Vox clamantis in deserto
Christine Owens: Democracy needs unions
1913 political cartoon showing organized labor marching towards progress, while a shortsighted employer tries to stop labor
Via OtherWords.org
Democratic rights in the workplace — including the right to form a union, and the power to speak up about workplace issues — go hand in hand with a democratic society. But for decades now, those rights have been under assault.
This Labor Day, it’s time we fight to restore them.
Make no mistake: By whittling away at workers’ right to a voice at work, right-wing corporate activists have also been able to curtail workers’ voices at the ballot box, too.
Unionized workers vote at higher rates than non-union workers. States that have adopted so-called “right to work” laws to undermine unions have seen a net decline in turnout.
That’s exactly why corporate lobbyists and their political cronies push such laws — it’s part of their strategy to weaken support for popular proposals that help working people, from higher minimum wages to stronger social insurance programs.
These efforts work hand in hand with voter suppression, gerrymandering, and other efforts to undermine voting rights — as well as with “carve-outs” to labor laws, which exclude categories of workers like farm and domestic workers. Together these abuses disenfranchise workers and lock in poverty wages.
We’ve seen what happens when huge corporations, and the politicians beholden to them, wield all the political power.
They roll back government oversight so companies can engage in dangerous — even deadly — workplace practices. They widen tax loopholes so that companies that operate in our backyards don’t contribute to the upkeep of our communities. And they make corporations “people” with democratic rights far greater than those of actual human beings.
Then they illegally retaliate against workers who try to join together for change. They threaten mass layoffs and the decimation of communities. From the moment a person is hired, she’s told she’s replaceable and compelled to sign away her rights, leaving her on her own against an all-powerful boss.
But increasingly, working people are fighting back
Around the nation, worker activists are urging lawmakers to prohibit employers from firing people in retaliation for trying to improve their own workplaces. They’re calling for an end to longstanding racist exclusions of caregivers and agricultural workers from labor protections. And, from poultry plants to commercial banks, they’re blowing the whistle on dangerous employer practices that hurt workers and consumers alike.
Working people are joining together to demand a more just economy in other ways, too
From Walmart workers walking off the job to protest guns sales following the El Paso massacre, to adjunct professors warning that poverty wages affect the quality in the classroom, workers are protecting our democracy.
When call center workers in Mississippi draw attention to low wages and high turnover in critical federal services, and employees of the furnishing company Wayfair walk out to protest the inhumane treatment of immigrants at the border, they’re reminding us of our civic responsibilities.
When teachers fill streets and statehouses to raise the specter of generational harm from underfunded schools, and museum employees lift the veil on pay inequality in arts institutions, they highlight the permanent damage to our country if worker voices are silenced.
Restoring worker power isn’t just about restoring the right to unionize. It’s about balancing one-sided corporate control with workplace democracy.
Labor Day and the Fourth of July may be separated by several weeks, but the values they embody are deeply intertwined. If we truly want justice, domestic tranquility, general welfare, and the blessings of liberty, we must allow democracy to flourish in the workplace as well as at the ballot box.
Christine Owens is executive director of the National Employment Law Project.
As union membership declined income inequality rose.
Thinking of the Amazon
“Moonlight Burning’’ (photograph), by Richard Alan Cohen, in a group show at Galatea Fine Art, Boston, through Sept. 1
Life on a wharf
Long Wharf in Boston, United States, 19th Century, jutting into Boston Harbor
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
I’ve spent a lot of time on wharves, and I especially think of them in August, when their smells of salt water, fish, creosote, diesel and gasoline reach their greatest intensity. Standing there at the edge of water, maybe looking at the eelgrass wave in the water a few feet away, I think of how summer is waning as a back-door cold front replaces the sultry southwest wind with a salty breeze from the east that’s cool enough to remind me of fishing for smelt as a kid in October off the “floats’’ (wooden floating wharves) in the harbor near our house, using a bamboo pole and multiple hooks. (Smelts, by the way, are best fried in butter.) Or I remember the east wind coming off Boston Harbor and cooling off my summer work mates and me as we smoked on the loading platforms along the promiscuously polluted South Boston waterfront and I mulled the threats and opportunities involved in returning to college in a couple of weeks.
