Vox clamantis in deserto
Chris Powell: Casinos transfer wealth to the rich from the poor but liberals still like them
The Foxwoods casino complex (the world's largest), in Mashantucket, Conn.
Nothing transfers wealth from the many to the few as casinos do, which is why they demonstrate so well the phoniness of what passes for liberalism in Connecticut.
Libertarianism can justify casinos, but they are not justified by their claims of employment, since that employment is merely the mechanism of the transfer of wealth from casino patrons, disproportionately poor, to casino owners, always rich.
So why does the clamor for enlarging casino gambling in Connecticut come mainly from supposedly liberal Democrats, most recently from Bridgeport's delegation in the General Assembly?
Because the casino jobs will go disproportionately to their constituents while the victims of casino gambling will be drawn from all over, because the casinos will pay political graft locally, and because nothing matters more to liberals than raising government revenue, whatever the source.
Fortunately for the advocates of a casino in Bridgeport there are two other issues -- the unfairness of Connecticut's current casino policy and its failure to maximize the state's royalties from the business.
That is, state government long has conferred a monopoly on the two casinos operated by reconstituted Indian tribes in the southeast corner of the state in exchange for 25 percent of their slot-machine take. But the state has never required the tribes to bid again for their monopoly even as the revenue they send the state has been declining for years because nearby states have been getting into the business.
Non-tribal casino operators such as MGM, which soon will open a casino just over the Massachusetts line in Springfield, would love to participate in an auction for casino rights in Connecticut. MGM maintains that a casino it would put in Bridgeport would pay royalties far exceeding what the tribes pay. Indeed, combined with the casinos being built in Massachusetts, a casino in Bridgeport might threaten the survival of the tribal casinos, cutting off most of their distant traffic and leaving them with a clientele that is mostly local and poor.
The big question about a casino in Bridgeport may be how long it could operate before inducing New York to put full-scale casinos in New York City, Westchester County and Nassau County and New Jersey to put them in the Newark area. Such a time is almost certainly coming anyway, and Connecticut will have caused it by legitimizing the Indian casino racket in the Northeast in the guise of social justice and ethnic reparations 25 years ago.
So what will happen with Connecticut's casino policy? Who will win -- the Indians, Bridgeport, or MGM? In any case it's not likely to be determined by any examination of the public interest.
xxx
Jostling for a return to office in recent years, former Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz, a Democrat, has made herself a caricature of political ambition, opportunism, and calculation.
She twice became a candidate for governor, withdrawing her second candidacy to run for attorney general, which offered her better prospects upon Attorney General Richard Blumenthal's decision to run for the U.S. Senate. But the state Supreme Court ruled imperiously that Bysiewicz lacked the lawyerly qualifications required by a manifestly unconstitutional statute. Bysiewicz then ran for U.S. senator but lost the Democratic primary. Lately she looked to move into various state Senate districts without Democratic incumbents. Last week she gave up on that and filed for governor again.
So does Bysiewicz stand for anything besides ambition? Last week she celebrated having no connection to the administration of Gov. Dannel Malloy, a Democrat not seeking re-election. Maybe that's a start.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.
Subdue and beautify
Old post card showing "White Village,'' aka Lower Waterford, on the Connecticut River and in Vermont's "Northeast Kingdom.''
“As for the wilderness, they {the Puritans} saw it as something to be ‘subdued,’ on the assumption that anything not immediately useful to man was inherently evil. The Indians who lived there had no real claim to it {the Puritans claimed}. ‘They ramble over much land,’ wrote {Boston founder John} Winthrop, ‘without title or property.’
“However they acquired their rights of possession, the new owners demonstrated an instinctive feeling for beauty in planning their towns in harmony with the land, and a sense of stewardship that abides in many communities to this day. Here in Lower Waterford, Vermont, known as White Village {because most of the buildings are painted white} the meetinghouse {church} and the library stand together as living links with the past.’’
-- From “Light From a Meetinghouse Window,’’ an essay by Paul Brooks, in the book Arthur Griffin’s New England: The Four Seasons, With Original Essays by 51 Famous Authors.
