecondary institution on or after July 1, 2015. It also provides for a loan forgiveness program to those graduates who stay in the state and work in key sectors of the economy.

State Authorization Reciprocity Agreement

Vermont state budget amendments allow the state to enter into interstate reciprocity agreements for purposes of authorizing online postsecondary programs. The secretary of the Agency of Education or another appropriate Vermont agency will address any complaints relative to Vermont institutions participating in a recognized interstate reciprocity agreement.

K- 12 Legislation Enacted

An Act Relating to Providing Access to Publicly Funded Pre-K Education

Provides that pre-K education will be extended to all school districts in Vermont. Over 80% of school districts in the state already offer some pre-K programs. The new law will require school districts to offer at least 10 hours of instruction for 35 weeks to any preschool-aged child. The state will reimburse districts of qualified pre-K programs offered by private or public providers.

Carolyn Morwick handles government and community relations at the New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org) and is former director of the Caucus of New England State Legislatures.

R&R

 

"Composicion'' (oil on canvas, 1930), by WILFREDO LAM,  in the show "Wilfredo Lam: Imaging New Worlds,'' at the McMullen Museum of Art, at Boston College (Chestnut Hill, in Newton, Mass.), Aug. 30-Dec. 14.

"Puzzling' newspaper purchase deconstructed

  Nice little  analytical piece in Commonwealth Magazine about the "puzzling'' purchase of  The Providence Journal.

Llewellyn King: Beware the armchair terrorists

  Terrorism isn’t what it used to be. Disruptive technology is at work, and terrorism is much more threatening than it was.

The long-running, terrorist wars of the last century –  such as those of the Palestinians, the Basques in Spain, or the Kurds in Turkey – were relatively contained, both in the fields of operation and the political motivations.

The new face of terrorism is more awful, more random, and has little of the political purpose of terrorism of the past, however terrible its consequences were.

A new generation of robots is coming, which will make remotely controlled terrorism a real threat throughout the world. Add to that threat the profound difference in terrorism motivation.

Yesterday’s terrorism, though heinous, could claim high purpose: It was wholesale terrorism with political goals to be attained by murder and destruction of civilian targets. Today’s terrorism, by contrast, is increasingly retail, motivated by hatred and revenge. Often, the motivation is more religious than nationalistic. The 9/11 attacks were the harbinger of this new terrorism.

Now take blind, irrational hatred, as in the Middle East, mix it with killer robots technology, and you have a huge global threat.

In May, the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons convened a first-ever meeting of experts in Geneva to discuss Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems, which could be the start of a wave of anonymous killing across continents and oceans.

These new robotic weapons can do everything that a human with a bomb or improvised explosive can do. The old brake on terrorism -- that the terrorist would be caught or, more likely, be killed in the attack -- could be over. The age of the armchair terrorist is at hand.

We have all seen the carnage from a simple bomb made from fuel oil and fertilizer. Now add to that the possibility that bombs and other weapons could be made and stored for future detonation using mobile phone technology; or that remotely operated vehicles could drive down a street with machine guns blazing.

Then there are drones. The United States has pioneered the highly sophisticated Predator -- remotely-piloted vehicles that can destroy a target across continents and oceans with precision. But non-lethal drones are doing all sorts of work, from examining pipelines to determining the views from potential skyscrapers in New York.

Not only will tomorrow’s terrorists have farther reach, but they will also have the Internet to create chaos. Imagine a Web whisper about a drone armed with biological or chemical agents flying over a big city, its effects magnified by public panic. Likewise, a drone armed with a dirty nuclear weapon – its impact is likely to be quite limited, but the public panic over radiation could cause severe incident.

Israel may have been more panicked over the appearance of a drone from Gaza than the rockets that the Iron Dome missile system took out. A slow-moving drone at rooftop level might one day be a greater threat than a fusillade of high-flying rockets.

The late James Schlesinger, a former Defense secretary and CIA director, liked to discuss with me the British Empire and how it had held together.  Because I had grown up in a British colony,  then Southern Rhodesia and now called Zimbabwe, he thought I could tell him.

The answer is a combination of economics, psychology and formation before the worldwide proliferation of small arms and explosives. It was fundamental after the Indian Mutiny of 1857-58 that weapons be kept strictly in the hands of the British. African regiments and police, for example, were seldom armed, and then only for special purposes.

Schlesinger emphasized that all arms developments demanded further developments, because your enemy would soon catch up with you. This has happened throughout history: The British invented the tank in World War I, the Germans perfected it in World War II and overran Europe with its Panzer divisions.

