‘Sewn together’
— Photo by Staben
“America and I, the two of us
so sewn together that we both should
hang limp in rain, or whiplashed in storms,
wars and massacres.’’
— From “Leaving the Flag Out All Night,’’ by the late Napoleon St. Cyr, who was a poet as well as the publisher, editor and sole staff member of a literary magazine called The Small Pond Magazine of Literature, in Stratford, Conn.
Boothe Memorial Park and Museum, in Stratford, which owns it, Around 1914 two brothers, David Beach Boothe and Stephen Nichols Boothe, created the Boothe Memorial Museum, which has a collection of 20 architecturally unusual buildings. The structures include a carriage house, Americana Museum, miniature lighthouse, windmill, a clock tower museum, trolley station, chapel and a blacksmith shop.
Weather always innovating
“There is a sumptuous variety about the New England weather that compels the stranger’s admiration — and regret. The weather is always doing something there; always attending strictly to business; always getting up new designs and trying them on people to see how they will go. But it gets through more business in spring than in any other season. In the spring I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of twenty-four hours.”’
— Mark Twain (1835-1910). The famed writer lived for many years in Connecticut. He once said his favorite place was Dublin, N.H., where late in life he summered.
—Photo by David McCandless
“June in New England is like a lover’s dream made tangible.’
— Gladys Taber (1899-1908), writer and resident of rural Connecticut and Cape Cod.
Braving the cold on a hot day
“Maine Surf” (tempera on board), by John Falter (1910-1982), at the National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, R.I. It’s the cover of the Aug. 14, 1948 Saturday Evening Post. Copyright the National Museum of American Illustration.
‘In the dewy air of June’
Ten o'clock: the broken moon
Hangs not yet a half hour high,
Yellow as a shield of brass,
In the dewy air of June,
Poised between the vaulted sky
And the ocean's liquid glass.
Earth lies in the shadow still;
Low black bushes, trees, and lawn
Night's ambrosial dews absorb;Through the foliage creeps a thrill,
Whispering of yon spectral dawn
And the hidden climbing orb.
Higher, higher, gathering light,
Veiling with a golden gauze
All the trembling atmosphere,
See, the rayless disk grows white!
Hark, the glittering billows pause!
Faint, far sounds possess the ear.
Elves on such a night as this
Spin their rings upon the grass;
On the beach the water-fay
Greets her lover with a kiss;
Through the air swift spirits pass,
Laugh, caress, and float away.
Shut thy lids and thou shalt see
Angel faces wreathed with light,
Mystic forms long vanished hence.
Ah, too fine, too rare, they be
For the grosser mortal sight,
And they foil our waking sense.
Yet we feel them floating near,
Know that we are not alone,
Though our open eyes behold
Nothing save the moon's bright sphere,
In the vacant heavens shown,
And the ocean's path of gold.
“— A June Night’’, by Emma Lazarus (1849-1887)
Police escort
Bronze statue of Mr. McCloskey’s ducklings and Mrs. Mallard by Nancy Schön is a popular attraction in the Boston Public Garden. A replica in Moscow was a gift from First Lady Barbara Bush to Soviet First Lady Raisa Gorbachev.
“When they came to the corner of Beacon Street there was the police car with four policemen that Clancy had sent from headquarters. The policemen held back the traffic so Mrs. Mallard and the ducklings could march across the street, right on into the Public Garden.’’
— From Robert McCloskey’s Make Way for Ducklings (1942)
As paper goes away....
“NY Times Arts with Cat” (mixed media wall sculpture), in Paul Rousso’s show through June 27 at Lanoue Gallery, Boston.
The gallery reports:
“The ink and paper era is drawing to a close. ‘All this stuff,’ as artist Paul Rousso puts it, ‘is going away.’ That ‘stuff’ is no less than the paper-based underpinnings of modern civilization. Texts, images, sheet music, currency – the paper document is being displaced by its transformation into so many bits of binary code, digitized for the screen and everyplace at once. Yet paper documents are themselves an expression of something else entirely. An artist sketches a two dimensional impression of a flower; a novelist commits an imagined conversation to paper – meaning is imbued within a separate medium, altered yet understood.’’
