‘Into yellow froth’
The Jenckes Spinning Company textile-factory complex in Pawtucket, R.I., one of many old factories along the Blackstone River.
— Photo by Kenneth C. Zirkel
— Photo by Rosser1954
“Overhead the sea blows upside down across Rhode Island.
slub clump slub clump
Charlie drops out. Carl steps in
sllub clump
No hitch in the sequence….
They lay the bricks that build the mills
that shock the Blackstone River into yellow froth.’’
— From “The Tragedy of Bricks,’’ by Galway Kinnell (19270-2014), Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. He was a native of Rhode Island who became a Vermont resident.
Delirious duo
"The Two of Them" (mixed media sculpture), by Livia Linden, in the Greater Than the Sum of Parts group show at Galatea Fine Art, Boston, Aug. 4-27.
The gallery says:
“Fabric, thread, wool, reeds, paper, wire and even plastic are magical through the eyes and in the hands of a fiber artist. As they reinterpret old designs and reinvent old techniques, fiber artists create new visions.
Beauty and bathos in The Berkshires
Mt. Greylock State Reservation (Greylock summit on the far right), in The Berkshires. At 3,491 feet, Mt. Greylock is the tallest point in Massachusetts. The shape of the mountain reminded Herman Melville of a whale as he was writing Moby Dick.
— Photo by Protophobic
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
I drove out to The Berkshires last week for a couple of meetings. It brought back memories. In the late ‘50s’ I traveled there (by train from Boston!) to see relatives outside of Pittsfield in the little town of Richmond, and in the ‘70s I spent quite a few weekends staying with friends in a couple of towns along the Connecticut-Massachusetts line as an escape from New York City, where I was living and working.
One of my strongest recollections of the region is the election of 1970, when the Boston Herald Traveler (RIP) sent me to cover the vote in Berkshire County. I had little idea of how to go about that. So I first went to Pittsfield, the county seat and biggest town, and started walking around its then-busy downtown – lots of industry still around -- came across a radio station and went in to introduce myself. Unlike now, when most radio stations are owned by chains, many stations were locally owned and provided hefty doses of local news and other stuff from Berkshire communities.
I explained my plight to the station manager – ignorance – and he told me: “Don’t worry about it. We’ll bring you the vote tallies tonight. Would you like a donut and a cup of coffee? Take a look at The Berkshire Eagle’’ (a great local paper that still lives). He then gave me an overview of the county, including its reliance on General Electric and other big manufacturers that employed thousands of people, paid well and offered attractive fringe benefits. They also dumped large quantities of dangerous, cancer-causing chemicals into the region’s many rivers. The cleanups continue to this day.
My bosses in Boston were surprised that I was able to so quickly send them so much information that night….
Anyway, my recent trip reminded me that most of the county’s industrial base is gone.\
And so, increasingly the area has depended on tourism as well as on affluent people (most, apparently, from the New York City area) who have second homes there amidst the lovely hills and the region’s astonishingly large collection of cultural organizations. Here’s a few: Tanglewood (music), Jacob’s Pillow (dance), Shakespeare & Company (theater), the Clark, Berkshire, Williams College, and Norman Rockwell museums and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Route 7, in particular, is Culture Gulch.
Not surprisingly, the region has long drawn famous painters and writers. After all, much of it is beautiful, and it’s close to New York and Boston. (I love that Herman Melville saw the shape of a whale while gazing at Mt. Greylock from his house in Pittsfield, as he worked on Moby Dick.)
People are drawn from far and wide to such lovely towns -- if maybe a tad too precious/quaint to some people -- as Stockbridge, Lenox, Williamstown, and Great Barrington, with their fine 19th Century houses, fancy restaurants, art galleries, bookstores, weavers, health spas and big country estates. Private equity, hedge fund, and tech moguls have taken over some of the last, many built by “Robber Barons’’ from after the Civil War through the Roaring Twenties.
All these attractions, however, have helped raise housing costs by drawing rich people who have bid up property prices and made a living in the region unaffordable for many people who, decades ago, might have had good jobs in a local factory. But God bless a lot of the newcomers. Most aren’t showy -- they don’t want to be in the Hamptons or on Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard --- and some give big bucks to charities in The Berkshires, a couple of civic leaders explained to me.
In any event, away from the spiffy towns are gritty and depressed ones, with closed stores and ramshackle housing. But Pittsfield, anyway, seems to be coming back from its long economic depression.