On the Cape’s West Falmouth Harbor, there’s a very old and small granite-block wharf in front of what used to be my paternal grandparents’ house, since torn down and replaced by a tall McMansion but, as the builder emphasized to angry neighbors, on the “same footprint.’’ The little wharf provided me with a couple of lessons in the passage of time:
Low tide now exposes sand and mud flats going right up to the front of the wharf (or “dock’’ as we called it, even though docks are more precisely the area between wharves).
So why was it built? It turns out that a little stream emptying into the harbor had silted up the water abutting the wharf. In the 19th Century the water in that part of the harbor (once famous for its shellfish, before a disastrous oil spill, in 1969) was much deeper. And the rather mysterious structure was apparently built to provide access for people coming in small boats to a fresh water spring a few feet up the slope from the wharf.
3 Boston hospitals partner to help low-income families with rent
The Boston Medical Center’s Moakley Building
This is from The New England Council (newenglandcouncil.com):
BOSTON
“New England Council members Boston Children’s Hospital and Brigham & Women’s Hospital have partnered with Boston Medical Center (BMC) to launch a program to aid families struggling with rent. By joining forces on this initiative, the three major Boston hospitals are recognizing a substantive connection between stable housing and good health.
“Research conducted by BMC has shown that housing, alongside food and education, plays a critical role in an individual’s health and their health care costs. Children are especially vulnerable to health issues and developmental delays if they lack a stable housing situation. City officials found than over 4,600 eviction cases were filed in Boston Housing Court in 2016, the majority of which involved residents in subsidized housing. As rent continues to rise in Boston, the hospitals identified access to affordable, stable housing as a major concern for low income families and their health.
“The three hospitals plan to donate over $3 million over three years to fund housing programs and community grants. The first $1.5 million has be reserved for families behind on rent and at risk for eviction. Because of the hospitals’ financial commitment to this project, all three have also been granted state approval for construction plans at each of their campuses.
“‘The hospitals don’t think they’re going to fix the housing problem,’ said Dr. Shari Nethersole, executive director for community health at Boston’s Children’s. ‘We recognize this is a societal problem. We’re trying to help identify where we do have a role, where we can help.’
“The New England Council commends all three institutions for their commitment to support the health of low- income families.
John O. Harney: The latest in the N.E. 'free college' movement
2008–2012 bachelor's degree or higher (5-year estimate) by county (percent)
From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)
The New England Board of Higher Education recently honored Hartford Promise and the Rhode Island Promise Scholarship with 2019 New England Higher Education Excellence Awards. And NEJHE has been paying close attention to innovations—and challenges—facing such “free college” programs.
In June, the Campaign for Free College Tuition (CFCT) lauded NEBHE delegate and Connecticut state Rep. Gregg Haddad for his work helping the land of steady habits become the 13th state to meet CFCT’s criteria for having a robust free college tuition program for its residents.
Under the budget signed by Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, eligible students at the state’s 12 community colleges will be able to attend without paying any tuition or fees starting in 2020. Haddad co-chairs the Legislature’s Higher Education and Employment Advancement Committee. He worked on the issue with Sen. Mae Flexer, Senate vice chairman of the Higher Education and Employment Advancement Committee, after the two heard of the enrollment success at Rhode Island Community College under its Rhode Island Promise program. Sen. Will Haskell and Rep. Gary Turco also helped make the legislation happen. Connecticut’s program will provide a “middle dollar” scholarship to all recent high school graduates with at least a 2.0 HS GPA who fill out FAFSA and take at least 12 credit hours each year. “If the student’s Pell Grant fully covers tuition, they will still get a $250 per semester grant to spend on other costs of attending college. The revenue to pay for this new program is expected to come from online lottery sales which have not yet been legally approved. But the budget directs the Governor and the State’s Board of Regents for Higher Education to find alternative sources of revenue should that idea not work out,” the CFCT reports.
Meanwhile, the 2019 Education Next Poll found 60% of Americans endorse the idea of making public four-year colleges free, and 69% want free public two-year colleges. “Democrats are especially supportive of the concept (79% approval for four-year and 85% for two-year). Republicans tend to oppose free tuition for four-year colleges (35% in support and 55% opposed) and are divided over free tuition for two-year colleges (47% in support and 47% opposed).”
A paper from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research explains that while college promise programs offer invaluable opportunities, “eligibility requirements and rules on whether funds can be used to cover non-tuition costs, can exclude students who are older, working, or who have children.”