Josh Hoxie: Ryan's $1.50-a-week gift from the GOP tax law
Avarice, by Jesus Solana.
Via OtherWords.org
Love is in the air. Or so the marketers want us to believe, as Valentine’s Day ads sweep the nation into a frenzy of buying flowers, greeting cards, and confections to communicate our affection.
Washington is less forthcoming with the adoration, especially for working people.
You’re probably tired of hearing about the tax plan passed by Congress late last year. If not, just wait for the media barrage coming your way from the Republican donor class, which is guaranteed to make the Super Bowl Tide ads look like child’s play.
In case you missed it, Republicans jammed through a comprehensive reform of the tax code in December without a single congressional hearing or Democratic vote. The plan was a massive gift to the ultra-wealthy — a money grab by any measure, with just a few peanuts tossed to the rest of us.
Next, Republican lawmakers and their backers announced plans to spend tens of millions of dollars promoting said peanuts, to distract from the huge windfalls going to millionaires and billionaires.
They’ve got their work cut out for them in promoting the most unpopular legislation in recent history.
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan took to Twitter to celebrate the reported tax savings of a secretary in Pennsylvania resulting from the Trump tax cuts. Her take of the $1.5 trillion cut? A whopping $1.50 per week added to her paycheck, Ryan boasted.
It’s safe to say this PR effort is off to poor start.
Ryan didn’t explain why he quickly deleted his tweet shortly after posting it. I suspect it had something to do with the Twitter users who pointed out that the billionaire Koch brothers stand to gain as much as $1.4 billion annually, according to Americans for Tax Fairness.
That’s $1.50 a week for the secretary in Pennsylvania, versus about $27 million per week for the Koch brothers.
The Koch brothers jab might’ve hit a bit close to home for Ryan — who, just days after the Trump tax cuts became law, accepted $500,000 from Charles Koch for his fundraising committee. If it looks like corruption, smells like corruption, and tastes like corruption… Well, you get the idea.
The author and Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel taught us, “The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference.” What we’ve witnessed from Ryan and his billionaire backers, as well as Trump, is complete and utter indifference to the needs of working families.
The $1.50 tweet is indicative of just how out of touch Washington has become with ordinary families. The only group that matters is the wealthy. They get the love, the adoration, and the huge handouts.
Meanwhile, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) will expire without re-authorization this year. SNAP, sometimes called food stamps, serves one in seven low-income Americans, over 20 million households.
This is just one of many vitally important programs on the chopping block of Trump’s proposed budget. Given the rhetoric coming from the Republican majority in Congress, prospects look dim.
Maybe this Valentine’s Day, Cupid’s arrow will strike our greedy Koch brothers as they sit in their private jets looking down on the working families for whom they hold such deep disdain. Maybe they’ll find a little love and compassion for the less-well off and stop doing everything they can to make themselves richer and everyone else poorer.
Josh Hoxie directs the Project on Taxation and Opportunity at the Institute for Policy Studies.
For a minute anyway
"Joining Minds'' ( oil and tar on linen), by Richard Nocera, in the group show "A Pairing,'' at Atelier Newport, through March 25.
Boston mayor complains about dearth of state funding for city's schools
Plaque commemorating the first site, on School Street. of the Boston Latin School, the most prestigious public school in Boston and, founded in 1635, the oldest public school in America.
Boston Mayor Marty Walsh told the New England Council on Monday that his city is in a “crisis” because the state has been failing to address longstanding shortages of state funding for local schools. And he said he disappointed in the amount of aid proposed by Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican with whom the Democratic mayor has generally had friendly political relations.
“One of our biggest fiscal challenges that we can’t wait to solve is our declining and underfunded state aid. We have issues there.''
The city says: “State aid has been reduced substantially over the course of the last two recessions. Since FY02, net state aid (defined as state aid revenues less state assessments) to the City has been reduced by over $252 million or 59%. The City lost approximately $79 million between FY03 {fiscal 2003} and FY05, gained approximately $16 million between FY06 and FY08.''
To read more, please hit this link.