How to make the Berkshires prosperous for more people? The tourism/ hospitality businesses don’t pay well and are quite seasonal. The state is pushing for more pharmaceuticals-manufacturing plants, and state officials have said that they want to make Berkshire County a biotech hub. Really? And perhaps the region could ramp up its farming sector to take advantage of the public’s growing desire for more locally-grown food and for less reliance on huge agribusinesses far away. The Berkshires’ proximity to the huge Greater New York market is a plus. But the hilly terrain puts a limit on the size and number of farms, even as human-caused global warming extends the Berkshires’ growing season.
Global warming is also producing more flooding and other extreme weather events, as I was reminded early last week when I came upon some roads washed out by the same system that did such damage in Vermont. Torrential rain in hilly areas can be devastating, and such downpours are becoming more frequent. Local and state officials must push for new rules to discourage building in such potentially dangerous places as right along rivers. Reading about the disastrous flooding in such communities as Montpelier, Vt., last week reminded me of how strange it is that so much building has long taken place on riverbanks. Of course, people love being along water, and some of the original construction there were mills using waterpower, but at what cost now? Presumably, more and more insurers will stop writing property insurance in such vulnerable places, which will block a lot of waterfront buildings. That’s happening in many places along the coast as sea levels rise.
The Berkshires used to be a pretty important ski region, but not so much any more; the weather’s too unreliable and there are more environmental concerns about ski areas’ massive use of energy and water (for snowmaking) and erosion off the hills.
Much of Berkshire County, despite its bucolic reputation, is more exurban than rural. There are ugly malls with windswept parking lots in strips along roads without sidewalks and other depressing scenes of sprawl, some of which threaten water pollution. But local officials and the general population are more aware than they were just a few years ago of the need to control sprawl, by, among other ways, boosting public transportation and encouraging more housing density near the old downtowns, whose businesses would be helped by having more customers within walking distance.
Let’s hope that in the next few years, Berkshire County offers some edifying new examples of how to protect the scenic and cultural attractions of an area that’s so close to big cities, while also creating better jobs for year-round residents so that they aren’t compelled to leave.
Meanwhile, enjoy the glories of the Berkshires, where summer road traffic can be bad, but not nearly as bad as traffic along the coast, as I saw last Wednesday, when it took me almost an hour and a half to drive to Narragansett from Providence in bumper-to-bumper traffic there. Head for the hills, not the coast, in high summer, when millions want to visit New England all at once.
View from Main Street in Great Barrington (obviously) in the spring
—Photo by Anc516
Boston-based Verve Therapeutics partners with Lilly to target cholesterol
Edited from a New England Council report:
“Eli Lilly is collaborating with Boston-based Verve Therapeutics on a gene-editing program with a total value of $525 million. Eli Lilly will pay $60 million to use Verve’s gene-editing technology to target a cholesterol-carrying protein. The agreement also includes potential milestone payments of up to $465 million, as well as royalties for Verve. Verve plans to test Phase 1 clinical trials, with Eli Lilly handling clinical development, manufacturing, and commercialization.
“Verve Therapeutics, which focuses on eliminating cardiovascular disease associated with high cholesterol, emerged in 2019 with technology developed by Harvard scientists. The company went public in 2021 and has received investments from GV, Wellington Management Company, and Casdin Capital, as well as collaboration deals with Beam Therapeutics and Verily. Following the announcement of the collaboration, Verve’s shares rose more than 12 percent.’’
‘Sinister phoenixes’
From Chilean-born American artist Rodrigo Valenzuela’s show “Weapons,’’ at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, through Sept. 10.
The gallery says:
“Rodrigo Valenzuela’s exhibition incorporates works from two connected and ongoing photographic series, ‘Weapons’ and “Afterwork,’ that are integrated into floor-to-ceiling wood frame structures installed along with ceramic pieces by the artist.
“Through a patina of nostalgic fantasy, Valenzuela’s ‘Weapons’ series offers views of imaginative performances that might take place on a job site once workers depart. Knives, screws, rope, and chains—the tools of many trades—appear reconfigured as sinister phoenixes, ramshackle sculptures, and animistic creatures of dreams. ‘Afterwork’’ presents pictures of somber, silvery rooms filled with mechanical contraptions and fog, possibly from the sweat left hanging in the air after a long day’s work. Valenzuela’s works are animated by a dream-like quality and driven by an urgent human and political exploration: that of global economics and the human dimensions of labor, considered in the wake of neoliberalism.’’