“From his ‘painting with paper’ collages to his latest creations of wildly outsized and convoluted sculptures of money, candy wrappers, and newspapers, Paul Rousso has sought to flatten the dimensional and elevate the flattened: ‘There are many shades from one end of the spectrum to the other, but everything has an opposite. My work is about finding what comes next.’' For Rousso, a good deal of what’s next involves a process of crumpling, folding, tearing, gluing, and re-composing – turning the printed pages of a single Vogue magazine into a sculpted wall hanging, for example, or transforming every printed note of every Beatles’ song into a massive jumble of texture on canvas.’’
Beach bathos
Narragansett Town Beach in more sedate times
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Regarding the May 22 brawl at Narragansett Town Beach: I wonder if the Rhode Island State Police and municipal cops have enough officers to oversee the beaches in this summer of pent-up demand. This is not only a matter of public safety; it’s also an economic issue. Rhode Island’s beaches draw many visitors, and their money, from out of state. For the state’s beaches to develop a reputation for rowdiness, or worse, will scare many away.
I’ve always been surprised by the number of people who want to be at a beach with hundreds or thousands of other people, cheek by jowl, with at least a few stoned, drunk or both.
It seemed particularly strange that so many people showed up last weekend with the water still quite frigid. Then there’s the glare of the sun, that vaguely itchy feeling of salt on your face, sand in and on everything….
I don’t get the allure but I do hope that beach lovers will bring their wallets from out of state to the Ocean State’s many lovely beaches, nearby restaurants and places to stay. When they leave after Labor Day, I’ll walk on the beach.
Good enough for us
Forest Lodge, former home of Louise Dickinson Rich in Upton, Maine. It consists of seven buildings, four of which are residential. The complex was owned and occupied by the family on a year-round basis between 1933 and 1944, and as Rich's summer residence until 1955. The property, as well as the surrounding country and its small number of year-round residents and seasonal visitors, were recurring themes in her writing. The property was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2008.
“We don't have plays and music and contact with sophisticated minds, and a round of social engagements. All we have are sun and wind and rain, and space in which to move and breathe. All we have are the forests, and the calm expanses of the lakes, and time to call our own. All we have are the hunting and fishing and the swimming, and each other.”
—Louise Dickinson Rich (1903-1991), in We Took to the Woods (1942) and many other books, mostly about Maine. We Took to the Woods (1942) is set in the Rangeley Lake area of northwest Maine. It has elements of Thoreau. She played down the darker stuff.
In Rangeley Lake State Park
Mapping emotions
“Map of Mumbling Red,” (mixed media), by Jeesoo Lee, in her show “Pung-Gyeong Moving Scenery,’’ at Kingston Gallery, Boston, through June.
The galley says:
‘‘In the process of layering, cutting, and reattaching materials, Jeesoo Lee combines passing moments in time and the physical spaces in which they have occurred…She captures the fleetingness of memory. Lee weaves poignant recollections such as ‘the sound of a young son’s laughter when he opens his eyes in the morning’ or ‘the anguish of a friend who has unexpectedly lost a loved one’. The work portrays these moments, both the intense and the mundane, to combine and form ever-evolving landscapes. Her work is based on psychological states of being which are then redefined through the physicality of her material. This deconstruction/construction of her imagery investigates the search for meaning and understanding. The result is intricate collage-like fabric pieces that ‘live and breath.’’’
Chris Powell: Is infamous hedge fund Alden saving or killing newspapers?
The now closed Hartford Courant headquarters building
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Nearly everyone wanted Tribune Publishing Co. to be purchased by someone other than Alden Global Capital, since the hedge fund is seen as an "asset stripper." Indeed, months before acquiring the shares of Tribune it didn't already own, Alden had managed the neat trick of stripping the Hartford Courant of its own building, leaving Connecticut's largest newspaper homeless.
But while nearly infinite money lately has been floating around the country and zillionaires abound, nobody offered more than the $633 million Alden offered to take Tribune private. Despite the decline in the newspaper industry, Tribune is said to remain profitable and to have millions in the bank, and the eight newspapers it owns apart from The Courant include some storied names: the Chicago Tribune, the New York Daily News, and the Baltimore Sun.
