Vox clamantis in deserto
Fans and the media corrupt sport
Bode Miller in the giant slalom at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Italy.
“Sport is born clean and it would stay that way if it was the athletes who ran it for the pleasure of taking part, but then the fans and the media intervene and finish up by corrupting it with the pressure that they exercise.’’
— Bode Miller (born 1977), American Olympic and World Championship Gold Medalist and the most successful male U.S. alpine ski racer so far.
He was born in Easton, N.H. (population: 254) and grew up in Franconia, N.H., site of the famous old ski area at Cannon Mountain and what had been The Old Man of the Mountain and a home of Robert Frost.
The current Cannon Mountain Aerial Tramway (completed in 1980), which rises to the 4,100-foot summit of Cannon Mountain. The first version (below) built in 1938, was the first passenger aerial tramway in North America.
Weaving togetherness
“Quite Frankly’’ (weaving with paper), by Dawn Mallozzi, in the group show “Weaving Together,’’ at the Jamestown Arts Center, through March 13.
The show displays the work of artists with disabilities, bringing together four organizations dedicated to supporting disabled artists: Artists' Exchange, Flying Shuttles, Looking Upwards and Outsider Collective. The artists created works of fabric, yarn, paper, branches and more to express creativity and togetherness. There are also outdoor installations, including looms and murals of yarn and twine — to encourage visitors to create artwork as a group.
"We hope that the various pieces woven together bring warmth to all during this dark time" it says on the Jamestown Arts Center’s exhibition page.
Jamestown, an island in Narragansett Bay, is both an affluent summer resort (with many summer people from Philadelphia and New York) and a mostly bucolic suburb/exurb of Providence.
The Jamestown windmill, built in 1787
The Jamestown-Verrazano Bridge, constructed in 1992, connects Jamestown with mainland Rhode Island.
Good citizens must protest
Fascist allies Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler
“The voice of protest, of warning, of appeal is never more needed than when the clamor of fife and drum, echoed by the press and too often by the pulpit, is bidding all men fall in and keep step and obey in silence the tyrannous word of command. Then, more than ever, it is the duty of the good citizen not to be silent.”
— Charles Eliot Norton (1827-1908), author, Harvard art historian and social critic
Rudyard Kipling described him:
“We visited at Boston [my father's] old friend, Charles Eliot Norton of Harvard, whose daughters I had known… in my boyhood and since. They were Brahmins of the Boston Brahmins, living delightfully, but Norton himself, full of forebodings as to the future of his land’s soul, felt the established earth sliding under him, as horses feel coming earth-tremors. ... Norton spoke of Emerson and Wendell Holmes and Longfellow and the Alcotts and other influences of the past as we returned to his library, and he browsed aloud among his books; for he was a scholar among scholars.’’
Sarah Anderson: Expose those who financed their Fuhrer's Capitol rioters
Trump rioters just before breaking into the Capitol to try to keep their Fuhrer in power
— Photo byTapTheForwardAssist
Via OtherWords.org
Former president Donald Trump narrowly avoided conviction on his second impeachment trial. After delaying the vote till he was out of office, most Republican senators simply said that they couldn’t impeach a “private citizen” — even if he was guilty.
Still, the trial was revealing. And the hunt for the wealthy financiers of the Jan. 6 coup attempt continues.
Throughout his scorching indictment of Trump, lead House impeachment manager Jamie Raskin (D.-Md.) wove in quotes from eminent historic minds, including this one from his late father, Institute for Policy Studies Co-founder Marcus Raskin: “Democracy needs a ground to stand on, and that ground is the truth.”
Raskin’s trial team exposed a great deal of truth as they made the case that Trump was “singularly responsible” for inciting the riot at the Capitol. Raskin pointed out that Trump had “road tested” his tactics for inflaming mobs at his campaign rallies and through Twitter. Social media traffic leading up to January 6 also made clear that dangerous extremist groups were planning a violent attack in the nation’s capital.
And in her widely viewed Instagram video, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D.-N.Y.) recounted that the threat of violence seemed to be widely known, as she started receiving warnings from other members of Congress, including Republicans, a week before the attack.
If plans for the insurrection were no great secret, then the wealthy enablers who financed the “Stop the Steal” convergence should also bear some responsibility. But identifying them is difficult.
“Thanks to a lattice of financial secrecy vehicles,” journalist Casey Michel explained for NBCNews.com, “we may never have a complete financial picture of those who provided the money to organize a rally that descended into chaos and that shook the underpinnings of American democracy.”
We do know, thanks to OpenSecrets, that the Trump 2020 campaign and its joint fundraising committees made more than $3.5 million in direct payments to people and firms involved in the demonstration.