Writing in The Conversation, William Zumeta, professor emeritus of public policy and governance and of higher education at the University of Washington, notes that “Washington state’s new college affordability initiative differs from the ‘free college’ efforts being undertaken by other states such as Tennessee and Oregon. In other states, such as these, Rhode Island and, soon, Massachusetts, the ‘free college’ initiatives are mostly limited to tuition-free community college for some students. But in Washington state, the Workforce Education Investment Act provides money for students to attend not only a community college, but four-year public and private colleges and universities.”
In a Chronicle of Higher Education piece titled “The Fight for Free College Is Your Fight Too,” Ann Larson, co-founder of the Debt Collective, called on academics to help win back the promise of college as a necessary and vital public good.
There are also critics of free college schemes. They include some families who had to scrimp and save for their children to earn degrees. And Bloomberg recently published this piece by Karl W. Smith, a former assistant professor of economics at the University of North Carolina, under the headline: The Hidden Cost of Free College.
More recently, College of William & Mary economics professor David H. Feldman and Davidson College visiting assistant professor of educational studies Christopher R. Marsicano wrote in USA Today: “While free college has its benefits, its simplicity makes it a regressive policy that will most help the wealthy.”
Feldman and Marsicano propose instead: increasing the maximum federal Pell Grant by 50%; partnering with states by offering a federal block grant for higher education if states appropriate at least a certain dollar amount per full-time student; offering nonprofit colleges and universities that work with significant numbers of lower-income students a small operating subsidy equal to a percentage of the Pell dollars their students receive; and tying any additional grant subsidies and student loan interest rates to accountability measures such as graduation rates and gainful employment for students upon graduation.
Two other key resource for the movement are The Campaign for Free College Tuition and the clearinghouse for College Promise Programs at UPenn.
Expect to hear more about free college as the 2020 elections approach and student indebtedness grows. U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders’s campaigned for free college in 2016. Most of the other candidates now call for at least two years of free college.
John O. Harney is executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education.
Block JUMP Bikes for now
A JUMP Bike in Providence. The passenger here is a lot more benign than many of the riders.
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
A couple of weeks ago I implied here that though we’re in the Wild West period of such rentable personal-transportation options as dockless JUMP Bikes, we shouldn’t worry too much about them.
But I grossly underestimated the potential for mayhem with these bikes in some parts of Providence, as seen in recent episodes of teens, almost all boys, stealing these things for out-of-control rides that have included scaring, and even assaulting, some hapless pedestrians. These punks also ignore all traffic rules and in so doing threaten to cause serious car and truck crashes.
JUMP is owned by scandal-ridden Uber.
What to do? First off, what Mayor Jorge Elorza announced last week: These dockless bikes are being pulled from service, at least for a while. He said:
“As part of a commitment to provide residents and visitors with convenient and equitable intermodal transportation options, a joint public safety effort will collect bicycles and explore options to enhance security mechanisms for the system and to promote responsible ridership.”
Let’s look for long-term solutions to the problem. Perhaps this will involve only allowing bikes that must be docked -- i.e., station-based. Station-based systems can obviously be better monitored by police than can systems in which bikes (and scooters) can be picked up and left willy-nilly all over place, most irritatingly in the middle of sidewalks. This limitation, of course, will make them less accessible to many people, but so be it. Further, the police and courts must crack down hard on wild riders and thieves who abuse shareable bikes and scooters -- and publicize the punishment. And Uber (not unfamiliar with scandal) must be compelled to improve JUMP’s anti-theft technology ASAP. That applies to other companies offering similar services, too.
It’s too bad that the actions of a few would deprive many of the opportunity to use this handy, nonpolluting and fun transport, but public safety demands it.
Grace Kelly: Bluefish -- sustainable and delicious
Bluefish
Via ecoRI News (ecori.org)
According to a recent report released by the United Nations, our meat-forward eating habits are having a big impact on the environment — and not in a good way.
Farm animals produce 25 percent to 30 percent of greenhouse gases, particularly methane, which traps heat 25 times more effectively than carbon dioxide. One small step we can take to reduce climate emissions is to eat less meat, and perhaps fill that protein void by eating more sustainably caught local fish.=
As New Englanders with access to plenty of ocean, our seafood options are vast and varied. But not all options are created equal. Some fish, like the local cod, are in dangerous waters (pun intended) when it comes to population decline. But fear not, there’s plenty of sustainable options that are just as, and arguably more, tasty. We’re going to highlight these choices in a new monthly feature called Go Fish.