So the lack of other bidders suggests wide scorn for the industry's future.
That's why bemoaning Alden is so hypocritical, as it was the other day when Connecticut U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal joined Courant journalists at a protest rally. "Get a better buyer," Blumenthal implored, even as his own family easily could have afforded becoming a major partner in a rival bid -- but didn't.
But rich people indifferent to the public interest in sustaining newspapers are not the main culprits of the industry's decline.
Troubled as they are, newspapers remain the country's primary source for serious news, news beyond idle distraction and titillation -- news about government, community, business and life in general. Television and radio steal from newspapers shamelessly. Some state and local Internet news sites do great service but their "business model" is only charity and thus not so reliable.
The biggest problems for newspapers are the public's diminishing interest in serious news and the country's worsening demographics. Literacy and civic engagement long have been declining while poverty and violence have been increasing, especially in such cities as Chicago, Baltimore and Hartford. It takes courage enough to invest in the newspaper business generally, and heroism to invest in newspapers in disintegrating cities.
Even in Connecticut it is a matter of general indifference that half the state's high school graduates never master high school English and math and so enter adulthood unprepared to be citizens, much less newspaper readers -- or readers at all.
So horrible as it may seem, for the moment there may be nothing to do but to root for Alden, especially since before acquiring Tribune it already had acquired a hundred papers across the country and was the country's second largest newspaper chain. Alden President Heath Freeman says the company's goal is "getting publications to a place where they can operate sustainably over the long term."
Of course, to "operate sustainably" may require weakening Alden's papers more. But then the content of nearly all newspapers long has been weakening along with their circulation. For in the end the investment newspapers rely on most is not that of their owners but their subscribers, and nobody needs a newspaper just to keep up with the Kardashians.
xxx
\If the United States is ever attacked again, nobody should seek advice from Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy.
“Israel," Murphy said the other day, "has the right to defend itself from Hamas's rocket attacks, in a manner proportionate with the threat its citizens are facing.”
But no country wins a war with a "proportionate" response to attacks. Wars are won with enough force to defeat the enemy and eliminate its war-making capacity. Japan started its war with the United States by sinking a few ships at Pearl Harbor, but the United States won the war by sinking nearly all Japanese ships and leveling the whole country, concluding with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In a recent newspaper essay Murphy also wrote that schools need fewer police officers and less student discipline and more counselors and social workers. But disruptions by students in school are helping to drive the exodus from the cities. Murphy misses that problem and the underlying one, since he fails to ask:
Where are all the messed-up kids coming from?
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.
Remembering the Grand Army of the Republic
The Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment, a bronze relief sculpture by Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1948-1907) opposite 24 Beacon St., Boston. It depicts Col. Robert Gould Shaw leading members of the 54th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry as it marched down Beacon Street on May 28, 1863 to depart the city to fight in the South. The sculpture was unveiled on May 31, 1897 and was the first civic monument to honor the heroism of African-American soldiers.
“On a thousand small town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.
The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year—
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns . . ..’’
— From Robert Lowell’s (1917-1977) “For the Union Dead’’
Construction site
“hannah well met” (bronze and stone), by Jerold Ehrlich, in the Providence Art Club’s “Open-Air Sculpture Exhibition 2021’’ through Aug. 31
On view in the club's courtyard, this annual exhibition features seven sculptures selected by juror Gage Prentiss. Sculptors Jerold Ehrlich, Alice Benvie Gebhart, Walter Horak, Madeleine Lord, Ed McAloon, Gage Prentiss and Mark Wholey are all New England area artists, each presenting a work of art with a unique narrative and perspective. Jerold Ehrlich is a Narragansett, R.I.-based artist who previously worked in construction, leading to him use materials from construction sites in his work.
Todd McLeish: Strengthening plant and animal diversity by planting native plants
Purple coneflowers, a native plant, on a ‘‘pollinator pathway’’ that helps boost populations of wide range of wildlife.
—Photo by Frank Carini/ecoRI News)
From ecoRI News (ecori.org)
Rhode Island gardeners in Cranston and Barrington are joining a national effort to install native plants in their gardens. The idea behind the effort is to link their yards with native habitat on protected lands and create what organizers are calling “pollinator pathways” to boost populations of bees, butterflies, birds and other wildlife.