Heading toward Rockland Breakwater Lighthouse
— Photo by Needsmoreritalin
Video: The newsprint capital
One of Berlin’s paper mills, in 1912. While the industry brought many jobs, it also polluted the Androscoggin River, as well as the air in Berlin.
“Berlin, New Hampshire, in the heart of the Northern Forest, is a small city of approximately 10,000 people, best known for its paper mills and being the largest producer of newsprint in the world during the mid-twentieth century. The city's history is as deep as the woods that surround it. Our dynamic partnership brings together Timberlane Regional High School, in Plaistow, New Hampshire, and the Berlin and Coos County Historical Society in an oral history project, resulting in a ninety-minute documentary on Berlin in the 20th Century. Part of Historic New England's ‘Everyone's History’ series.’’
Hit this link for video
Restorative Granite State
The Hopkinton (N.H.) State Fair, held every year in early September
“The restoration comes not only from the landscape and air, though they play their significant part, but from the people. I feel a strong need to be in New Hampshire for as much of the summer as I can manage it.’’
— Retired U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice David Souter (born 1939). He served on the high court from 1990 to 2009, when he moved back to his native New Hampshire, where he lives in the small town of Hopkinton.
Llewellyn King: Yes. climate change is upon us, but panic isn’t a tool against it
The Kendall Cogeneration Station, in Cambridge, Mass., is a natural-gas- powered station owned by Vicinity Energy that produces both steam and electricity for Boston and Cambridge. We’ll be hooked on natural gas for a long time to come.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
One of the luxuries of democracy is that we don’t have to listen. Or we can listen and hear what we want to hear. We can find resonance in dissonance, or we can hear flat notes.
That is the story of the climate crisis, which is here.
We have been warned over and over, sometimes as gently as a summer zephyr, and sometimes gustily, as with Al Gore’s tireless campaigning and his seminal 1992 book, and later movie, Earth in the Balance.
Now high summer is upon us — with its intimations of worse to come. And this message rings in our ears: The climate is changing — polar ice caps are melting; the sea level is rising; the oceans are heating up; natural patterns are changing, whether it be for sharks or butterflies; and we are going to have to live with a world that we, in some measure, have thrown out of kilter.
Around the beginning of the 20th Century, we began an attack on the environment, the likes of which all of history hadn’t seen, including two centuries of industrial revolution. Sadly, it was when invention began improving the lives of millions of people.
Two big forces were unleashed in the early 20th Century: the harnessing of electricity and the perfection of the internal-combustion engine. These improved life immensely, but there was a downside: They brought with them air pollution and, at the time unknown, started the greenhouse effect.
In the same wave of inventions, we pushed back the ravages of infectious diseases, boosted irrigated farming and enabled huge growth in the world population — all of whom aspired to a better life with electricity and cars.
In 1900, the world population was 1.6 billion. Now it is 8 billion. The population of India alone has increased by about a billion since the British withdrawal, in 1947. Most Indians don’t have cars, jet off for their vacations or have enough, or any, electricity, and very few have air conditioning. Obviously, they are aspirational, as are the 1.4 billion people of Africa, most of whom have nothing. But the population of Africa is set to double in 25 years.
The greenhouse effect has been known and argued about for a long time. Starting in 1970, I became aware of it as I started covering energy intensively. I have sat through climate sessions at places like the Aspen Institute, Harvard and MIT, where it was a topic and where the sources of the numbers were discussed, debated, questioned and analyzed.
Oddly, the environmental movement didn’t take up the cause then. It was engaged in a battle to the death with nuclear power. To prosecute its war on nuclear, it had to advocate something else, and that something else was coal: coal in a form of advanced boilers, but nonetheless coal.
The Arab oil embargo of 1973 added to the move to coal. At that point, there was little else, and coal was held out as our almost inexhaustible energy source: coal to liquid, coal to gas, coal in direct combustion. Very quiet voices on the effects of burning so much coal had no hearing. It was a desperate time needing desperate measures.
Natural gas was assumed to be a depleted resource (fracking wasn’t perfected); wind was a scheme, as today’s turbines, relying heavily on rare earths, hadn’t been created, nor had the solar electric cell. So, the air took a shellacking.
To its credit, the Biden administration has been cognizant of the building crisis. With three acts of Congress, it is trying to tackle the problem — albeit in a somewhat incoherent way.