To do so, ecoRI News is partnering with Kate Masury of Eating with the Ecosystem, a local organization dedicated to promoting a “place-based approach to sustaining New England’s wild seafood,” and Stuart Meltzer of the Fearless Fish Market in Providence.
The first time I had bluefish was at a local restaurant where it was basted in a pool of nutty brown butter and served with an herb-onion salad and fresh-made tortillas. Its signature purplish-blue flesh had tempered to white during cooking, and each bite was silky and rich.
Bluefish is a sustainable delight that is readily available in the summer, when it migrates to the New England coast after spending the colder months in the South Atlantic Bight. It’s a hardy predator whose active lifestyle requires more oxygen than most fish, turning its flesh the purplish-blue color that gives the species its name. Its great seared in a pan until the skin gets crispy and golden, or as the recipe below suggests, soaked in a soy-sauce citrus marinade and grilled until charred and smok
According to Seafood Watch, bluefish caught in the North Atlantic is a “best choice.” This means “the stock is healthy, and management is effective. In addition, bycatch and habitat impacts are a low concern.” When buying, look for fish that has been caught by handline or hand-operated pole and line.
Grace Kelly is a journalist with ecoRI News (ecori.org).
“Trolling for blue fish’’ (lithograph by Currier & Ives, 1866)
And you, too
— Photos by Simeon Zahl of burial vaults at Hatfield House. Dr. Zahl is a theologian at Cambridge University.
Hatfield House is a country house in the town of Hatfield, in Hertfordshire, England. The present Jacobean house was built in 1611 by Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury and chief minister to King James I, and has been the home of the Cecil family ever since. The estate includes extensive grounds and surviving parts of an earlier grand house. The house, now the home of Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 7th Marquess of Salisbury, is open to the public.
Llewellyn King: A way to greater leisure with same number of work hours a week
The American Federation of Labor union label, circa 1900
Labor Day is almost here and with it another blessed, three-day weekend. Three days without work!
The best day, of course, is the middle one, when we can luxuriate in the time off without the knowledge that grips most of us on Sunday afternoons — that we must climb Monday’s escarpment.
The fact is that we Americans work too much. Not necessarily too hard, but too much. In the United States, workers’ vacations are mostly two precious weeks — and a third after long service. In Europe, they’re a month or, as in Germany, often up to six weeks — yet no one accuses the Germans of being idlers or not performing.
We won’t get more vacations, I think, until high-tech workers — those one might refer to as “the indispensables” — demand and get them. Some already have the choice of working in Europe and are looking at the “package” of their employment, not just the dollars in the paycheck. If they demand more, the idea will get around.
However, more vacation days won’t have the same benefit as those leisurely Sundays in a three-day weekend.
There is a way to greater leisure with the same number of work hours in a week. I have experienced it, and it does wonders in terms of employee happiness and creativity.
In the early 1960s, I was a writer for BBC Television News, and we worked a fabulous shift system: three days on and three days off. This system recognized that journalists could seldom finish what they had started in a procrustean eight hours.
The BBC 10-hour shift — three days on and three days off — accepted and accommodated the reality of the work rather than trying to squeeze the work into an arbitrary time frame, leaving it either unfinished or for someone else to try to finish — say a script for the late news broadcast or coverage of an ongoing parliamentary debate.
The social dimension of this work structure was even more interesting. Writers and editors became more productive in other ways: Some wrote novels, others worked on biographies or tried their hands at plays. They’d been given the gift of time.
Armed with this experience, when I worked at the Washington Post, where I was an assistant editor and also president of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild, one of the largest chapters of the American Newspaper Guild, the trade union that represented journalists and some other workers, I was appalled at the mess the Post had with its overtime.
There was a complicated system of overtime and something called “overtime cutoff,” which applied to people who were paid more than the Guild-negotiated salary. It led to fights, conscientious reporters and editors working overtime without compensation, and major altercations over weekend schedules. No winners, just unhappy people. The management knew it was a mess and would’ve liked to change it.
When I suggested the BBC system to the Washington Post Company, management was enthusiastic. They asked if the union would bring it forward as a formal proposal in the contract negotiations, then just beginning for a new three-year contract.