But as the transparency group pointed out, “the campaign used an opaque payment scheme that concealed details of hundreds of millions of dollars in spending by routing payments through shell companies where the ultimate payee is hidden.”
In December 2020, Congress passed a landmark bipartisan bill, the Corporate Transparency Act, which will take a meaningful step toward eliminating such anonymous shell corporations. But it won’t take effect for another two years.
So Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D.-N.Y.) has introduced the Insurrection Financing Transparency Act, which would give U.S. authorities immediate access to the identities of those who financed the Capitol assault.
Another proposed bill, the For the People Act, would also curb dangerous financial secrecy by requiring super PACs and other “dark money” political campaign organizations to disclose their donors.
The events of Jan. 6 have also prompted pro-democracy advocates to step up their demands on corporations to end their political spending.
More than 50 organizations, investment firms, and religious organizations called on large U.S. corporations to take a number of steps to signal their support for democracy. These included ending all super PAC and dark money contributions and pledging to never again provide financial backing for the 147 members of Congress who refused to certify the presidential election.
The groups pointed out that these members have received more than $170 million from corporate and trade group PACs and nearly $2 million from Big Tech companies. In the wake of the insurrection, a number of corporate PACs pulled back their corporate donations to these officials.
The full impact of the Jan. 6 insurrection and the impeachment trial on our democracy will not be known for many years, if not centuries. We can only hope that this national trauma will lead to greater accountability for future political leaders — and their wealthy financial enablers.
Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.
Beer and Motown
The Hitsville U.S.A. Motown building, at 2648 West Grand Boulevard in Detroit, Motown's headquarters from 1959 to 1968, which became the Motown Historical Museum in 1985.
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
The death of The Supremes’ Mary Wilson brought back ‘60s memories of the smoky basement of my Dartmouth College (in Hanover, N.H.) fraternity house, where I cemented many friendships, some of which are now being revived via the ambiguous charms of Zoom.
But rather than details of our conversations in that bar- (half keg on Wednesday nights and full keg on Saturday nights)-and-ping-pong-table- equipped cave, the sounds I most remember are those of Motown on our juke box. This was the favored music of the fraternity’s leadership. I had heard little Motown before arriving; the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Mamas & the Papas were the leaders in my Connecticut high school.
Maybe that so many of my fraternity brothers came from big cities (as opposed to the suburbanites that dominated my high school) explains the love of this “Black music”. I got a bit tired of it over three years, but it sure got into my bones and to hear it takes me back to relatively happy days (for me) more than half a century ago.
'The burning of decay'
— Photo by MPF
Out walking in the frozen swamp one gray day,
I paused and said, 'I will turn back from here.
No, I will go on farther—and we shall see.'
The hard snow held me, save where now and then
One foot went through. The view was all in lines
Straight up and down of tall slim trees
Too much alike to mark or name a place by
So as to say for certain I was here
Or somewhere else: I was just far from home.
A small bird flew before me. He was careful
To put a tree between us when he lighted,
And say no word to tell me who he was
Who was so foolish as to think what he thought.
He thought that I was after him for a feather—
The white one in his tail; like one who takes
Everything said as personal to himself.
One flight out sideways would have undeceived him.
And then there was a pile of wood for which
I forgot him and let his little fear
Carry him off the way I might have gone,
Without so much as wishing him good-night.
He went behind it to make his last stand.
It was a cord of maple, cut and split
And piled—and measured, four by four by eight.
And not another like it could I see.
No runner tracks in this year's snow looped near it.
And it was older sure than this year's cutting,
Or even last year's or the year's before.
The wood was gray and the bark warping off it
And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis
Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle.
What held it though on one side was a tree
Still growing, and on one a stake and prop,
These latter about to fall. I thought that only
Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks
Could so forget his handiwork on which
He spent himself, the labor of his ax,
And leave it there far from a useful fireplace
To warm the frozen swamp as best it could
With the slow smokeless burning of decay.
— “The Wood-Pile,’’ by Robert Frost (1874-1963)
Chris Powell: Teachers of your memories, and today’s
The Wylie School, in Voluntown, Conn. Built in 1856, this public “one-room” school house was used by the town until 1939. It is now used as a meeting space and museum by the local historical society. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Nearly everyone will forever remember some admired or even beloved teachers whose insights, enthusiasm and caring pointed students in the right direction. Of course, there were and are some mediocre, incompetent and even malicious teachers too, but they are easily forgotten.
So even as society becomes more fractious and angry, there is still a cult of respect around the teaching profession.