Some of its plans just aren’t going to work. It is pushing so hard against the least troublesome fossil fuel, natural gas, that it might destabilize the whole electric system. The administration has set a goal that by 2050 — just 27 years from now — power production should produce no greenhouse gases whatsoever, known as net-zero.
To reach this goal, the Environmental Protection Agency is proposing strict new standards. However, these call for the deployment of carbon capture technology which, as Jim Matheson, CEO of the Rural Electric Cooperative Association, told a United States Energy Association press briefing, doesn’t exist.
The crisis needs addressing, but panic isn’t a tool. A mad attack on electric utilities, the demonizing of cars or air carriers, or less environmentally aware countries won’t carry us forward.
Awareness and technology are the tools that will turn the tide of climate change and its threat to everything. It took a century to get here, and it may take that long to get back.
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and is based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
White House Chronicle
Near the Arctic Circle, year-round outdoor swimming
“The Blue Lagoon, Svartsengi Geothermal Pumping Station, Iceland” (1988, chromogenic print), by Laura McPhee at the Fitchburg (Mass.) Art Museum.
Downtown Fitchburg seen from the south, looking toward New Hampshire mountains. From the 19th to the first half of the 20th Century the city was an industrial center, especially for paper making.
— Photo by Nick Allen
Chris Powell: Only obnoxious students justify teacher raises now; justice system runs on sometimes dubious plea bargains
Young student wearing dunce hat as punishment in 1906 photo
Latch-key kid of parents who aren’t home
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Student performance continues to crash in schools in Connecticut and throughout the country. The results of the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress tests showed steep declines in the reading and math proficiency of 13-year-olds. Students are doing worse than a decade ago.
But as usual there is much clamor to increase compensation for teachers, to hire more teaching assistants, and to keep increasing spending on schools even as enrollment keeps falling.
The enduring gap between school spending and student performance should have destroyed by now Connecticut's longstanding presumption that spending equals education. But the presumption is sustained by the influence of the presumption's main beneficiaries -- members of teacher unions -- and by the public's not wanting to acknowledge education's decline. For doing so might lead to other troubling realizations.
One such troubling realization would be that teacher pay has to keep being raised not because teachers are successful but because students are making their jobs insufferable.
Teachers are leaving the profession and recruiting good candidates for teaching jobs is a struggle because many more students arrive in school ignorant of the basics they once learned at home and because many others seriously misbehave, even violently, or are chronically absent.
In these circumstances even the best teachers can't get good results, and even the worst teachers may be considered essential because there are no replacements.
For similar reasons police work in Connecticut also faces a staffing problem, especially in the cities. Who wants to "serve and protect" when the work is less appreciated and more dangerous?
xxx
Everywhere more people are behaving badly and seem full of rage -- not just on the road and in politics but in ordinary life as well. Hence, for example, Connecticut state government’s decision to allow municipalities to install "red light cameras" where motorist misconduct is worst.
Few people in authority acknowledge what is going on. Those who do sense that something is seriously wrong attribute it to the disruptions of the recent virus epidemic. While government's main responses to the epidemic were indeed mistaken and damaging -- school and commercial shutdowns and near-compulsory submission to inadequately tested vaccines -- the bad trends, including educational decline, were in place long before the epidemic. Signs of social disintegration are almost everywhere.
Everything starts with children. So where are all the messed-up kids coming from? Government isn't asking.
Throwing more money at teachers and police, as Connecticut is doing, may keep them on the job a while longer but it doesn’t answer the question and won’t make their jobs easier.
Southport, Conn.-based Sturm, Ruger & Co.’s MK II 22/45 target pistol. Despite the departures in recent decades from a state that used to be famous for firearms manufacturing, several major gun makers still retain a presence in Connecticut, including Sturm, Ruger; Colt, Charter Arms and Mossberg.
Maybe there is a hint about social disintegration in a recent study by the state Office of Legislative Research, analyzed last monthby Marc E. Fitch of the {conservative} Yankee Institute's Connecticut Inside Investigator.
The study tends to confirm complaints made in February by city mayors and police officials that since gun crime in Connecticut is committed disproportionately by repeat offenders, prosecutors and courts aren't taking gun crime seriously enough.
The OLR study found that from 2013 through 2022 two-thirds of gun-related criminal charges brought by police in Connecticut were dropped, usually as part of plea bargains gaining convictions on charges considered more serious.