We had to have our proposal vetted by union headquarters, the International. They said, “No, no, no. Heresy.” The union had always fought for a shorter workday since the so-called “model contract,” written by Heywood Broun, the famous reporter, columnist and founder of the American Newspaper Guild, in 1935. It was dropped like a libelous story.
Well, the three-days shift won’t work in many places, but in journalism, manufacturing and retail, it’s worth a try. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of workers would have the joy of that middle day of rest and, maybe, creativity.
When you open another cold one on Sept. 1, think about how nice it would be if that happened all year. Three days on and three days off. Glorious!
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS.
Taking them in
Here’s a brand-new watercolor by William Hall. There’s show of his watercolors at the Jessie Edwards Studio, on Water Street, Block Island, R.I., through Sept. 4.
The back story of the painting here is that Howard Milikin, a great-grandfather of Mr. Hall, was a navigational pilot from Block Island. He would be ferried from Block Island to meet incoming clipper ships and then pilot them into New England ports. His license was unlimited.
Cute but they eat songbirds
“Challenge 120: People and Their Pets: To Those I’ve Loved Before,’’ by Natasha Stoppel, in her show “Other Worlds of Now and Then,’’ at Art Up Front Street, Exeter, N.H., Sept. 6-28. The gallery explains that she’s a traveling artist who quit her corporate job in 2014 to launch Artist Explores the World, a blog and YouTube channel centered around her art and travels.’’
Water Street in downtown Exeter
— Photo by Rglowacky1
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Not much in a name?
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
New England has too many small private colleges; some of them are not financially viable. So some have decided to change their name to “university’’ to make themselves sound more important and alluring. Accrediting organizations require a certain minimum number of graduate courses for such nomenclature
Lasell College, in Newton, Mass., is the latest New England college to decide to call itself a university; Assumption College, in Worcester, has done the same thing
Some of this is just the endless pursuit of status, though with so many little, and little known, institutions calling themselves “university’’ the alleged advantage must be getting a little thin.=
Two internationally known New England institutions – Boston College and Dartmouth College – are universities but for historical reasons – they started out and have remained devoted most strongly to undergraduate liberal arts education -- have refused to change their names. Admirable.
David Warsh: The future of the great U.S.-China trade decoupling
In the Port of Shanghai, the world’s biggest container port
James Kynge, Financial Times bureau chief in Bejing in 1998-2005, is among the China-watchers whom I have followed, especially since China Shakes the World: A Titan’s Rise and Troubled Future – and the Challenge for America appeared, in 2006. Today he operates a pair of proprietary research services for the FT.
So I was disheartened to see to see Kynge employ an ominous new term in an FT op-ed column on Friday, Aug. 23, “Righteous Anger Will Not Win a Trade War’’. President Trump thinks that the U.S. becomes stronger and China weaker as the trade war continues, Kynge wrote, but others see an opposite dynamic at work: “mounting losses for American corporations as the U.S. and Chinese economies decouple after nearly 40 years of engagement.”
Decoupling is so incipient as a term of art in international economics that Wikipedia offers no meaning more precise than “the ending, removal or reverse of coupling.” A decade ago, it implied nothing more ominous than buffering the business cycle (The Decoupling Debate). Former World Bank chief economist Paul Romer, no professional China-watcher but better connected than ever, since he shared a Nobel Prize in economics last year, returned from a trip there in June with something of a definition. The mood in China, at least in technology circles, was grim but determined, he told Bloomberg News.
“I think what they’ve decided is that the U.S .is not a reliable trading partner, and they can’t maintain their economy or their tech industry if it’s dependent on critical components from the United States. So I think they are on a trajectory now, that they’re not going to move off of, of becoming wholly self-sufficient in technology. Even if there’s a paper deal that covers over this trade war stuff, I think we’ve seen a permanent change in China’s approach…. There’s no question that they’re on a trajectory to become completely independent of the United States because they just can’t count on us anymore.’’
How long might it take to pretty fully disengage at the level of technological standards? More than five years, maybe ten, Romer guessed, citing Chinese estimates. For that length of time, Kynge reckons, U.S. high tech vendors would continue to suffer. American companies and their affiliates sell nine times more in China than their counterparts operating in the United States, according to one estimate he cited. Cisco and Qualcomm report being squeezed out of China markets, he says. HP, Dell, Microsoft, Amazon and Apples are considering pulling back.