In the Edgewood section of Cranston, Suzanne Borstein is leading the effort to get her neighbors and friends to plant native plants in what she calls the “tree lawn” — the area between the sidewalk and the road. Since last November, she has hosted a series of online meetings to discuss the initiative, and nearly three dozen Cranston households had agreed to participate by the beginning of May, with more signing on every week.
“The connectability of the garden spaces is what’s especially important,” Borstein said. “If you have a great yard but nobody else in the neighborhood does, then the pollinators won’t be attracted or sustained.”
Planting native plants and restoring native habitat is vital to preserving biodiversity, according to the National Audubon Society. The habitat created by native plant gardens helps to nurture and sustain insects, birds and other creatures.
The idea for the Pollinator Pathways program emerged from a popular book written by University of Delaware entomologist Doug Tallamy called Bringing Nature Home. According to Borstein, Tallamy’s idea was to get people to replace half of their lawns with native plants that would support native insect populations, which in turn support bird populations. If enough people participated, the pollinator pathways would link properties that, when combined, would total more acreage than all of the country’s national parks.
Borstein, a clinical psychologist, said the goal of her effort is to “raise awareness of the importance of choosing native plants. I’m making it as local as I can so we can build community, neighbor to neighbor. I want to increase the availability and use of native plants.”
But where to buy native plants for local use is a considerable problem.
“There’s a new awakening that we should plant natives, but native plants are hard to find,” said Sally Johnson, vice president of the Rhode Island Wild Plant Society board of directors. “I don’t think the commercial market has responded yet to the need.”
The Rhody Native program, launched by the Rhode Island Natural History Survey in 2009, was initially successful at growing native plants from seeds collected locally, but it couldn’t be sustained by a nonprofit with limited staff and funding.
When Borstein contacted Johnson for help in sourcing native plants for her Edgewood gardeners, Johnson eventually identified about 10 native plant species that could be acquired from a commercial nursery in New Jersey.
“It’s called the Garden State for a reason,” Johnson said.
The Barrington Land Conservation Trust is also finding it difficult to find native plants for participants in its pollinator effort.
“Many local nurseries carry plants listed as native, but native to where? New England? The Midwest? Are they true natives or cultivars?” asked Cindy Pierce, one of the organizers of the Barrington project. “It can be daunting for a new gardener or even an experienced gardener new to natives.”
Pierce noted Blue Moon Farm Perennials, in South Kingstown, R.I., specializes in native plants, but the Barrington group is also working with the Rhode Island Wild Plant Society to acquire native plants. The Land Conservation Trust is also asking local nurseries to stock natives, and it plans to hold its own native plant sale in the fall.
The Barrington gardeners aren’t just focusing their efforts on planting natives in the tree lawn, however. They are instead encouraging their neighbors to take whatever steps they can to diversify their gardens with native plants.
“Whether it’s adding a few container plants, adding native plants to an existing garden, or creating a meadow,” Pierce said. “Eliminating the use of fertilizers and lawn chemicals is another important step everyone can take, along with reducing the size of your lawn, mowing less often and leaving the leaves in your garden. Every little bit helps.”
Assuming that interest in native plants and the Pollinator Pathways program continues to build, organizers in Barrington and Cranston hope additional communities will join and extend the corridors being built for pollinators. Those that add native plants to their gardens can add their properties to an online map of native plant gardens called Homegrown National Parks that author Tallamy has established.
“Even if you only have three feet of natives, you can get on the map and it hooks you up to a lot of resources,” Borstein said.
After the planting season, Borstein hopes to organize a neighborhood walk so residents can “see what’s possible.” She hopes such an event will lead to additional participants and further discussions about expanding the project.
“I don’t have anything formal planned, but I’d like to create some way that all of the other organizations in Rhode Island could communicate to share information,” Borstein said. “And I’d like to see it grow beyond pollinators and help people to understand the role of shrubs and trees as well. It will help gardeners understand more about the issues from a holistic point of view.”
Todd McLeish is a nature writer and ecoRI News contributor.