The criminal-justice system runs on plea bargaining, so when most crimes get to court they are "discounted." While some arrests may involve "overcharging" by police -- adding charges that are more or less redundant -- a gun charge can be redundant only if the state thinks, for example, that it doesn't matter much if an assault or a robbery was committed with a gun as long as a conviction for assault or robbery can be achieved.
Of course, if state policy considered a gun offense to be just as serious as an assault or robbery, or even more so, and demanded that it be prosecuted just as seriously, and if conviction on a gun charge carried a mandatory long prison sentence, gun crime might diminish substantially.
Instead state legislators keep passing laws to impede gun ownership by the law-abiding and then boast about reducing the prison population even as repeat offenders, including gun criminals, remain free.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net).
Podcast: 'Ideas actually matter’
In this c. 1772 portrait by John Singleton Copley, Samuel Adams points at the Massachusetts Charter, which he viewed as a constitution that protected the people’s rights.
From Lapham’s Quarterly:
“‘I think that I started the book,’ historian Stacy Schiff says of The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, ‘with this thirst for somebody who—I’ve just been writing about the Salem witch trials for many years. And I was looking for someone who had the courage of his convictions, to stand up and take an unpopular stand, which is something that takes a very long time for anyone to do in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1692, when it was very dangerous to take that stand. As it is dangerous again in the 1760s. And Adams very much fit that description. The more time I spent with him, the more time I was convinced and remain convinced that he teaches you that one person can actually make a difference and that ideas actually matter.”’
Lewis H. Lapham speaks with Stacy Schiff, author of The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams
At maximum fragrance
“Morning at the Creek” (oil on gesso board), by Massachusetts painter Sue Dragoo Lembo, at Alpers Fine Art, Rockport, Mass.
David Warsh: For the rest of us, a look at economists and what they do
Robert M. Solow in 2008
Somerville, Mass.
It defies credulity to say that Robert M. Solow’s most recent book is his best book to date, but, at least for certain practical purposes, this is the case. He will turn 99 next month. His four earlier books were written for other economists, beginning with Linear Programming and Economic Analysis, with Paul Samuelson and Robert Dorfman, in 1958; and Growth Theory: An Exposition (1970, expanded second edition, 2006).
Three very short books – The Labor Market as a Social Institution (Blackwell, 1990); Learning from “Learning By Doing” (Stanford, 1997) and Monopolistic Competition and Macroeconomic Theory (Cambridge, 1998) – approachable as they are, were also intended to influence professional audiences. There is no volume of collected papers, though many important papers exist to collect. Similarly, Solow has declined all offers to collect his popular reviews and essays, though many are classics of the sort.
Thus, Economists (Yale, 2019) is Solow’s first book written for a broad audience of intelligent citizens, outsiders and insiders, who are genuinely interested in what economics as a professional discipline exists to say and to do. The only barrier to entry is the price, $43 new, though copies can be obtained on second-hand markets for less and borrowed from many good libraries.
Economists is a book of photographic portraits of contemporary economists, designed for coffee tables display. What makes it worth reading, as opposed to slowly leafing through the ingenious photographs, is the introductory essay by Solow, and the answers to the questions he put to each subject, their replies carefully composed and printed on the page facing each subject’s portrait. The result is “A unique and illuminating portrait of economists and their work,” in the words of its editor, Seth Ditchik.
To recap briefly, Solow is the senior statesman of all academic economics. He dropped out of college after Pearl Harbor, returning after the war to study economics at Harvard. He joined the faculty of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1951, where one way or another, he has been ever since. A Nobel laureate himself, in 1987, he taught four others along the way: George Akerlof, Joseph Stiglitz, Peter Diamond, and William Nordhaus. He remains intellectually nimble.
The book has its beginnings at a dinner party on Martha’s Vineyard some years ago. Seated next to him was Mariana Cook, a celebrated fine-art photographer, who with her husband also has a summer home on the island. She mentioned she had recently published a book of portraits of contemporary mathematicians. Solow rejoined, “Why not do one of economists?” He quickly found himself involved in more ways than one.