But that cult may not last much longer as teacher unions, most notoriously in big cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, but also in most states, including Connecticut, obstruct normal school operations amid the virus epidemic. The unions insist on perfect protection against the virus when there is no perfect protection, though risk of transmission is far lower in school than in other places that continue to operate normally.
Of course, the damage to schoolchildren from the loss of in-person schooling has been catastrophic -- not just in education but also in their mental and physical health. Recovery will take years.
The teachers unions long have proclaimed the importance of education and the dedication of their members to students, so now maybe the country will see how empty this prattle has been. In effect, the unions now are proclaiming that education and children don't matter that much at all.
In pursuit of the greater good during the epidemic, risks are being borne by hospital and nursing-home employees, emergency personnel, postal and delivery workers and supermarket clerks and cashiers. But according to the teachers unions, their members cannot bear any risk. No -- if even one student or school employee contracts the virus, even without showing symptoms, the whole school must be closed for a week or two and everyone in it must be quarantined, though children are the least susceptible to the virus and fatalities from exposure in school are rare.
The "remote" learning offered as an alternative to regular schooling is a joke, since as many as half the students don't show up and many of those who do show up are impossibly distracted. But while education is destroyed, everyone employed in its name remains on the payroll anyway, compensated many times better than the supermarket clerks and cashiers without whom no one would be fed.
Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont and state Education Commissioner Miguel Cardona, President Biden's nominee for U.S. education secretary, are part of this pretense. The governor and the commissioner have been hailed for favoring normal operation of schools, but most of Connecticut's schools have not been operating normally.
Though he has ruled by decree under his emergency powers since last March, the governor has failed to order schools to do anything in particular. Local school boards are free to be intimidated by the teacher unions, as they usually are intimidated along with state legislators and as the governor himself seems to be, since keeping government employee union members happy long has been the primary objective of government in Connecticut.
Some people say that teachers are not pleased with the intransigence of their unions amid the destruction of education. But if teachers are displeased with their unions and are ready to take the same risks as supermarket clerks and cashiers, they have yet to show it. Teachers union leaders may know better than anyone else what is required for election to their offices -- better even than people with happy memories of beloved teachers from many years ago. After all, back then Connecticut's public schools were public -- that is, administered by elected officials. Today, not so much, as even most school administrators are unionized in a conspiracy against the public. School management is not really management.
There’s no harm in cherishing memories of old school days. But they should not blind anyone to the huge change in public education since then, a change that invites the sort of reflection with which the journalist William L. Shirer prefaced one of his books about modern European history. Shirer quoted the great German writer, scientist and statesman Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832):
“I have often felt a bitter sorrow at the thought of the German people, which is so estimable in the individual and so wretched in the generality.”
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.
Reflecting in the dark
“The Fox Hunt” (1893) (oil on canvas), by Winslow Homer (1836-1910), a mostly New England painter.
“In the dark, cold solitude of winter months ….I thank the Lord for this opportunity for reflection.’’
— Winslow Homer (1836-1910), painter
Avoid Mass. motorists
Boston traffic crawls over a closed Ted Williams Tunnel entrance in Boston during rush hour on July 11, 2006, the day after a tunnel collapse killed a passenger in a car.
— Geraldine Brooks (born 1955), Australian-American novelist and journalist. Despite her complaints about Bay State drivers, she lives in the state, albeit in bucolic West Tisbury, on Martha’s Vineyard.
Alley’s General Store, in West Tisbury
Words in the visual experience
“Make (In)Visible” (mixed media), by Boston area artist Cynthia Maurice, in her show “Cynthia Maurice: New Drawings and Prints,’’ at Galatea Fine Art, Boston, March 5-28.
She writes:
“Recently I came across an essay about a technique called ‘Cento’, used in the 1600’s. It refers to a method of clipping words to create poems. It struck me as what I was dreaming of doing. But I hesitated.
"For me, inserting words profoundly altars the quality of visual experience that I wish to honor. It was adding sound to the visual which I regard with reverence as an essentially a silent medium, much needed in these times of chronic noise. Tread lightly."
"Printmaking invites experimenting with techniques like collage and layering.
Recently I came across an essay about a technique called “Cento, used in the 1600’s. Simply translated from Latin as "patchwork garment. It refers to a method of clipping words to create poems. It struck me as what I was dreaming of doing. But I hesitated.
For me, inserting words profoundly altars the quality of visual experience that I wish to honor. It was adding sound to the visual which I regard with reverence as an essentially a silent medium, much needed in these times of chronic noise. Tread lightly." - Cynthia Maurice
David Warsh: New journal seeks to foment new approach to economic history
First edition of Karl Marx’s Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867)
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
What have been the dominating economic events of the first 20 years of the 21st Century? The financial crisis of 2008 was surely one. The advance of global warming is another. With the rise of China, India and Brazil, the configuration of great powers has become uncertain, and with it the future of international trade.