Phil Galewitz: Biden seems in no hurry to allow import of Canadian drugs
U.S. and Canadian customs officers
The Biden administration said Friday it has no timeline on whether it will allow states to import drugs from Canada, an effort that was approved under former President Trump as a key strategy to control costs. {Many New Englanders, especially those in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, have long sought to be able to easily get pharmaceuticals from Canada for obvious reasons of price and proximity.}
Six states have passed laws to start such programs, and Florida, Colorado and New Mexico are the furthest along in plans to get federal approval.
The Biden administration said states still have several hurdles to get through, including a review by the Food and Drug Administration, and such efforts may face pressures from the Canadian government, which has warned its drug industry not to do anything that could cause drug shortages in that country.
The Biden administration said the lawsuit was moot because it’s unclear when or if any states would get an importation plan approved.
Drug importation has been hotly debated for decades, with many states and advocates believing it would help lower the prices Americans pay while the drug industry contends it would undercut the safety of the U.S. drug supply. Critics note most brand-name drugs sold in the U.S. are manufactured abroad.
Friday’s court filing had been eagerly anticipated, as it was the first time the Biden administration weighed in on the issue. Promises to curb high drug prices have been a standard sound bite of political campaigns, and importation enjoys broad public support. Supporters of importation range the political spectrum from progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to Florida’s conservative Republican governor, Ron DeSantis. They argue Americans should not pay more for drugs than consumers in other countries.
Rachel Sachs, a health law expert at Washington University, in St. Louis, said the rhetoric in the court filing is probably “disheartening” to DeSantis and other supporters hoping that states’ importation programs would be approved soon. “They are laying out that there is no time limit on the FDA and there are many steps that states have to undergo before approval,” she said.
Supporters of drug importation say they still have hope, especially if the court agrees to the administration’s effort to throw out the suit.
“While articulating possible hurdles that may prevent state drug importation programs from moving forward, the Biden administration’s motion to dismiss PhRMA’s lawsuit keeps alive opportunities for more Americans to benefit from drug importation,” said Gabriel Levitt, president of Pharmacychecker.com, which verifies online foreign pharmacies for customers.
Importing drugs from Canada, where government controls keep prices lower, has been debated for decades in the U.S. A 2003 federal law gave the executive branch permission to do it, but only if certified as safe and cost-effective by the HHS secretary. Then-HHS Secretary Alex Azar announced in September that he would become the first to do that, and the department issued its rule in October.
Florida, Colorado, Maine, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Vermont are pursuing efforts to import drugs.
PhRMA filed its suit in November in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. In the court filing late Friday, the Biden administration said the FDA could reject state importation plans for many reasons, including safety concerns and lack of significant savings for consumers.
In an e-mailed statement, PhRMa spokesperson Nicole Longo said: “We continue to believe the Trump Administration violated federal law when it finalized its rule permitting state-sponsored drug importation from Canada without proper certification and, in doing so, putting the health and safety of Americans in jeopardy.”
Canada has opposed efforts to send its drugs to the United States, fearing that it could exacerbate shortages there. Last year, Canadian health regulators warned companies against exporting any drugs that could lead to shortages.
During the presidential campaign, Joe Biden supported drug importation. His HHS secretary, Xavier Becerra, voted for the 2003 Canadian drug importation law as a member of Congress.
In most circumstances, the FDA says it’s illegal for individuals to import drugs for personal use.
Yet, for nearly 20 years, storefronts in Florida have helped people buy drugs online from pharmacies in Canada and other nations at typically half the U.S. price. The FDA has periodically cracked down on the operators but has allowed the stores to stay open.
The Florida legislature in 2019 approved the state drug importation program, and the state submitted its proposal to the federal government last year. While DeSantis has boasted of the strategy at news conferences in the retiree-heavy community of The Villages, the state program would have little direct effect on most Floridians.
That’s because the state effort is geared to getting lower-cost drugs to state agencies for prison health programs and other needs and for Medicaid, the state-federal health program for the poor. Medicaid enrollees already pay little or nothing for medications.
Florida has identified about 150 drugs — many of them expensive HIV/AIDS, diabetes and mental health medicines — that it plans to import. Insulin, one of the most expensive widely used drugs, is not included in the program.