Tim Faulkner: N.H. panel's rejection of Northern Pass hydro-energy project upends Mass. plans
Via ecoRI News (ecori.org)
By all accounts, the rejection of the Northern Pass energy project was a major surprise. The plan to deliver 1.09 gigawatts of hydropower from Quebec through New Hampshire to southern New England via high-voltage transmission lines was all but assured by the developer and energy officials in Massachusetts. The Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources was counting on the electricity for its Clean Energy and Climate Plan for 2020.
A Massachusetts Clean Energy power-purchase contract was recently awarded to Eversource and Hydro-Quebec for hydro electricity to help meet the state's goal of 1,200 megawatt of new land-based power by 2022. Eversource intended to start construction in April and complete the project by 2020.
On Feb. 1, however, the New Hampshire Site Evaluation Committee rejected the proposal, 7-0. The board worried that the 192-mile power-line system, including hulking towers, would disrupt main streets and harm tourism, particularly in the scenic northern portion of the state that is home to the White Mountain National Forest and Franconia Notch.
Eversource made concessions by promising to bury 52 miles of the route and set aside 5,000 acres of preservation and recreation land. But it wasn't enough. The decision was celebrated by small towns and environmental groups that vigorously opposed the project since it was announced in 2010. Thousands of New Hampshire residents submitted comments objecting to the project.
Eversource said it was “shocked and outraged” by the vote and plans to appeal the decision in New Hampshire Supreme Court. It has 30 days to appeal the vote by the site evaluation committee.
“The process failed to comply with New Hampshire law and did not reflect the substantial evidence on the record,” Eversource said in a prepared statement.
The utility referred to the economic benefits of the $1.6 billion project, including $30 million in annual tax revenue, as well as the renewable-energy goals it would be fulfilling. The process, Eversource said, “is broken and this decision sends a chilling message to any energy project contemplating development in the Granite State.”
Eversource had invested some $250 million in the project and received approval from the U.S. Department of Energy for a portion of the power lines last November, but still requires a permit from Quebec.
In Massachusetts, the office of the attorney general and the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs (EEA) said they would reevaluate the energy procurement decision, while remaining committed to acquiring imported hydropower.
Peter Lorenz, EEA communications director, said a new proposal for renewable energy would be considered if existing contracts can't meet the terms of the agreement.
Rhode Island has also shown interest in imported hydropower. Former Gov. Lincoln Chafee advocated for a deal with Hydro-Quebec after touring the company. In recent years the state discussed buying a portion of Quebec hydropower in a deal with Massachusetts but an agreement was never reached.
On Feb. 5, Gov. Gina Raimondo announced a goal of acquiring 400 megawatts of utility-scale renewable energy from the Northeast, but only small-scale hydro projects qualify for the program.
Tim Faulkner writes for ecoRI News.
Don Pesci: Chris Powell has been very important to Connecticut
I happen to be writing something on Mark Twain’s politics, and I couldn’t help but wonder what he might have thought rather than written – for Twain was fairly cautious, some would say over-cautious, while his wife and censor Olivia was still alive – about recent Connecticut politics.
Surely Twain would have noticed that the flight of progressive politicians from their sinecures have followed the flight of businesses and entrepreneurial capital from his beloved state. There’s got to be some heavy levity, Twain’s specialty, in there somewhere. Not even Olivia, the keeper of Twain’s reputation, could have prevented him from poking fun at Connecticut’s political Grand Guignol. Following a fatal dip in the polls, Gov. Dannel Malloy has chosen not to run again, and he has been followed out the door by his lieutenant governor, a promising Democrat gubernatorial prospect who has not spent time in prison, Comptroller Kevin Lembo, Atty. Gen. George Jepsen, and other Democrat celebrities, all banging their tushies, frantically attempting to put out pant fires.
We don’t have Twain with us anymore. But Chris Powell, whose retirement from his job as managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn., is still pending, will be with us for some time to come. Though he will be leaving the paper as a regular employee after 50 years, Powell will maintain his column – good news for the good guys, bad news for the bad guys.