The long-term competition for technological dominance worries Kynge more than the trade war. In many industries, he writes, China is thought to be already ahead. Among those he lists are high-speed rail, high-voltage transmission lines, renewables, new energy vehicles, digital payment systems, and 5G telecom technologies. And while there is no agreement about which nation possesses the more effective start-up culture, in university-based disciplines such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and biomedicine, in which the U.S. has been thought to have been well ahead, China is making rapid gains.
This decoupling of two nations that for 40 years gave grand demonstration of the benefits and, latterly, the costs, of trade is a bleak prospect. If there is a silver lining, it lies in the fact that rivalry often produces plenty of jobs along with the mortal risks that passionate competition entail. But if America is to do anything more than simply capitulate, it must find a leader and begin to move past the disastrous presidency of Donald Trump.
Friday’s shocking escalation, via Trump’s Tweets, brought that eventuality a little closer. The president is on the ropes. There is no sign of trade war fever beyond his base that might restore the confidence required for him to win a second term.
. xxx
New on the EP bookshelf: The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty, by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson (Random House, 2019).
The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay, by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman (Norton, 2019).
David Warsh, an economic historian, book author and veteran columnist, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this essay first appeared.
Chris Powell: The Epstein scandal: 'No one that couldn't be bought'
Jeffrey Epstein in a 2006 police mug shot
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Vile as financier Jeffrey Epstein seems to have been, many if not most of the girls he targeted were not quite the innocent victims being luridly portrayed by news organizations, not all if any of them really being "sex slaves."
To the contrary, while most of them were minors, under 18, they retained freedom of movement and repeatedly returned to Epstein, traveled with him, or went where he told them to go to be used by his friends. They knew what they were doing was prostitution, even if the law rightly holds that minors are not fully responsible for themselves.
Epstein's character is a settled matter, just as it is settled that money is power and power tends to corrupt. So it may be more illuminating to ask how so many teenage girls could escape the custody of their parents for so long to become the playthings of Epstein and his friends without inciting at least suspicion back home.
There seem to be two explanations. First is that some girls did not have much in the way of parents, so they were more vulnerable. Second is that there was a lot of money in it for them, for Epstein paid them well -- so well that many of his girls recruited others for him, and some even told the police that they loved him.
Having accepted such employment with Epstein, some of his girls now accuse him of ruining their lives and are levying claim to his estate. Others brought suit against him and then settled confidentially, choosing to take his money again without warning the world against him.
Epstein's most publicized accuser, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, now in her 30s, married, a mother, and living in Australia, has figured it out better than most news organizations. "Laughing the whole way through," Giuffre says, "Jeffrey thought it was absolutely brilliant how easily money seduced all walks of life -- nothing or no one that couldn't be bought."
Of course as the prototypical "sadder but wiser girl," Giuffre could apply her insight to herself most of all.
The corruptibility of human nature explains Epstein's success as a predator. Of course it does not excuse him. But it does invite reflection on the failure of society and the law to protect minors, and, really, the lack of interest in protecting them.
That children don't have parents is often the consequence of welfare and divorce policy.
Advertising and television sexualize children and bring the coarsest sex to the youngest audiences, especially those with negligent parents.
Even Epstein's friends and acquaintances who did not exploit his girls surely saw that something wrong was going on but did not report it. Long before he was elected president, one of those friends, Donald J. Trump, was quoted about Epstein's partiality to young women
Epstein was notorious a long time before he was prosecuted, and then his prosecution was so gentle that it has become a scandal in itself, suspected of having been meant to protect the most influential of his accomplices.
But lest people in Connecticut get too disdainful of Epstein and his circle, it should be remembered that had one of his underage playthings been impregnated, she could have been given another few hundred dollars in cash and been driven by limousine to any abortion clinic in the state, where nobody would have contacted her parents for approval or notified the police, state law concurring as much as Epstein in the concealment of statutory rape.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.
William Morgan: Magnificent machine is Yankee ingenuity writ large
While my wife, Carolyn, was recently buying some wood at Sweet Lumber Company, in the Olneyville section of Providence, I noticed this photograph of a saw that cut shingles.
Who knew what a magnificent piece of machinery there was to render wooden shingles from logs?! It is hard not to be impressed by this no-nonsense beast, capable of severing a hand or an arm in an instant. It was made in Orange, Mass., sometime after 1889, the year of its patent.