Those who hate the West may use its own technologies to attack it at random with remote-controlled weapons, mobile phones, Google maps, and vehicles invented in America. Disruptive technologies are coming to terrorism -- and that’s a horror.

Llewellyn King (king@kingpublishing.com) is executive producer and host of  "White House Chronicle'' on PBS.

Charles Chieppo/Jamie Gass: Legislators do the wrong thing for students

BOSTON After losing the 1958 governor's race, George Wallace, then considered a moderate on segregation by mid-20th century Alabama standards, said he would never get "out-segged" again. Four years later, after his election by the state's virtually all white voters, it was easy for him to declare in his inaugural address, "I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say, segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."

Five months later, it was easy for him to "stand in the schoolhouse door" and attempt to block two qualified African-American students from enrolling at the University of Alabama.

Fast forward more than half a century, and it was easy for Massachusetts state senators to appease the monied interests of the education establishment and reject legislation that would have raised the cap on charter school seats in the lowest-performing 10 percent of Massachusetts school districts from 18 percent to 23 percent of overall enrollment.

It was easy for supposed charter school "supporters" to file poison-pill amendments to the bill, then wait until it was clear that the legislation was going down before casting their votes in favor.

But in politics, what is easy is often wrong.

Despite historic educational improvements over the last two decades, nearly 100,000 largely poor and minority Massachusetts students remain trapped in chronically underperforming district schools.

In Boston, over 15,000 students vied for just 1,700 charter school seats last year. Statewide, there were over 40,000 students on charter school wait lists. For these children and their families, there are no school choices and no way out.

Charters came within two points of closing the 20-point wealth-based achievement gap on 2013 MCAS tests. The year before, 20 charter schools, including many urban charters, finished first in Massachusetts on various tests. Many inner-city charters outperform even affluent suburban schools.

A 2013 Stanford University study found that Boston charter-school students are closing the achievement gap faster than any other public schools in the country. Students learn as much from one year in a Boston charter school as they do in two years in the Boston Public Schools.

The study also found that Massachusetts has the nation's best charter schools. Statewide, charter students gain an additional month and a half of learning in English and two and a half months in math each year compared with the commonwealth's traditional public schools.

These facts build upon the findings of a 2009 Boston Foundation report that the academic impact of a year spent in a Boston charter was comparable to that of a year in one of the city's elite exam schools. In middle school math, it was equivalent to one-half of the achievement gap between black and white students.

Charter schools are also affordable. When students choose to leave a district school to attend a charter, public funding follows the student. A recent Pioneer Institute report showed that raising charter enrollment to accommodate wait-listed students up to the current spending cap of 18 percent in the commonwealth's 17 lowest-performing urban districts would only increase the funds flowing from districts to charters to 5 percent of the districts' $2.5 billion in net school spending.

Districts would get more than a quarter of that back over a decade thanks to generous state reimbursements for students the districts no longer educate.

Massachusetts' s barriers to educational opportunity were not left here by glaciers, they are man-made. Entrenched special interests with nearly limitless bank accounts lobby Beacon Hill to maintain obstacles like enrollment caps, huge wait lists, and needless red tape that deny educational opportunity to underprivileged children, but ensure the continuing comfort of adults in the system.

In the 50th anniversary edition of Simple Justice, Richard Kluger's definitive history of the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling that struck down the doctrine of "separate but equal," he concluded that "America is a colossus of contradictions… justice of any type cannot materialize… without the binding up of its constituent elements."

In rejecting legislation that would have lifted the charter-school cap, the Massachusetts Senate blocked justice from being done and approved the 21st century version of segregation by preventing more poor and minority children from accessing high-quality educational opportunity.

It was an easy vote; it was also wrong.

Charles Chieppo is a senior fellow of and Jamie Gass directs the Center for School Reform at Pioneer Institute, a Boston-based think tank.

Freshwater heaven

 

"Early Morning on Rattlesnake Mountain'' (in Rumney, N.H.)  (oil), by CELIA JUDGE, at  the Surroundings Art Gallery, in  Center Sandwich, N.H.

Mideast paradox

It's interesting that Arabs have more rights and security in Israel than they do in any Arab-run country, except maybe Tunisia.

Red skies

 

"Red Sky'' (oil on canvas), by PAUL RESIKA, at Berta Walker Gallery, Provincetown, in his Aug. 1- Aug. 17 show.