State Sen. Joe Markley said on Facebook that Powell was Connecticut’s “indispensable man,” and this flushed out some doubters. One would think in the era of President Trump, country and state would have gotten used to a little hyperbole. A little rich, one guy thought. We hauled that guy off to a dark corner and gave him a public thrashing, because Powell really is the indispensable man. It’s OK; you can do this sort of thing on Facebook and, if you are president of the United States, on Twitter, which has become a kind of tumbril used to transport distasteful politicians to the guillotine.
I provided half a dozen items -- all written by me; interviews with Powell on Connecticut Commentary, mentions of him in past columns, his indispensable review of Lowell Weicker’s autobiography Maverick, which Powell titled “Mr. Bluster Saves The World,” and such like -- to support Markley’s thesis.
At the same time, I received from my nephew Craig Tobey, who is living in California – please don’t ask me why – a message on LinkedIn congratulating me for having spent 38 years writing columns. Powell is wholly responsible for this. So, I wrote Craig back saying “Thanks. It’s a long time to have been writing on water.”
When the waves break, when time passes, all of it is writing on water. You try to say some things that will stay fresh on the shelf, and Powell is better at this than most. He’s quotable and memorable, always the sign of a superior intellect. And he likes all the right thinkers -- Frédéric Bastiat, for instance, and G.K. Chesterton. Tethered to either of these sane anchors, you cannot wander far from the truth.
There are, as we know, two kinds of truths, pleasant and unpleasant -- mine and yours. It is the unpleasant but necessary truths we all instinctively retreat from.
We all are servants of the truth, not its masters. Writing in “The Examiner” in 1710, Jonathan Swift said it best: “Besides, as the vilest writer has his readers, so the greatest liar has his believers; and it often happens, that if a lie be believ’d only for an hour, it has done its work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it; so that when men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale has had its effect.”
It is the business of honest journalism to see to it that the truth is not washed away by lies. To lie is to say the thing that is not, and journalists should avoid this too common practice like the plague. For fifty years in journalism, that has been Powell’s honorable trade. He will never receive a Pulitzer – neither did Bill Buckley, astonishingly – but he has retired from the paper only, and during his long haul he has kept faith with Joseph Pulitzer’s ever-fresh observation that “good journalists should have no friends” -- in the political world, I should hasten to mention. Isn’t it uplifting to think that we will have Powell with us to kick around threadbare politicians a bit more?
Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based essayist, and, like Chris Powell, a frequent contributor to New England Diary.
'Green under the snow'
"Ice comes undone
Skin shining and
hair full of
March
girls spill out of
offices their
bones whispering strong
hands to marry
glazed orchards
and vines coming back
Green is under the
snow....''
-- From "Thaw,'' by Lyn Lifshin
Llewellyn King: Why doesn't Musk get more respect?
Elon Musk stands inside a rocket that is awaiting assembly.
-- SpaceX photo
I present to you the strange case of Elon Musk. Whatever he does, his detractors, or at least his minimizers, seem to control the narrative.
When his Falcon Heavy rocket — the largest and most sophisticated flying today — blasted into space on Feb. 6, there should have been a national outpouring of unabated joy.
Yet it only briefly edged out the news coverage of the GOP memo, emanating from House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, (R-Calif.) and its Democratic counter-memo. The greatest show on earth had it all: a rocket you could watch ascending, shedding its reusable stages and flying away, whimsically, with a sports car for a payload.
It was a showcase of American technology and know-how. It was a clear statement that the individual can still triumph in the United States.
President Trump acknowledged the achievement, which was probably hard for him because he and Musk don’t see eye to eye on global warming or much else. Musk’s visions are wildly futuristic, like populating Mars, while Trump is a man firmly rooted in the glories of the United States as an industrial power tethered to past strengths. Also, awkwardly, Musk is an immigrant who might have been kept out under Trump’s policies.
But the general indifference and in some circles antipathy to Musk goes far beyond politics. We embraced Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg as tech heroes, the faces of the future. Musk less so or not at all; maybe because we have narrowed our view of what is exciting tech to the internet and its collaterals.
Although he made his first $500 selling a game program when he was 12, and his first billion as a founder of PayPal, Musk’s real claim to fame is as an engineer and physicist. His Tesla electric car may not survive as the industry leader, but today it is out front.