The appearance of an important book may also qualify for inclusion on such a list. I am thinking of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by Thomas Piketty, which seeks to return to economics a preoccupation with distribution and equality. If it belongs, so probably does a second book of history, by Nobel laureate Angus Deaton. The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality, received less attention than did Piketty’s tome, but Deaton’s account of economic growth as a source of well-being represents the other side of the argument about distribution.
A new journal, Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics, has appeared to examine these issues, and others, in a consistently new light. On its appearance hangs a story.
“It is a journal born out of scholarly disagreement,” wrote editor Marc Flandreau in the first issue, “and, as a result, it is a journal whose primary mission is to keep disagreement alive.” The publication aims to foment a new approach to economic history, Flandreau says, “engaged across borders, unruly and free.”
The first issue appeared a year ago. The second issue arrived last autumn. The third issue went into the mail last week. Its contents will remain free online here for another week. Articles by up and-comers are interspersed with pronouncements by well-established authorities: Barry Eichengreen, Gary Gorton, Harold James, Emma Rothschild, François Velde. A previously unpublished review by the late Charles P. Kindleberger is slated for a future issue.
Co-editors in an “editorial collective” are Julia Ott, of The New School, Francesca Trivelatto, of the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, and Carolyn Biltoft, of the Graduate Institute for International and Development Studies, in Geneva. An advisory board lends prestige. Editor Flandreau is the chair of economic history in the history department of the University of Pennsylvania. He is editor of an interesting collection, Money Doctors: The Experience of International Financial Advising 1850-2000 (2004); and author of two books: The Glitter of Gold: France, Bimetallism, and the Emergence of the International Gold Standard 1848-1873 and Anthropologists in the Stock Exchange: A Financial History of Victorian Science (2016).
I might not have brought up Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics if I weren’t reading a biography, Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History, by Richard J. Evans. As Evans writes, Hobsbawm was, at the time of his death, in 2012, the best-known and most widely read historian in the world. A life-long Marxist, he was author of a spell-binding trilogy on the dual revolutions, political and industrial, that helped make the 19th Century: The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848; The Age of Capital: 1848-1875; The Age of Empire: 1875-1914.
An equally strong claim was Hobsbawm’s leading role in founding, in 1952, Past and Present, an English journal, itself inspire by the French journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, and intended, as Hobsbawm later wrote, “for the new, post-war generation of historians for whom, Marxist or not, economic and social dimensions of history were more important than before….” All members of the editorial board read all submissions to the journal, to work out differences between Marxist and non-Marxist historians; gradually divergences diminished. Social history blossomed in its pages,
A great deal has changed in the last quarter-century. Where there is action going forward, I expect Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics will find it. Evidence of its perspicacity will emerge over time.
David Warsh, an economic historian and a veteran columnist, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com.
© 2021 DAVID WARSH, PROPRIETOR
'Implied movement'
“Pacific” (steel pipe and high-performance car paint), by John Clement, in his joint show with Robert Sagerman, “Sagerman and Clement: High-Performance Color,’’ at Heather Gaudio Fine Art, New Canaan, Conn., March 13-May 1.
Mr. Clement’s site explains that his work “juxtaposes a variety of playing steel coils and arcs that, layered on top of one another, take on a life of their own. While today Clement focuses primarily on large-scale outdoor work …. his smaller works are, on their own volition, about to swivel about on their bases and spin about in space. Clement’s dynamic and dramatic union of form, line and negative space emphasizes the impression of implied movement.’’
“The Glass House,’’ in New Canaan (built in 1948-1949), designed by Modernist architect Philip Johnson (1906-2005) as his own residence. It’s now a National Historic Site.
Those boots are history
“Vern has gone up to the attic to hunt for a fish pole and I trailed along after him. The attic was just like that of any other North Country farmhouse – cobwebby corn, and old clothes; corners piled full of haircloth trunks, boxes, and dead furniture. I saw a homemade cradle, an ancient spinning wheel, a flax-carder, piles of books and magazines and then, suspended from a nail, two pairs of rivermen’s boots….Vern took them in one huge hand and held them almost tenderly. ‘These boots, young feller,’ he said to me, ‘may be said to mark the passing of an era.’’’
From Spiked Boots: From New England’s North Country, True Stories of Yesteryear, When Men Were Rugged and Rivers Wild, by Robert Pike (1905-1997), a scholar and writer who grew up in Waterford, Vt., on the Connecticut River.
Looking across the Moore Reservoir at Waterford, Vt.