Orange is in Franklin County, not far from Greenfield and Millers Falls and Turners Falls, serious 19th-Century mill towns, producing sewing machines, cutlery and a range of tools. While we associate manufacturing with cities such as Manchester, Lowell and Fall River, machine shops and watermills were found throughout western New England.
Beyond the cities of Springfield, Holyoke and Chicopee, there were a lot of factories in small rural towns. If there were a swiftly flowing stream, waterpower would power a mill of some kind
The Chase Turbine Manufacturing Company was founded around 1850 in Concord, Vt., up in that state’s “Northeast Kingdom.’’
The company went bust during the Civil War, but soon thereafter reconstituted itself in the more economically advantageous location of Orange. They made equipment for water wheels and the magnificent turbine shingle saw until the Great Depression.
The inscription on it says it all: “Built by the Chase Turbine M'F'G'. Co. Orange, Mass.’’ This is no wimpy Chinese-made throwaway tool from Home Depot, but something built to last – Yankee ingenuity writ large. In many a Vermont hollow, singles are no doubt still being cleaved from trees by these glorious machines.
William Morgan is a Providence-based architectural historian, photographer and essayist. He is the author of Yankee Modern and The Cape Cod Cottage, among other books.
BU starting online MBA program; but do we need more MBA's?
The unvirtual part of the BU business school, whose official name is the Questrom School of Business
This comes from The New England Council (newenglandcouncil.com):
“Boston University (BU) has announced plans to launch an online Master of Business Administration (MBA) program. The new program will have a total tuition cost of $24,00 and is set to launch in fall of 2020.
“Boston University will partner with online education platform edX to offer the low-cost online MBA worldwide. EdX, created by Harvard University and MIT, currently has over 21 million registered users who have enrolled in more than 75 million online courses. While BU has worked with edX for the past six years to offer low cost undergraduate ‘massive open online courses’ (MOOC’s), this is their first time offering a graduate degree. The MBA will be designed from the ground up and will incorporate content from BU’s Questrom School of Business alumni and international business partners.
“BU Provost Jean Morrison noted that by adding an affordable, high-quality, large enrollment online MBA, the university is continuing its mission to provide various iterations of MBA programs that are compatible with the unique aspects of all business learners. BU currently has six different MBA programs, including Full-Time MBA, Professional Evening MBA, Executive MBA, Health Sector MBA, Social Impact MBA and the MBA+ MS in Digital Innovation. Applications for the online program have opened for the fall 2020 semester.’’
“With an online MBA we’re seizing the initiative to offer a major degree for which we believe there is global demand,” said BU President Robert A. Brown. “Higher education must evolve in a fast changing world. We aim to lead in this evolution.”
A river realm
“Spider web, Rail Trail between Northampton and Hadley, Mass.’’ {on the Connecticut River} (archival digital print), by Mary Lang , in her show “Here, nowhere else,’’ at Kingston Gallery, Boston, Sept. 4-29.
She says of her show:
“Each one of these photographs could be a doorway into a separate realm. They are single perceptions, clear and vivid, like waking from a dream, finding yourself Here, nowhere else. Like the turning of a kaleidoscope, for a moment time stops, everything falls into place and I am part of the invisible pattern that holds the world together. Though standing on the earth, it still feels groundless. For so many years I photographed water as a way of exploring groundlessness. It turns out that photographing earth is groundless as well.
“The world is inundated with photographs; 100 million and counting are uploaded to Instagram every day, visual records of a place or a time, a vacation or a hike. These photographs are those as well, but what makes this one, and not that one, rise above so many others, to hang on the wall in a frame, is because captured within the photograph is a sense of presence, of this moment, here, nowhere else, an absorption into vastness that some would call magic.’’
Looking north up the Connecticut River from the French King Bridge, at the Erving-Gill town line in western Massachusetts. Too many New Englanders don’t realize that the Connecticut is one of the world’s most beautiful rivers.
“If the river is as varied and beautiful as the Connecticut, you can merely look at it – in the long light of a sultry summer evening, under an angry winter sky, in the high color of autumn or the pastel shades of spring – and derive that sense of peace and uplift of the spirit that most men find in living water.’’