His rocket may not be the future of heavy-lift space vehicles, but it is the leader today: cheaper and with reusable stages. His SolarCity is not alone in seeking to convert idle roofs to electricity sources, but it is a big player. And Musk’s batteries, though disappointing at the outset, may yet make grid-free houses a reality.
Yet Musk’s detractors are legion and effective. I know quite a few and they range from an electric company chairman (who accused him of lying and denounced him to me in the most vociferous tones), to financial seers (who question the viability of any of his companies), to conservatives (who believe that he has misused government funds, and his “private” company owes everything to government support). The transportation industry, almost to a man, believes Musk’s plan for an underground, people-mover vacuum tube is nuts.
I, too, have been in the ranks of the detractors, at least in part. I sought to have him correct a whopper about nuclear versus solar power. He had his sums wrong by a factor of hundreds.
Yet you have to love Musk for thinking on a scale that hasn’t been seen for over half a century. He is a throwback to the great builder-engineers of the past: men who built the bridges, canals, dams and railroads, and electrified the United States.
As a nation, we used to be devoted to the big, the bold and the futuristic. Now, we’ve developed sophisticated ways of defeating big projects.
After the 1960s we lost our passion for the big idea and the big machine, from nuclear power plants to big civil engineering. The late, great Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-New York, lamented this lack of courage to go big on a project.
Westway — the highway for New York City’s West Side — was defeated partly to protect the striped bass in New York Harbor. Moynihan said, “There is a kind of stasis that is beginning to settle into our public life. We cannot reach decision.”
I don’t wish to live on Mars, I don’t want to be whisked in a tube from Washington to New York. I’m even undecided whether I want to ride in space — but try me.
I don’t know whether Musk will go broke, whether he’ll overreach or whether he’ll give the whole world a new frontier. But until (and if) a better dreamer comes along, I’m glad we have him reaching for the planets.
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King (llewellynking1@gmail.com) is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS.
Whining Uberites & Lyftites
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com:
The complaints from car-hailing services and their passengers about the $6 pickup fee at T.F. Green Airport, in Warwick, R.I., ring hollow to me. Jim Hummel wrote about this in a good Jan. 28 Providence Journal story, “Driving revenue: Price of arrival rises at T.F. Green’’. All users should help pay for the airport, which has been much improved in recent years. Uber and Lyft have taken away some of the airport’s revenue from rental cars and taxis. It’s generally cheaper to take a car-hailing service than a ca b. Further, many airports charge to drop off and pick up passengers.
As usual, people want more services but lower charges. Take the federal gasoline tax. It was last raised in 1993! No wonder the roads are such a mess. And while Trump talks about improving transportation infrastructure, he got Congress to enact a huge tax cut, mostly for business and the rich. America remains a fiscal Fantasyland.
Neal Costello: Down in the depths of Dorcester
Fields Corner Municipal Building.
From Neal Costello's memoir Last Tinker Caravan, about growing in in Boston's tough Dorchester neighborhood in the Sixties and Seventies. (It was tougher then than it is now.)
Dorchester
"Fourteen times by the time I was sixteen, we played a game of Irish ghetto hide and seek. My father was a common laborer; he worked construction most of his life. In those days he would work eight, maybe ten months of the year. During the winter months, when the snow slowed the work down, Iron Mike would be laid off and 'loaf' until Spring, when he could find steady work again. The evil Italian forman, and they were all Italian, would lay guys off on a Friday afternoon, giving the mostly Irish laborers what was known as an 'Irish payroll'. The fucking Mussolini motherfuckers figured since every thick Mick was a fucking boozebag, they could shortchange them by wrapping a twenty around a bunch of ones and hand it to them as they fired them. The Turkeys would be in such a hurry to get to the nearest bar they wouldn’t notice they’d just been fucked as well as fired.