Todd J. Leach: Colleges must figure out how to survive after the pandemic
At the Keene (N.H.)State College campus, left to right: President's House, Morrison Hall, Parker Hall
From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)
Colleges and universities were hit hard by the COVID-19 crisis. The American Council on Education (ACE) estimated a total impact of $120 billion in a recent letter to legislators. That number reflects both direct expenses and lost revenues. It is easy to identify the direct expenses associated with testing, cleaning, PPE, remote learning technology and improved ventilation systems. But the lost revenues, while harder to measure, were just as impactful.
The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reports a 22% drop in students going directly from high school to college. With an estimated 30 million people out of work, part-time enrollments and lower-priced community colleges were affected sharply. Four-year institutions may have experienced smaller overall enrollment drops than the community colleges, but the combination of fewer students in residence halls and significantly higher costs associated with those students who did choose to live on campus, had a dramatic negative impact on auxiliary revenues.
Given the gloomy financial realities of both 2019 and 2020 it may be somewhat surprising how few colleges permanently closed their doors as a result. It might be tempting to believe the worst of the financial woes for higher education will soon be over once the vaccine brings an end to the pandemic, but that sigh of relief would be premature.
The federal relief provided to higher education was ultimately less than a third of what the ACE was requesting. Many states augmented that aid further with state-allocated CARES funding, but there remains a financial gap that institutions have to address in other ways. Many of the approaches used to cover that gap will have lasting impact and make the future for many colleges more challenging than it already was.
Tapping into reserves or endowments, furloughs and layoffs, increases in deferred maintenance, salary cuts and freezes, and other short-term fixes may have helped institutions manage through the crisis but they will have to be made up for at some point. It may turn out that COVID has a delayed impact on the survivability of many institutions that relied on these short-term measures as opposed to addressing more substantially those structural costs that better support long-term sustainability in the face of continuing demographic declines and intensifying competition.
Already squeezed
Higher education was already in the midst of challenging times and COVID’s biggest impact may be how it accelerates the need for structural change and the rethinking of the student experience. The long-term demographic picture, as forecast by Nathan Grawe among others, shows many years of declining enrollments ahead, capped off at the end of the 2020s by, what Grawe himself described in a January 2018 interview with Inside Higher Ed, as a “free fall.” For those of us in the Northeast, the predicted loss in four-year college going students is about 4,000 per year for the next decade.
Institutions that thought they could weather the predicted 1% to 2% annual demographic decline as they incrementally rethought and restructured over the course of several years may no longer have the luxury of time. In fact, those institutions that solely focused on the short-term challenge of COVID may have weakened their ability to respond to the long-term threats. The loss (or disenfranchising) of key talent, the spending of strategic reserves, and the increased backlog of deferred maintenance will all make it much more challenging to make the bold strategic changes and investments it will take to compete in a post-COVID environment.
It may be many years before families fully recover economically, and it is highly likely that states will have fewer funds available for higher education going forward, at least without federal level support. These financial constraints will make it highly unlikely that institutions will be able to make up for the COVID impacts by raising tuition or advocating for higher levels of state support. In fact, the discounting wars can be expected to accelerate, rather than cease, as institutions compete more heavily over a smaller pool students simultaneously facing deeper financial challenges.
Some leaders may find comfort in the fact that many of their peer institutions will be in the same situation and that some shakeout may help address the supply side of the equation, but that is not likely to provide any immediate post-COVID relief. It might also be tempting to believe that the massive migration to remote learning that was necessitated by the pandemic has now jumpstarted a new revenue stream that will carry institutions into the future. The reality is that very few institutions that served a residential population with remote technology have attracted a truly online audience, and they are not likely to, without substantial investment in marketing, extended-hour support services and instructional design. The “Field of Dreams” approach no longer works in a saturated online market and it will take more than streaming lectures or putting classes on the latest LMS to be competitive in online markets.
While higher education may be facing precarious times, the value and need for it has never been greater, and surely, there will be institutions that thrive post-COVID. According to Grawe’s demographic analysis, we can expect highly selective institutions to continue to attract students, and even experience higher demand. I don’t believe the COVID crisis has any particular impact on this prediction. For small and regional institutions, however, I believe the COVID crisis has brought an imminent shakeout closer to the forefront for all the reasons identified above. Nonetheless, post-COVID will also be a period of opportunity for those institutions that have either incorporated long-term plans into their COVID decisions or are prepared to move beyond incremental change and move rapidly towards a rethink of both costs and the student experience.