My father and others in our coastal town liked to say the old line:

"Red sky in  morning, sailors take warning/ Red sky at night, sailor's delight.''

But I  never found much connection between the time of day that the sky, or at least the horizon, was red, and coming storminess or good weather.

It was just another bit of comforting folk malarkey.

-- Robert Whitcomb

What really is meant by 'patient engagement'?

  Cambridge Management Group (cmg625.com) senior adviser <a href="http://www.cfah.org/blog/2014/what-physicians-told-us-about-patient-engagement">Marc Pierson, M.D., had some pithy things </a>to say when he and other experts were recently interviewed by the Center for Advancing Health.

Here are some of the remarks of Dr. Pierson, who is also retired vice president for clinical information and quality for PeaceHealth's St. Joseph Medical Center, Bellingham, Wash.:

<strong> CFAH: ''Here is the CFAH definition of patient engagement: 'Actions people take to support their health and benefit from their health care.' What's missing from this definition? What would you add, subtract or word differently?''</strong> <strong> Dr. Pierson:</strong> ''....Defining {patient} engagement is very much the product of who is doing the defining. If from within health care, then the key question becomes for what or for whom is 'patient' engagement primarily intended to benefit?...I would prefer thinking of 'people' engaged in their health and health care. However, I do like that this definition recognizes that both health and health care require people's active participation...Medical care is not the same as health. Health is much more than the lack of illness...We need to incorporate more perspectives from real people and ask them what they need to become more engaged with their medical conditions, their health, and their well-being.'' <strong>CFAH: ''If a person is engaged in their health and health care, what difference does that make? To whom?''</strong>

<strong>Dr. PIERSON: </strong>"Typically, engagement is defined by health care insiders as paying attention to what you are told to do and being compliant with 'orders.' The current non-system of health care plays into this by being disconnected and difficult for people to understand or navigate....

''Health care offers technology and knowledge but is set up for the people that work inside it, not for its clients' ease, safety, or affordability. Payment for health care is based on professionals managing clients' ill health, not on engaging with people to prevent illness, create well-being, or for self-care of illnesses and chronic conditions.

''People are scared of what they are not allowed to know or understand. They don't want to be more dependent. They don't want to end up going to an emergency room. Their primary relationships are with family, friends, neighborhood, and community — not professional service providers.''

Roz Chast on 'Being, Nothingness,' etc.

 

From the show "Being, Nothingness and Much, Much More: Roz Chast, Beyond The New Yorker,'' at the Bruce Museum, in Greenwich, Conn., through Oct. 19.

Ms. Chast is  best known a cartoonist for The New  Yorker but she is also a distinguished writer. Her latest book, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (Bloomsbury, 2014), deals with her aged parents -- a topic of great interest and often exasperation for Baby Boomers who are dealing with such people even as they slide and stagger into old age themselves.

But you still can't hide

 

"Encrypted'' (mixed media on paper),  by GALEN CHENEY, in the "Spaces In Between'' show at the Preservation Framer  & Art Gallery, in North Attleboro, Mass., through July 26.

Build that gas pipeline; noisy times

Because of pollution, global warming and global geopolitics, we obviously need to move away from fossil fuels, especially coal and oil, but also natural gas. Still, our economy will primarily run on fossil fuels for a few more decades as we move too slowly away from them. The least dirty one — and quite cheap now — is gas.  

New England, if it’s to remain economically competitive with the rest of the country, must have access to more gas, of which there’s lots nearby, in Pennsylvania and upstate New York. The best way to obtain it is to build a 180-mile-long pipeline from central New York to a transmission hub in Dracut, north of Boston, as proposed by Kinder Morgan, the big pipeline company. However, it’s tougher than ever to get big things done in America. Well-heeled interest groups can hold up projects indefinitely, whatever the public interest. This is happening in the northern part of western and central Massachusetts, where some big landowners are trying to keep out the project. Many people understandably don’t want a pipeline across their acres, even with generous payments from the likes of Kinder. But New England has been on the edge of disaster several times in recent years when bad weather, and that gas is used for heating, cooking and electricity-generation, forcea utilities to turn to highly polluting oil when the gas-pipeline system — built originally only for heating and cooking — can’t meet demand, notably in cold waves.

We’ve barely missed region-wide blackouts. Meanwhile, New England’s pipeline-capacity deficit makes our energy bills higher and ability to expand business lower, and undermines economic-development planning. The engineering consultants Black & Veatch, in a study for the New England States Committee on Electricity, warns that severe gas shortages threaten the reliability of our electricity grid over the next few years. Many foes of pipelines (or at least of pipelines that go through their property, who tend to be affluent and thus can own a lot of land and can afford to hire lawyers to fight public projects) say that if we must have new pipelines, then let’s run them only along big roads and existing pipeline routes.