Luckily for us, Iron Mike feared Olive too much to ever fall for that bullshit. Besides, he never trusted Italians. He made sure to count his cash. Whenever he got laid off, he would come straight home with a couple of Hi-Fi pizzas and some Pepsi, and give the rest of the cash to my mother. Iron Mike and Olive would never tell us what had happened. We’d figure it out Saturday afternoon, when my father would sit at the kitchen table, drink O.F.C. (Old Fart Cure) straight and play The Free-Wheeling Bob Dylan and The Clancy Brothers with Tommy Makem and Pete Seeger on the phonograph record player. Then it was on to Enrico Caruso and John McCormick at 78 speed. Our hearts sank when we heard the scratchy yet velvet stylings of Woody Guthrie 45s. When Iron Mike, drunk as a fucking hoot owl, started singing his own version of 'In The Pines,' we knew we were fucked. 'In the pines, in the pines, where the sun never shines, and you shiver when the cold wind blows'. Shit. He would do odd jobs, sweep bar room floors on Sunday, handyman stuff, but never made enough to make ends meet over the winter months. The Jewish landlord would come looking for the overdue rent, usually on a Sunday afternoon, and we’d all be huddled in silence in the kitchen 'where we had gathered for fear of the Jews,' as Saint John the Divine first reported in his Gospel detailing the super adventures of Jesus. The book Divine John wrote before he got all paranoid and shit from dropping peyote, hanging out by himself in caves and writing fucking weird shit like The Book of Revelation (surpassed only in outright incomprehensible sucking by that movie Head, by Jack Nicholson and The Monkees). In no time, all the utilities would be shut off, we’d be out of milk, bread and gray, salty meat (but still plenty of Pall Malls), last year’s Zayre’s Christmas Layaway bill was way past due (Zayre’s was owned by the Feldberg family because Zayre’s just wasn’t Jewish enough), and we were facing eviction. Evictions were a sort of harbinger of Spring for us, kind of like our robin. Not that we had ever seen a robin or any other bird other than pigeons, dead pigeons, and sparrows. So we had all Twelve Fucking Tribes wandering the desert looking for us because we owed them money, some of them still drunk from Purim. Money changers my Royal Irish Ass, more like Money keepers. We had the Goddamn Mossad after us. Who are we? Fucking Mengele? But Olive would quietly find some other available dump a few blocks away. The landlords didn’t live in the neighborhood, or know anyone who did, so there was little fear of being found if we could just slip away to another dump. We just needed to escape our current abode without being detected. So the extended family would suddenly show up in the middle of the night, load up the shitboxes, and we’d move to the next place, skipping out on all past debts. I’d go to bed at eight in the evening on the third floor of a triple-decker on Geneva Ave., and wake up in a yellow brick tenement house in an apartment no bigger than an H-Block cell on Ditson Street (the first place we lived that was so small, decrepit, dreary, frightening and entombed, with no windows or back door, with so many other cells piled on top above ours, all brick and cement, that I still believed in Santa Claus but had no idea how he would ever get in). Then just spell the last name a little differently, put utilities and such in an uncle’s name, real or imagined, and there you go. No fucking problem. The chase is on. Catch us if you can.
We lived in one of the poorer sections of white Dorchester on Geneva Avenue in Fields Corner. I never bought the nonsense, still don't, that Boston is a racist city. If it is it is no more racist than any other city in America and far less racist than any lily white suburb. That said, there most certainly was a white Dorchester and a black Dorchester back then, an arrangement wanted by and agreed to by both races, however begrudgingly. Dorchester had been founded by the Puritans in 1630 and had been annexed by the city of Boston in 1870. It is a section of the city the size of Worcester, which I'm told is another city in Massachusetts, located near the Mississippi River, just this side of Japan. My family had invaded white Dorchester in 1959 from my birthplace on Dudley Street in Roxbury. White Dorchester in those days stretched on one side from the Fields Corner area, for a couple of miles to the Atlantic ocean at the absurdly named Malibu Beach. Nothing but rocks, broken glass, seaweed, cigarette butts, dog shit and jellyfish with nary a Beach Boy or Barbie lookalike to be found. Miss Jean of Romper Room lived in a really nice house overlooking Dorchester’s Malibu Beach. She worked at the old WHDH Channel 5 studio, where Bozo lived, right up Morrissey Boulevard, beside Boston College High School and across from the reviled Boston Globe. Always hated that bitch. Miss Jean. At the end of each show she’d look in her magic mirror and call out the names of all the 'Good Doo-Bees'. Fucking bitch never once called out my name. I sat in front of our tiny black and white Zenith for twenty-five years and that bitch never once called out my name. We can’t all be fucking Bobbies and Johnnies, you fucking hoebag. Don’t you know any Neals ??!??! Bitch ! Nancy ??!?! Who the fuck is named Nancy anymore ??! How about Neal ??!! Whore!"