Short-term cutting vs long-term investment
In an ideal situation, institutions would have already begun planning for long-term cost restructuring prior to the pandemic and, therefore, have simply accelerated those plans, rather than needing to take short-term cost-cutting measures that hinder long-term investment and success. However, for those institutions that had not begun addressing their cost structures, the urgency to do so should be strategic and immediate. Not all the competitors that emerge from the pandemic are going to be in the same place, and those that address their actual cost structure will have the ability to further lower price or, just as importantly, redirect dollars to initiatives that will have an impact on retention and enrollment.
Cost restructuring is only one part of the equation: Rethinking the student experience should also be a post-pandemic priority. Based on a variety of surveys, it seems clear that residential students may not have been entirely happy with their remote experiences. But might they still value the flexibility of one or two online classes that free up an early morning or a Friday? Can we better leverage physical classroom time if that classroom time can be augmented with more remote content? Will students who have become accustomed to remote advising and telehealth want to return to lines, or running across campus for a 15-minute appointment? Colleges that are planning to return to where they left off will miss the opportunity to become more “student-centered.” They will also be in danger of disenfranchising their students, not to mention faculty and staff who have also become accustomed to doing more remotely.
There are other ways to leverage the process and technology enhancements that were made to cope with COVID to also improve the student experience going forward, and ultimately provide some competitive advantage. These may include expanding student options through cross-institution collaborations and course sharing. While some institutions will not be prepared to survive post-COVID, for others, this is going to be a period of change and improvement. The difference will come down to the ability and willingness to go beyond incremental, not only in terms of cost reductions but also in terms of advancing the student experience and addressing changes in the market, all while remaining true to the core ethos of the institution. Simply renegotiating a few vendor contracts or migrating an additional program or two to online will not be enough to compete in a post-COVID era for most institutions.
Todd J. Leach is chancellor emeritus of the University System of New Hampshire and former chairman of The New England Board of Higher Education.
Llewellyn King: Utilities are becoming innovation hubs as they move away from fossil fuel
Wind farm in Mars Hill, Maine
Solar-energy array in Exeter, N.H.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
The electric utility industry looks a bit like a man on a ladder with one foot seeking the rung below, unsure of where it is. But find it he must.
The industry is beset with technological change as well as social and political pressures. It isn’t in crisis, but it is in dramatic transition.
It has one overriding driver: the need first to reduce, then to eliminate carbon emissions.
The utilities have been heroic in turning to wind and solar – which have also turned out to be economically advantageous. However, those efforts are challenged by the need to store electricity produced when these “alternatives” aren’t available.
General Motors is switching to making only electric vehicles after 2035. It can stop and retool. Utilities can never stop pumping out electrons; they must retool on the go.
Most of us only realize the hidden fragility of the system when storms are forecast, and the local utility tells us to buy batteries.
Feb. 11 was the 174th anniversary of Thomas Edison’s birth. No one has affected the way we live as completely as Edison, neither king, conqueror, philosopher, revolutionary, nor any other inventor.
New fuels produce new ancillary needs. Every new introduction in electricity requires the supporting technologies to change — sometimes new technologies must be invented for the supporting role.
The big pressures on the utilities are to get off fossil fuels and to increase the resilience of the system, including resilience against weather and cyberattack.
These pressures spawn other pressures, particularly how to store alternative electricity, which is made when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, often not when consumption is high.
Storage is a hot area in electric innovation. Batteries, which are front-and-center in storage, must get much better, so they can have longer drawdown times. Arshad Mansoor, president of the Electric Power Research Institute, says batteries will get much better, but not enough to take up the slack for days of bad weather. He was speaking at the virtual winter meeting of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners.
Hydrogen is a favorite to deal with days of rain, as happens in Florida and elsewhere, and wind droughts that can last more than a week in Texas, a big wind-generating center.
But hydrogen isn’t a one-for-one replacement of natural gas, the current workhorse of generating fuels. On paper, hydrogen has every virtue. In reality, it has challenges of its own: It has less than half the energy of natural gas; it is harder to handle, can explode, and can produce nitrogen oxide; and turbines have to be modified to burn it.
Even so, a plethora of utilities, including Sempra, Arizona Public Service, and NextEra Energy, are experimenting with it. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is converting a coal plant in Utah to run completely on green hydrogen (that is hydrogen derived from the electrolysis of water not from natural gas).
San Antonio’s municipally owned energy utility, CPS Energy, buys a lot of wind power and is planning to install 900 megawatts of solar power on top of 4oo MW already deployed. That means storage is critical, and the utility has launched an ambitious global search for new-and-improved technologies. This has generated 300 responses worldwide. These, according to COO Cris Eugster, include hydrogen and batteries, but also far-out ideas like compressed air, flywheels, mineshafts for pumped storage, and liquefied air.
All of this restructuring, moving from big central plants to diverse generating and complex substitutions, requires recognition that data is now central in utilities — and data has to move instantly.