But that would be too limiting to meet a market demand that some experts project might increase 50 percent in the next few years. And it would require digging up more land in densely populated areas, much of it inhabited by low-income people. But then, the affluent, the biggest energy consumers on a per-capita basis, have always been more than happy to have the energy infrastructure that supports their lifestyles put in places where low-income people without easy access to lawyers and politicians live. Consider comedian Bill Cosby and his wife, who own hundreds of acres of tax-favored protected land that the pipeline might cross and are vehemently fighting it.

It  all recalls the old line about taxes, attribute to Russell Long: "Don't tax you, don't tax me; tax the man behind the tree''.

  Pipeline foes, as have wind-turbine opponents, cite the alleged environmental dangers of such projects. In the case of Kinder proposal, Mr. Cosby complains that “flora and fauna” would be imperiled. But they’re far more threatened by the air and water pollution and climate change caused by digging up and burning oil and coal than by the relatively clean gas extracted by fracking and put into pipelines.

  Then there’s the demand for the absurd promise that the pipeline would never leak or explode. But nothing is 100 percent safe. We’d have no modern civilization without risk, in the case of gas pipelines very low. And foes don’t mention the much greater dangers of tanker trucks and railroad cars carrying gas.

  Regulators and political leaders should push to take by eminent domain whatever land is needed for the Kinder project so that the region’s economy and, yes, environment can benefit from long-overdue gas-pipeline expansion. *** My wife and I went to a wedding at a Brooklyn restaurant almost under the famous bridge last Saturday. It has one of the world’s great urban views.

  We were New Yorkers back in the ’70s, and our visits evoke all sorts of memories.

  The music at such weddings used to be mostly from “The Great American Songbook.” Now it might start out with a bit of Gershwin, et al. (which seems just perfect as you gaze at soaring Lower Manhattan), but fairly quickly move to ear-splitting, conversation-stopping hip hop, expeditiously eliminating the romance in a much richer and cleaner but in a some ways less interesting Gotham than four decades ago. (Prepare to mostly text at such functions.)

But then, some drugstores and gyms are almost as loud. It's the Culture of Cacophony. Even some post offices have bad rock blaring.

Meanwhile, the Metro-North Railroad has closed its last bar car. While “functioning alcoholics” were part of the clientele, most patrons exercised a disciplined conviviality. Worse, a study in the British Medical Journal says that even moderate drinking is bad for you, contrary to earlier researchers’ assertions. Thus we head deeper into a healthier (?), if less fun, era.

-- Robert Whitcomb

'On a darkling plain'

A friend of mine traveling on the Black Sea today sent me this famous 19th Century poem after learning that Putin's people in eastern Ukraine had shot down the Malaysian airliner. I have not read this poem for 40 years.

-- Robert Whitcomb

Dover Beach

BY MATTHEW ARNOLD

The sea is calm tonight.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits; on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Spartan National Park

"Pineland,'' by LUCINDA BLISS, at Sharon Arts Center Exhibition Gallery, Peterboro, N.H. The work is in the Graduate Programs Faculty Art Exhibition of the New Hampshire Institute of Art, though Aug. 30.

Cheap stuff shows age; put out the wood fires

Providence has lovely  walkways  and bridges along and over downtown rivers -- if you don't look too closely. Much of the infrastructure, whose essentials were designed by the late, great landscape architect Bill Warner, is showing its age because when the work was done, back in the '90's, they used concrete instead of real stone. The concrete is starting  to flake, crumble and fade.  As an alert reader reminds me, the best word for this deterioration is ''spalling.'' Very quaint. Almost Chaucerian.

He also suggests that substandard concrete might have been intentionally used.  I would add: Maybe it wasn't corruption but incompetence and too-low construction budgets. In any case, stone would not have had these problems.

Such public infrastructure would once have included mostly real stone, and not cheap concrete.  Consider the wonderfully sturdy and beautiful projects put up by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930's; many of them are still around.

The idea was that such public places deserved the dignity of natural materials that would last a long, long time -- that  such projects would not only be be beautiful but  be very long-term public investments ,  especially considering our rigorous four-season climate.  Picking good building materials and merging them with good design was an expression of pride in our civic life together, to be enjoyed by rich and poor alike.