DeSantis said the importation plan would save the state between $80 million and $150 million. The state has a $96 billion budget, he said.
“It’s been under review enough,” DeSantis said Friday, hours before the Biden administration’s court filing. “We have followed every regulation. We’ve met every requirement that we were asked to meet, and we want now to be able to get this final approval so that we can finally move forward.”
Christina Pushaw, a spokesperson for DeSantis, said the governor was disappointed by the Biden court filing.
“Governor DeSantis calls on the Biden Administration to step out of the way of innovation and act immediately to approve Florida’s plan that provides safe and effective drugs to drive down prescription costs,” she said in an email to KHN.
The governor appeared at LifeScience Logistics in Lakeland, Florida, where state regulators worked with the company to construct an FDA-compliant warehouse to process pharmaceuticals from Canada.
“We’re ready, willing and able, and I think that this could be really, really significant,” DeSantis said.
He said the warehouse could begin receiving drugs from Canada within 90 days if the state were to get approval from Washington.
LifeScience Logistics officials said they are working with Methapharm Specialty Pharmaceuticals, which has offices near Toronto and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to act as its Canadian wholesaler. Quality checks would be done on the drugs in Canada and again in Florida, said Richard Beeny, CEO of LifeScience Logistics.
LifeScience has begun early talks on negotiating prices with drug manufacturers that would deliver medications to Methapharm, which in turn would send drugs to the Lakeland warehouse. “There is broad interest in the program,” Beeny said about drug companies wanting to participate. “But the pending suit is a bit of a roadblock, so we have to wait and see how that pans out.”
Unlike Florida’s plan, Colorado’s Canadian importation program would help individuals buy the medicines at their local pharmacy. Colorado also would give health insurance plans the option to include imported drugs in their benefit designs.
Mara Baer, a health consultant who has worked with Colorado on its proposal, said the Biden decision leaves open the question of whether state importation plans might eventually be approved. “HHS could have let the rule fall and they did not, which is important given the challenges facing Congress in moving major drug pricing reform in the short term,” she said.
Phil Galewitz is a journalist for Kaiser Health News
Campobello Island is an exclave of Canada’s Province of New Brunswick , but with land access to the mainland being only to Maine.
Useful then artistic
The Connecticut River Walk in Forest Park, in Springfield, Mass., one of many parks designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, who’s considered the father of American landscape architecture. His most famous work is New York’s Central Park. Forest Park, at 735 acres, is one the largest urban parks in American and dates from the late 19th Century, when Springfield was a major manufacturing center.
“Service must precede art. So long as considerations of utility are neglected or overridden by considerations of ornament, there will not be true art.’’
— Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903), landscape architect
Elegant order
“Amaryllis” (archival photograph) by Carol Wontkowski, in her show “Blooming,’’ at Galatea Fine Art, Boston, June 4-27.
Ms. Wontkowski comments:
“‘The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.’
— Dorothea Lange
"My work reflects the beauty in common things. Though we live in a world marred by human influence, there is still order, design and beauty around us. It is my desire to capture the more tranquil and serene images of this world, mirroring their Designer.
“This is an amaryllis bud beginning to open. The process is both elegant and exciting to see. I captured this image just before it began to fully emerge to show its unusual process."
That one face
When all the world is young, lad,
And all the trees are green;
And every goose a swan, lad,
And every lass a queen;
Then hey for boot and horse, lad,
And round the world away;
Young blood must have its course, lad,
And every dog his day.
When all the world is old, lad,
And all the trees are brown;
And all the sport is stale, lad,
And all the wheels run down;
Creep home, and take your place there,
The spent and maimed among:
God grant you find one face there,
You loved when all was young.
“Young and Old,’’ by Charles Kingsley (1819-1875), English writer and Anglican priest
Sam Pizzigati: Treating workers as disposable is bad for business
— Photo by Ramon F. Velasquez
Via OtherWords.org
BOSTON
McDonald’s workers in 15 U.S. cities recently staged a weeklong strike demanding a $15 hourly wage for every McDonald’s worker. McDonald’s resisted, pledging only to raise average wages to $13 an hour.