Solow explains in his introduction:
Naturally I had to ask myself: Was making a book of portraits of academic economists a useful or reasonable or even a sane thing to do? I came to the conclusion that it was, and I want to explain why. For a long time it has bothered me, as a teacher of economics, that most Americans – even those who, a long time ago, had wandered through an economics course – had no clear idea of what economics is and what economists do. That is not surprising. The only contact most of us have with economics and economists is through sound bites on television, radio, or in a newspaper These snippets are usually about what the stock market has done or might do, or perhaps about next quarter’s gross domestic product. But only a tiny fraction of academic economists spend their professional time thinking about the stock market or forecasting GDP. So I suspect that the general image of what economists do and what economics is about is way off-base.
Economists is designed to redress that. Ninety superb portraits of ninety economists, young and old, each having been recognized by one or more of the profession’s highest honors, and, taken as a group, representative of the increasingly broad spectrum of concerns to have come under economists’ lenses. I have appended their names at the bottom of this newsletter, since I think it is not possible to find them otherwise outside the book. If you are a kdnowledgeable economist, you will see what I mean about the extent of the spectrum; you will also notice there are few economists teaching in Europe on the roster, because it is a long way for photographer Cook to have traveled.
In my favorite exchange, Solow asks Hal Varian, chief economist at Google and professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley:
Thirty years ago, you wrote a very successful microeconomics textbook. If you were to start over today, after your experience with Google, would you do it very differently?
Varian replies:
[T]hat is now in its ninth edition. A colleague once explained to me that by the time the tenth edition comes around “having a successful textbook is like being married to a wealthy person you don’t like much anymore….”
Lucky for me I had two big breaks. The first was bumping into Eric Schmidt in 2001, shortly after he joined “this cute little company called Google.” He invited me to come spend some time there. I thought I would spend a year there and write a book about yet another Silicon Valley start-up. Well, here I am fifteen years later, and I still haven’t gotten around to writing that book.
But I sure learned a lot. Quite a bit…got folded into my textbook. I wrote a couple of new chapters devoted to network effects, auction design, matching mechanisms, and switching costs. The old chapters got updated to illustrate novel applications of work-horse concepts like marginal cost and marginal value….
Then I got lucky again: the Great Recession hit. My book is about microeconomics, not macroeconomics, but even so there were a lot of issues that suddenly showed up in the economy that somehow weren’t discussed in the text. How could I have missed talking about “counter-party risk” or “financial bubbles?”… So I added some discussion about these topics to the text….
Along with theory, businesses need measurement. Today, with all the sensors and system available, collecting data had become more inexpensive than ever before…. Google does about ten thousand experiments a year.; the knowledge gained from these experiments feeds back into design, allowing continual improvement in product offering.
Great stuff! Read the book if you can. See how many of those found there you know. It made me long for the old days, when Economic Principals was a newspaper column, approaching topics like these from slightly different angles, accompanied by caricatures supplied by Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston Globe cartoonist Paul Szep!
David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this column originated.
MIT’s then-new Cambridge campus, in 1916. Harvard Bridge, named after John Harvard, the founder of Harvard University, is in the foreground, connecting Boston to Cambridge.
Of blueberries and sunburns
“Summer Twilight, A Recollection of a Scene in New-England’’ (oil on wood, 1834), by British-born American painter Thomas Cole (1801—1848), of the Hudson River School of painters
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal 24.com
As we move deeper into high summer, the green of the trees and grass is less intense, as are the scents of flowers and the volume of birdsong. Soon the goldenrod will blaze by the roads. On some days we settle into an agreeable torpor, perhaps more socially acceptable in July than in any other month in our workaholic nation. And it’s a time in which to read long novels, biographies and histories, albeit nodding off from time to time while doing it.
Ah, cookouts! The smell of burning flesh. Yellow jackets! Ants! Snakes (usually just garter snakes)! The distinctive smell of lighter fluid to ignite the charcoal. Squirrels eyeing the proceedings, ready, like the birds, to swiftly move in for any food detritus we accidentally left behind.
One of the pleasures of summer in New England is stopping by blackberry, blueberry and raspberry bushes and feeding yourself with these tart or sweet “antioxidant-rich superfoods”. By the way, wild blueberries, which famously cover a lot of ‘’barrens’’ in Downeast Maine, taste better than the cultivated ones.
A walk on a beach this summer, or along many otherwise pretty roads, shows you how urgently Rhode Island needs a bottle bill.
Do you still follow those old summer myths – e.g., that swimming after eating will give you cramps that could end up drowning you? No it won’t. Or that getting a tan is healthy. “You look healthy!, ‘’ our parents used to say to our sunburned faces, in a mistake that you can trace back to the 1920’s, when having a tan started to be associated with the leisure time of the affluent rather than with farmers and day laborers. Getting your tan in such sexy places as Florida, California and the French Riviera gave you a particular status.