Morgan O’Brien, who co-founded the game-changing cellphone company, Nextel, and is now executive chairman of Anterix, a private broadband- network provider, says, “The intermittent nature of renewable sources imposes particular requirements on grid management for speed and accuracy. Luckily, the global wireless technology, LTE, which powers our smartphones is perfectly adapted to this communications challenge.”
The speed of transition is accelerating. The electric utilities, often thought of as staid, are going to be anything but going forward: They are becoming innovation hubs.
Edison’s birthday marks a busy time for his follow-on inventors.
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington. D.C.
Summer must be earned
In South Royalton, Vt.
— Photo by Nathan Siemers
“She came from people who thought they were too good to run from the cold, too hearty, too real. Fern allowed herself only short dreams of summer, properly earned summer, after winter and after spring.”
― From Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, by Ramona Ausubel, a novel about a wealthy New England family in the 1960s and ‘70s that suddenly loses its fortune.
Mystery wall
“I see a rock wall in the woods,
I wonder where it goes…
To some forgotten forest glade
that only whitetails know?’’
— From “Rock Wall in the Woods,’’ by David Welch
Harris Meyer: Leaders of some New England and other states look to curb prescription-drug-price increases
Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker is looking for support from state legislators for his plan to penalize price hikes for a broader range of drugs as part of his new budget proposal.
Fed up with a lack of federal action to lower prescription drug costs, state legislators around the country are pushing bills to penalize drugmakers for unjustified price hikes and to cap payment at much-lower Canadian levels.
These bills, sponsored by both Republicans and Democrats in a half-dozen states, are a response to consumers’ intensified demand for action on drug prices as prospects for solutions from Congress remain highly uncertain.
Eighty-seven percent of Americans favor federal action to lower drug prices, making it the public’s second-highest policy priority, according to a survey released by Politico and Harvard University last month. That concern is propelled by the toll of out-of-pocket costs on Medicare beneficiaries, many of whom pay thousands of dollars a year. Studies show many patients don’t take needed drugs because of the cost.
“States will keep a careful eye on Congress, but they can’t wait,” said Trish Riley, executive director of the National Academy for State Health Policy (NASHP), which has drafted two model bills on curbing prices that some state lawmakers are using.
Several reports released last month heightened the pressure for action. The Rand Corp. said average list prices in the U.S. for prescription drugs in 2018 were 2.56 times higher than the prices in 32 other developed countries, while brand-name drug prices averaged 3.44 times higher.
The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review found that drugmakers raised the list prices for seven widely used, expensive drugs in 2019 despite the lack of evidence of substantial clinical improvements. ICER, an independent drug research group, estimated that just those price increases cost U.S. consumers $1.2 billion a year more.
Democratic legislators in Hawaii, Maine and Washington recently introduced bills, based on one of NASHP’s models, that would impose an 80% tax on the drug price increases that ICER determines in its annual report are not supported by evidence of improved clinical value.
Under this model, after getting the list of drugs from ICER, states would require the manufacturers of those medicines to report total in-state sales of their drugs and the price difference since the previous year. Then the state would assess the tax on the manufacturer. The revenue generated by the tax would be used to fund programs that help consumers afford their medications.
“I’m not looking to gather more tax dollars,” said Democratic Sen. Ned Claxton, the sponsor of the bill in Maine and a retired family physician. “The best outcome would be to have drug companies just sell at a lower price.”
Similarly, Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican, proposed a penalty on price hikes for a broader range of drugs as part of his new budget proposal, projecting it would haul in $70 million in its first year.
Meanwhile, Republican and Democratic lawmakers in Hawaii, Maine, North Dakota, Oklahoma and Rhode Island have filed bills that would set the rates paid by state-run and commercial health plans — excluding Medicaid — for up to 250 of the costliest drugs to rates paid by the four most populous Canadian provinces. That could reduce prices by an average of 75%, according to NASHP.
Legislators in other states plan to file similar bills, Riley said.
Drugmakers, which have formidable lobbying power in Washington, D.C., and the states, fiercely oppose these efforts. “The outcomes of these policies would only make it harder for people to get the medicines they need and would threaten the crucial innovation necessary to get us out of a global pandemic,” the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the industry’s trade group, said in a written statement.
Colorado, Florida and several New England states previously passed laws allowing importation of cheaper drugs from Canada, an effort strongly promoted by former President Donald Trump. But those programs are still being developed and each would need a federal green light.
Bipartisan bills in Congress that would have penalized drugmakers for raising prices above inflation rates and capped out-of-pocket drug costs for enrollees in Medicare Part D drug plans died last year.