Tumultuous coast
"Sunken Ledges'' (oil on canvas, c. 1910), by Charles H. Woodbury, at the Art Complex Museum, Duxbury, Mass.
'A medieval thought'
“Trinity Park lies directly across from the {Boston Public} library, Trinity Church rising like a medieval thought amidst the glass and steel towers.”
― Writer Nick Flynn, from his memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, about his difficult early life in the Boston area. His mother killed herself and his father was homeless.
Trinity Church, designed by Henry Hobson Richardson and built in 1872-77 on the north side of Copley Square, in Boston's Back Bay neighborhood, is the birthplace and archetype of the Richardsonian Romanesque style, with a clay roof, polychromy, rough stone, heavy arches and a massive tower. The style became popular across the United States, especially for such institutions as schools, libraries and churches.
Towering kitsch
The statue of legendary woodsman Paul Bunyan in the old lumber town of Bangor, Maine, is one of those pieces of kitsch that can bring a smile on otherwise depressing days. But sadly, as Lonely Planet noted, "his view of the Penobscot River {which used to be used to float logs down to the coast when Maine was a huge supplier of wood} is now blocked by a casino. ''
Big fortunes were made in the wood business, and Bangor still has many mansions built by those who made these fortunes. One is below, now owned by famous writer Stephen King.
Alison Stine: Where the fracking industry dumps its waste
View of Athens, Ohio.
Via OtherWords.org
At Athens, my southeastern Ohio town in the Appalachian foothills, is a small, rural place where the demolition derby is a hot ticket, Walmart is the biggest store, and people in the surrounding villages must often drive for 30 minutes to grocery shop.
We hold the unfortunate distinction of being the poorest county in the state: an area that is both stunning — with rolling hills, rocky cliffs, pastures, and ravines — and inaccessible, far from industry.
It’s here, at the Hazel Ginsburg well, that fracking companies dump their waste. Trucks ship that sludge of toxic chemicals and undrinkable water across the country and inject it into my county’s forgotten ground.
My step-grandmother, the daughter of a Kentucky miner, used to tell me stories of washing her clothes in polluted red water, downstream from mines. Coal companies exploited employees like her father, paying him in company scrip and keeping him poor and exploiting the land.
That kind of abuse continues. It’s just changed shape. The Ginsburg well has a long history of violations, so many that the Ohio Department of Natural Resources ordered it shut.
It was not.
It’s a pit well, which looks like an old swimming pool, covered by a tarp. No sign indicates the presence of chemicals, just a “no trespassing” sign. Allegedly, a guard will snap your picture if you stop or turn your car around. The well is in a residential area, with houses — some with swing sets — just down the road.
In 2012, Madeline ffitch (whose last name is spelled lowercase and with the double ff) was arrested there. Her arrest was part of an action by a local anti-fracking group, Appalachia Resist. The then 31-year-old’s arms were locked into cement-filled plastic drums just before the gates, blocking the entrance.
Two years later, Christine Hughes, co-founder of the local Village Bakery, was arrested protesting against another well site, as were seven others. My town called them “the Athens 8” and they were hailed as heroes.
Ffitch and her young family continue to protest wells, despite the attempts of the fracking industry to, according to her, “paint anyone who is organizing resistance around this stuff as outsiders or extremists.” Her husband, Peter Gibbons-Ballew, was arrested in a peaceful protest in 2016, while ffitch watched, their baby strapped to her chest.
Our local economy now depends on tourism and farming. The long, humid growing season makes this part of Appalachia ideal for wild specialties such as pawpaws, black walnuts, and mushrooms. And many hunters stay here to be near our famous bucks.