In the meantime, the profits keep rolling in. The fast-food giant registered $4.7 billion in 2020 earnings. CEO Chris Kempczinski personally pocketed $10.8 million last year, 1,189 times more than the $9,124 that went to the company’s median worker.
Executives at McDonald’s seem to think they can outlast the Fight for $15 campaign. More to the point, they think they know everything. Nothing happens at Mickey D’s without incredibly intensive market research: “Plan, test, feedback, tweak, repeat.” More hours may go into planning the launch of a new McDonald’s menu item than Ike marshaled planning the D-Day invasion.
All this planning has McDonald’s executives supremely confident about their business know-how. But, in fact, these execs do not know their business inside-out. They don’t know their workers.
Workers remain, for McDonald’s executive class, a disposable item. Why pay them decently? If some workers feel underpaid and overstressed, the McDonald’s corporate attitude has historically been “good riddance to them.” Turnover at McDonald’s was running at an annual rate of 150 percent before the pandemic.
The entire fast-food industry rests on a low-wage, high-turnover foundation. And at those rare moments — such as this spring — when new workers seem harder to find, the industry starts expecting its politician pals to cut away at jobless benefits and force workers to take positions that don’t pay a living wage.
But if leaders were really doing their research, they’d learn very quickly that this makes no sense. Instead of treating workers as disposable and replaceable, businesses ought to be treating them as partners.
Who says? The Harvard Business Review, hardly a haven for anti-corporate sloganeering. Employee ownership, the journal concluded recently, “can reduce inequality and improve productivity.”
Thomas Dudley and Ethan Rouen reviewed a host of studies on enterprises where employees hold at least 30 percent of their company’s shares. These companies are more productive and grow faster than their counterparts, Dudley and Rouen found. Cooperatives are also less likely to go out of business.
Enterprises with at least a 30-percent employee ownership share currently employ about 1.5 million U.S. workers, just under 1 percent of the nation’s total workforce. If we raise that number to 30 percent, Dudley and Rouen calculate, the bottom half of Americans would see their share of national wealth more than quadruple.
Elsewhere, enterprises with 100-percent employee ownership already exist. Spain’s Mondragon cooperatives, The New York Times noted earlier this year, have flourished since the 1950s. They aim “not to lavish dividends on shareholders or shower stock options on executives, but to preserve paychecks.”
At each of Mondragón’s 96 cooperative enterprises, executives make no more than six times what workers in the network’s Spanish co-ops make. In the United States, the typical rate runs well over 300 to 1.
We’re not talking artsy-crafty boutiques here. Mondragón co-ops, including one of Spain’s largest grocery chains, currently employ 70,000 people in the country.
Mondragón has had a particularly powerful impact on the Basque region in Spain, the network’s home base. By one standard measure, the Basque region currently ranks as one of the most egalitarian political areas on Earth.
“We want to transform our society,” Mondragón International president Josu Ugarte told me in a 2016 interview. “We want to have a more equal society.”
So do workers at McDonald’s.
Sam Pizzigati, based in Boston, is a co-editor of Inequality.org and author of The Case for a Maximum Wage and The Rich Don’t Always Win.
And I learned to sail there
The Community Boating clubhouse on the Charles River in Boston
“Boston was a great city to grow up in, and it probably still is. We were surrounded by two very important elements: academia and the arts. I was surrounded by theater, music, dance, museums. And I learned how to sail on the Charles River. So I had a great childhood in Boston. It was wonderful.” –
Leonard Nimoy ( 1931-2015), American actor, filmmaker photographer, author, singer and songwriter best known for playing Spock in the Star Trek franchise
And the lichens keep eating
Stone wall at what had been Robert Frost's farm in Derry, N.H., which he describes in his famous poem "Mending Wall"
"Many New England stone fences built between 1700 and 1875 were laid by gangs of workers who piled stone at the rate of so much a rod. Edwin Way Teale says that in the latter years of the 19th Century, before economic and social developments began obliterating some of the walls, there were a hundred thousand miles of stone fences in New England. Even today, for many of them, the only change has been the size of the lichens, those delicate rock-eating algae that can live nine hundred years."
William Least Heat Moon, in Blue Highways