“If we waited for Congress, we’d have moss on our backs,” said Washington state Sen. Karen Keiser, a Democrat who sponsored the state’s bill to tax drug price hikes.
Based on ICER data, two of the drugs that could be targeted for tax penalties under the legislation are Enbrel and Humira — blockbuster products used to treat rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune conditions.
Since acquiring Enbrel in 2002, Amgen has raised the price 457% to $72,240 for a year’s treatment, according to a report last fall from the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.
In a written statement, Amgen denied that Enbrel’s list price increase is unsupported by clinical evidence and said the company ensures that every patient who needs its medicines has “meaningful access” to them.
The price for Humira, the world’s best-selling drug, with $20 billion in global sales in 2019, has gone up 470% since it was introduced to the market in 2003, according to AnalySource, a drug price database.
In contrast, AbbVie slashed Humira’s price in Europe by 80% in 2018 to match the price of biosimilar products available there. AbbVie patents block those biosimilar drugs in the U.S.
AbbVie did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
Manufacturers say the list price of a drug is irrelevant because insurers and patients pay a significantly lower net price, after getting rebates and other discounts.
But many people, especially those who are uninsured, are on Medicare or have high-deductible plans, pay some or all the cost based on the list price.
Katherine Pepper of Bellingham, Wash., has felt the bite of Humira’s list price. Several years ago, she retired from her job as a management analyst to go on Social Security disability and Medicare because of her psoriatic arthritis, diabetes and gastrointestinal issues.
When she enrolled in a Medicare Part D drug plan, she was shocked by her share of the cost. Since Pepper pays 5% of the Humira list price after reaching Medicare’s catastrophic cost threshold, she spent roughly $15,000 for the drug last year.
Medicare doesn’t allow drugmakers to cover beneficiaries’ copay costs because of concerns that it could prompt more beneficiaries and their doctors to choose high-cost drugs and increase federal spending.
Many patients with rheumatoid and other forms of arthritis are forced to switch from Enbrel or Humira, which they can inject at home themselves, to different drugs that are infused in a doctor’s office when they go on Medicare. Infusion drugs are covered almost entirely by the Medicare Part B program for outpatient care. But switching can complicate a patient’s care.
“Very few Part D patients can afford the [injectable drugs] because the copay can be so steep,” said Dr. Marcus Snow, an Omaha, Nebraska, rheumatologist and spokesperson for the American College of Rheumatology. “The math gets very ugly very quickly.”
To continue taking Humira, Pepper racked up large credit card bills, burning through most of her savings. In 2019, she and her husband, who’s retired and on Medicare, sold their house and moved into a rental apartment. She skimps on her diabetes medications to save money, which has taken a toll on her health, causing skin and vision problems, she said.
She’s also cut back on food spending, with her and her husband often eating only one meal a day.
“I’m now in a situation where I have to do Russian roulette, spin the wheel and figure out what I can do without this month,” said Pepper.
Harris Meyer is a Kaiser Health News reporter.
This article is part of a series on the impact of high prescription drug costs on consumers made possible through the 2020 West Health and Families USA Media Fellowship.
Harris Meyer: @Meyer_HM
Lawrence moves out of its funk
The old Ayer Mill building on the Merrimack River in Lawrence
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Old cities can be brought back, if not to their boom times, at least to more stability and even a modicum of prosperity. An example to watch is Lawrence, Mass., an old mill town on the Merrimack River. Even with the effects of the pandemic, the city is much better off than it was a decade ago, when Boston Magazine called it “City of the Damned” – a center of rising crime and poverty. (I spent some time there back in the fall of 1968, when I was teaching high school next door, in North Andover, Mass. It was a downer then but it still had a fair number of mills operating and was far from the disaster it became by 1990.)
A group called the Lawrence Partnership has been a key to the city’s economic and social revival. This includes a bunch of business and other community leaders formed in 2014 to “stimulate economic development and improve the quality of life” in Lawrence. This group has helped strengthen the city’s finances, cut crime, improve education and lure new business. COVID has made things more difficult, of course, but the city’s leaders are pressing on.
Lessons for cities in southeastern New England? Hit this link to learn more.
In the 1912 Lawrence textile strike, Massachusetts National Guardsmen with fixed bayonets surround a parade of strikers.
In Lawrence, the bizarre High Service Water Tower (1895), also called Tower Hill Water Tower, named an American Water Landmark in 1979 by the American Water Works Association
Love at the Cape Ann Museum
Above, Valentine shadow boxes from the archives of the Cape Ann Art Museum, Gloucester, Mass. Below, also at the museum, Sailors' Valentine, 1800-1840 (shell and glass on wood)