But now, rampant short-termism permeates all that we do and say ib the public square.  And only our rich are deemed worthy of using the highest-quality materials -- with military spending the exception, where anything goes.  (And Russian gangster/KGB operative/dictator Vlad Putin is working hard to force us to increase  our military spending.)

xxx

These same  downtown Providence rivers are also the venue for the city's WaterFire project,  that  clever sound, light, smell  and sales show that's put on from time to time except in the winter.

If I were czar, I would stop the wasteful and polluting burning of  aromatic wood that's the heart of it. There are now enough people living in, and visiting, downtown that burning wood should no longer be necessary to lure tourists and others. Music,  ornamental electric lighting, performance artists, food and other vendors, and making more boats available to take visitors up and down the rivers at night are enough. Maybe  (controlled!) natural-gas fires could be considered.

Let's stop fouling the air and killing more trees.

--- Robert Whitcomb

But the concrete is real

 

"Fictitious Force" (outdoor sculpture), by  BEKA GOEDDE,  in the "Exposed'' show at the Helen Day Art Center, in  Stowe, Vt., through Oct. 15.

This piece is  a cast-concrete  tile formation of a braid rug.

Ms.  Goedde says: "A fictitious force, in physics, is an apparent force; it is not due to one object or another accelerating but instead the natural frame of reference itself is accelerating. The rug is a household object I employ especially for its concentric, circular, or centripetal pattern.''

We're in the heart of New England's outdoor art season.

Chris Powell: Clinton's vast fee and UConn Foundation slush fund

  MANCHESTER, Conn.

Hillary Clinton,  ex-presidential spouse, former U.S. senator, secretary of state and likely presidential candidate, came to the University of Connecticut a few weeks ago and prattled about equality -- for which the university's foundation paid her $251,000.

As the extraordinary speaking fee has come under criticism, the university's defense has been that Clinton wasn't paid with state tax money or even with the university's own, that the foundation used money donated for a speakers program by a family in New Haven with various business interests. This defense is pathetic:

-- While the foundation is nominally separate from the university, it consists largely of university administrators and former students and the university pays it $8 million a year for fundraising. The foundation does nothing  that the administration doesn't want it to do.

-- The foundation exists only to use the university's name and to support its mission. If the foundation does something that can be defended only by purporting to separate the foundation from the university and state taxpayers, it disparages the university as well.

-- Somebody at UConn decided that paying Clinton $251,000 for one banal presentation was better than paying $50,000 each for five lecturers or $25,000 each for 10 or $5,000 each for 50. Since UConn President Susan Herbst spent much time on the stage in conversation with Clinton, it's a fair assumption that the decision ultimately was Herbst's and that her vanity figured in it.

-- Exactly for whom was it better for UConn to use all that money for just one speaker? Was it better for UConn's students, to whom the event was limited, giving them a look at the likely Democratic presidential nominee in 2016, as if presidential candidates don't eventually hold many campaign events in public?

Or was it better mainly for the university administration, Connecticut's Democratic state administration, and Fusco family business interests, all of which got to ingratiate themselves with someone who has a good chance of becoming president, just as investment houses like Goldman Sachs and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts have ingratiated themselves with Clinton, paying millions to her and her family's foundation as advance bribes?

After The Washington Post reported this month that she recently had taken extravagant speaking fees from eight universities, including UConn, Clinton told ABC News that she had donated all the money to her family's foundation, "so it goes from a foundation at a university to another foundation."

That is, the money went from a foundation Clinton did not control to a foundation whose disbursements she  can control, a foundation she can staff with her friends and campaign associates, a foundation that can be used in part as political patronage.

Clinton's speaking fee at UConn is still more evidence that the UConn Foundation is largely a slush fund for university officials, the mechanism by which they get to do what they wouldn't dare do with official government money.

Before the foundation paid Clinton's extravagant fee, it was employing two presidents at once, the old one being paid nearly a half million dollars per year while the salary of the new one was kept secret; it was spending $600,000 to buy a mansion in Hartford for Herbst so she might continue to schmooze and overawe state officials when inviting them to the president's mansion on the Storrs campus a half hour away might seem too burdensome; and it was even paying for Governor Malloy's international travel.

The foundation should be deprived of its exemption from Connecticut's freedom-of-information law and its board should be separated from university officials and made more independent.

Or else the foundation should start offering Republican presidential candidates a quarter million dollars to speak. At least some of  them might be politically incorrect and thus interesting or even outrageous rather than merely banal and corrupt.