By contaminating the environment, fracking wastewater wells threaten all these businesses. In 2015, tank trucks injected 4 million barrels of waste into my small county alone.
It’s hard to get answers about what it’s in that waste. But Jason Tremby, an engineering professor at Ohio University, is leading a local team to “clean” fracking wastewater using ultraviolet light, water softening techniques, and a high-pressure reactor.
It makes sense to me that a solution to the wells might come not from outside, but from people like ffitch, Hughes, and Trembly, working and living in Appalachia. People are used to doing things for themselves here — and used to the community helping the community.
I keep hoping more will be done to protect this place. “You want to forget it,” begins the Appalachian-born Ruth Stone’s poem “Garbage.” But the fracking waste in the injection wells of Appalachia can’t be forgotten forever.
It’ll bubble up, one way or another, before long.
Alison Stine is a novelist. Her most recent book is a novella, The Protectors. A longer version of this piece was produced by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
He went to the airport
"Waiting for Isaac Levitan After School'' (oil on canvas), by Alexandra Rozenman, at Fountain Street Fine Art, Boston.
The Maine way to boost lobster stocks
From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com:
Southern New England lobstermen (or should I say lobsterpersons?) may have hurt themselves by taking as many lobsters as they can, without looking at the species’ ability to reproduce. It may be a case of “the tragedy of the commons’’ -- wherein individual users in a shared-resource system acting independently in what they see as their own self-interest undermine the common good by depleting that resource through their collective action.
Has that attitude had as much impact on the plunging lobster stocks along the Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut coasts as environmental changes, especially warming seas? Hard to tell. Commercial fishermen are notoriously independent and secretive about their catches.
You can’t but think of that when you learn that many Maine lobsterman have long used what seems to be a very effective conservation method. As reported by Fred Bever for Maine Public Radio:
For years, Maine lobstermen have used "’V-notching’: when they found an egg-bearing female in their traps, they would clip a ‘V’ into the end of its tail, and throw it back. The next time it turns up in someone's trap, even if it's not showing eggs, the harvester knows it's a fertile female, and throws it back. Later, the lobstermen also pushed the Legislature to impose limits on the size of the lobster they can keep — because the biggest ones produce the most eggs.’’
“And those fertile females have been doing that job very well in Maine. Since the 1980s, lobster abundance here has grown by more than 500 percent, with landings shooting up from fewer than 20 million pounds in 1985, to more than 120 million pounds in 2015 with a value of more than a half billion dollars.’’
To read more, please hit this link.
https://nenc.news/research-concludes-maine-conservation-technique-helped-drive-lobster-population-boom/
A small-town Hollywood for documentaries
Walpole in 1915. Some of the town hasn't changed that much since then.
It's surprising what you can find in small New England towns. Consider Walpole, N.H., in the southwest corner of the Granite State.
That is where Ken Burns, Elaine Mayes and Roger Sherman, classmates at Hampshire College (in nearby Amherst, Mass.), in 1976 founded a documentary film company called Florentine Films, which went on to produce the famous films The Civil War (1990), Baseball (1994), Jazz (2001), The War (2007), The National Parks: America's Best Idea (2009), Prohibition (2011), The Roosevelts (2014) and The Vietnam War (2017).
The name of the company came from Florence, Mass., Mayes's home town, also in the Connecticut River Valley. A rather cozy company.
The famous Miss Florence Diner, in Florence, Mass. Such diners are civic ornaments of many small New England towns and some cities, too. They sometimes serve as informal town halls -- chatty and caffeinated central meeting places.
Retrograde spring
"Springtime in Massachusetts is depressing for those who embrace a progressive view of history and experience. It does not gradually develop as spring is supposed to. Instead, the crocuses bloom and the grass grows, but the foliage is independent from the weather, which gets colder and colder and sadder and sadder until June when one day it becomes brutishly hot without warning...It was fitting, then, that the first people who chose to settle there were mentally suspect."
-- Rebecca Harrington
(Editor's note: Meteorological spring starts soon -- on March 1.)