-- Roger Tory Peterson (1908-1996, artist and naturalist), in The Connecticut River, by Evan Hill (1972)
Todd McLeish: Rare Spring Salamanders like the hills
A Spring Salamander relaxing on some moss
Spring Salamanders are one of the giants of the salamander world, at least in the Northeast. They can grow to more than 8 inches long, and their diet often consists of other salamanders. But they are also quite rare in southern New England. They weren’t discovered in Rhode Island until the 1980s, and they still have only been found in a few locations in the northwest part of the state.
In Massachusetts, however, the tan or pinkish species with faint black spots was removed from the state’s list of rare species in 2006. Last month the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife (MassWildlife) launched a two-year survey to reassess the health of the state’s Spring Salamander populations amid concerns that the changing climate may be negatively impacting the cool streams where they live.
Jacob Kubel, a conservation scientist with MassWildlife’s Natural Heritage & Endangered Species Program, said Spring Salamanders have a long head with a square snout and external gills. He noted that the natural history of the species is somewhat unusual. After hatching in a stream, they live as larvae for three or four years before metamorphosing into adult salamanders.
“They can’t be in a stream that’s going to completely dry up in the summer, but they also do better in streams that don’t have fish that might eat them,” Kubel said. “That habitat isn’t extremely common, so the species isn’t extremely common.”
Spring Salamanders are primarily found in forested streams with seeps of cold groundwater in high-elevation, hilly terrain. They’ve been found at just four sites in Burrillville and Foster, R.I., but populations in Massachusetts have been located from the Berkshires to Worcester County. The species is listed as a state threatened species in Connecticut.
“The main objective of our survey is to do a quick assessment to make sure nothing has happened to our state population,” Kubel said. “If we can check off a great majority of historic sites and also find sites we didn’t know about previously, that tells us the status hasn’t taken a turn for the worse since delisting.
“The other component is that, as an agency, we need to be cognizant of climate change and its impacts on environmental resources. With Spring Salamanders being a cool-water, high-elevation species, it might be one of the first to show stress at the population level. They’re like the canary in the coal mine.”
Kubel and a team of volunteers are visiting locations where the salamander has been found in the past to document that the species hasn’t disappeared. Next year they will focus on finding new populations.
He said the results so far have been encouraging. But the work isn’t easy, and the success rate is pretty low.
“I was at a site last week where we didn’t have any historic records but I thought it was likely to be there, and I found quite a few — seven individuals — after turning over about 400 rocks,” he said. “But then I went to another stream nearby that I thought should have them, and I only found one after turning over 500 rocks.”
At the conclusion of the survey in 2020, Kubel will produce a report that makes recommendations about the conservation status of the Spring Salamander. The data will also be used as a baseline for comparative studies conducted in the future.
In addition to the survey, Kubel is also leading efforts to conduct genetic analyses of Blue Spotted and Jefferson salamanders, two rare species that look similar and are thought to hybridize, to clarify the geographic distribution of each.
No conservation activities have been undertaken in Rhode Island to study or monitor Spring Salamander populations, but recent land acquisitions have protected some of its habitat, according to Chris Raithel, a retired wildlife biologist with the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management.
“There are only a handful of known localities for it, but Rhode Island seems to be at the edge of its range,” he said.
“These guys have very specific habitat requirements, so it could be that the combination of high gradient perennial streams with a low abundance of fish in a heavily forested area isn’t available in Rhode Island,” Kubel said.
The Rhode Island Wildlife Action Plan lists Spring Salamanders as a species of greatest conservation need.
Rhode Island resident and author Todd McLeish runs a wildlife blog.
An identity complication
A statuette of Aphroditus in the anasyromenos pose. The ancient Greeks and Romans believed the pose had a magical power to ward off evil.
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.comAn Identification Issue
“But there are more than five sexes and only demotic Greek seems to distinguish among them.”
― Lawrence Durrell, in The Alexandria Quartet
Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo trendily wants her state to join others that will offer drivers’ licenses that don’t indicate the person’s sex. The change would let people put an “X’’ rather than a “M’’ or “F”
Of course, people are entitled to think of themselves as any sex they want and to have organs lopped off or created and to take hormones to change themselves into some sort of “gender’’ they weren’t at birth. But the fact is that, outside the very few cases of physical androgyny, people are physiologically either male or female. And for police and others in the justice system knowing the sex of individuals can be very useful, indeed sometimes essential. If these drivers undergo a sex-change operation, then fine, switch to one of the two sexes. But the “X’’ category will cause trouble.