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

Llewellyn King: Whether good merger or bad, the M&A kings prosper

  Whether Rupert Murdoch’s 20th Century Fox ultimately succeeds in its $80-billion bid for Time Warner, rest assured the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) industry will do just fine. Very fine, actually.

There is such a thing as the M&A industry, but it is elusive. It has no trade association and cannot be looked up in the telephone directory. But this virtual organization is a power in the land and very, very rich.

It is made up of investment bankers, lawyers, economists, advertising agencies, public-relations tacticians, lobbyists and legal printing firms. They all swing into action like sharks alerted by blood in the water. They are a diverse crew with one thing in common: They do not come cheap.

At the top of the pinnacle are the investment bankers and their pals in the hedge-fund world, who are ready with ideas and capital if it is needed; ready to reap the rewards of arbitrage. These are the elite officers of the Wall Street Brigades; money is their North Star. They have been bred, in the best schools, to expect it as their entitlement, and they are keen to live up to that expectation.

They are retained by both sides in a hostile takeover and, however it goes, their fees will be enough on one transaction to keep them on Easy Street for years. They fly high, shoot high and live high. They are aristocrats in the kingdom of money.

Just below them come the lawyers, droves of them each offering advice on some aspect of the challenge. Each billing more for one hour than most people earn in a week. When working on a big merger, where there are billions and billions of dollars in play, the legal fees run into the tens of millions of dollars -- and nobody cares. Outside of the senior management, who expect to get extraordinary wealthy – hundreds of millions of dollars, at least -- in a takeover, it is the bankers and the lawyers, denizens of Fifth Avenue and the Hamptons, who make out beyond normal dreams of avarice, and do it over and over.

So it is not surprising that it is often bankers who instigate mergers either by pushing the ideas and the finance mechanism on the firm that hopes to be the acquirer, or persuading a firm that it is time to put itself on the market. Once a target is “in play,” as Time Warner is, anything can happen: A white-knight suitor can come along or the vulnerable company can become an acquisitor, as in the way Men’s Warehouse stitched up Jos. A Banks.

If there is a hostile battle, the advertising and public-relations people come in, cajoling shareholders to hold out or sell out. More millions are spent in this effort: No one is trying to save money when the transactions are so large.

The biggest winners are those at the top of the heap: the managements. They own stock options and shares, plus special deals are written to sweeten things for them.

Everyone engaged in the M&A industry makes money when the game is on, all the way down to the caterers, who provide the sustenance when the midnight oil is burning. A merger is a grueling and fun undertaking; the fun of making money under pressure, a lot of pressure and even more money.

Who loses? Certainly the staff of the lesser-partner firm. The conqueror calls the shots and decrees the layoffs, which are one of the principal savings or “efficiencies” of the takeover. There will be less duplication, fewer subsidiary businesses, and fewer facilities that can be consolidated.

The other loser, feverishly denied in advance of the nuptials, is the consumer; the poor stiff who purchases the goods and services that the new entity offers. These may be fewer and, almost certainly, they will become more expensive over time.

Not all mergers are bad. Actually, Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of The Wall Street Journal has resulted in an invigorated newspaper. But anyone, including myself, who has flown on the merged American Airlines and U.S. Airways has nothing good to report about service, pricing, or frequency. I'll venture that the M&A moguls are taking private jets -- wouldn’t you?

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of “White House Chronicle” on PBS. His e-mail is lking@kingpublishing.com.

And forgotten

 

"Gone'' (photo), by REBECCA SKINNER,  at Galatea Fine Art's  (Boston) "New England Collective V,''  Aug. 1-30.

We used to "break into '' old houses like this (actually, you could usually just walk in via the door) , some, I suppose, abandoned during the Depression and never reoccupied. Their smell of mildew and dead animals was notably unpleasant but the yellowed copies of magazines and newspapers from the '30s were intriguing, raising my interest in the history of what was then only the half-completed  and very bloody 20th Century.

--- Robert Whitcomb

Still trying to appease Putin

  Russian dictator Vladimir Putin continues to send Russian troops, intelligence operatives and heavy weaponry into the eastern Ukraine to try to take it over.  It's not proving quite as easy as his theft of Crimea from Ukraine, a sovereign nation, but he is patient.

The West has responded to this brazen aggression by doing virtually nothing, Meanwhile, the Germans remain profoundly cynical and corrupt as they try to work out more business and other deals with this thug.  This recalls  the Hitler-Stalin pact, although of course the main players are nowhere that evil!

In any case,  we'll pay for this appeasement.