Now, after decades of skin-cancer removals, a couple rather gory, I head for the shade as much as I can.
Religious revival summer camps
Gingerbread Cottages at Wesleyan Grove, in Oak Bluffs, on Martha’s Vineyard. Oak Bluffs was a major Protestant revival summer community starting in the 19th Century.
Andy Miller/Markian Hawryluk: Do not-for-profit hospitals deserve their big tax breaks?
From Kaiser Family Foundation Health News
“With so many Americans struggling with medical debt and access to care, the need for hospitals to give back as much as they take grows stronger every day.”
—Vikas Saini, president of the Needham, Mass.-based Lown Institute
POTTSTOWN, Penn.
The public school system here had to scramble in 2018 when the local hospital, newly purchased, was converted to a tax-exempt nonprofit entity.
The takeover by Tower Health meant the 219-bed Pottstown Hospital no longer had to pay federal and state taxes. It also no longer had to pay local property taxes, taking away more than $900,000 a year from the already underfunded Pottstown School District, school officials said.
The district, about an hour’s drive from Philadelphia, had no choice but to trim expenses. It cut teacher aide positions and eliminated middle school foreign language classes.
“We have less curriculum, less coaches, less transportation,” said Superintendent Stephen Rodriguez.
The school system appealed Pottstown Hospital’s new nonprofit status, and earlier this year a state court struck down the facility’s property-tax break. It cited the “eye-popping” compensation for multiple Tower Health executives as contrary to how Pennsylvania law defines a charity.
The court decision, which Tower Health is appealing, stunned the nonprofit hospital industry, which includes roughly 3,000 nongovernment tax-exempt hospitals nationwide.
“The ruling sent a warning shot to all nonprofit hospitals, highlighting that their state and local tax exemptions, which are often greater than their federal income tax exemptions, can be challenged by state and local courts,” said Ge Bai, a health-policy expert at Johns Hopkins University.
The Pottstown case reflects the growing scrutiny of how much the nation’s nonprofit hospitals spend — and on what — to justify billions in state and federal tax breaks. In exchange for these savings, hospitals are supposed to provide community benefits, like care for those who can’t afford it and free health screenings.
More than a dozen states have considered or passed legislation to better define charity care, to increase transparency about the benefits hospitals provide, or, in some cases, to set minimum financial thresholds for charitable help to their communities.
The growing interest in how tax-exempt hospitals operate — from lawmakers, the public, and the media — has coincided with a stubborn increase in consumers’ medical debt. KFF Health News reported last year that more than 100 million Americans are saddled with medical bills they can’t pay, and has documented aggressive bill-collection practices by hospitals, many of them nonprofits.
In 2019, Oregon passed legislation to set floors on community benefit spending largely based on each hospital’s past expenditures as well as its operating profit margin. Illinois and Utah created spending requirements for hospitals based on the property taxes they would have been assessed as for-profit organizations.
And a congressional committee in April heard testimony on the issue.
“States have a general interest in understanding how much is being spent on community benefit and, increasingly, understanding what those expenditures are targeted at,” said Maureen Hensley-Quinn, a senior director at the National Academy for State Health Policy. “It’s not a blue or red state issue. It really is across the board that we’ve been seeing inquiries on this.”
Besides providing federal, state, and local tax breaks, nonprofit status also lets hospitals benefit from tax-exempt bond financing and receive charitable contributions that are tax-deductible for the donors. Policy analysts at KFF estimated the total value of nonprofit hospitals’ exemptions in 2020 at about $28 billion, much higher than the $16 billion in free or discounted services they provided through the charity care portion of their community benefits.
Federal law defines the sort of spending that can qualify as a community benefit but does not stipulate how much hospitals need to spend. The range of community benefit activities, reported by hospitals on IRS forms, varies considerably by organization. The spending typically includes charity care — broadly defined as free or discounted care to eligible patients. But it can also include underpayments from public health plans, as well as the costs of training medical professionals and doing research.
Hospitals also claim as community benefits the difference between what it costs to provide a service and what Medicaid pays them, known as the Medicaid shortfall. But some states and policy experts argue that shouldn’t count because higher payments from commercial insurance companies and uninsured patients paying cash cover those costs.
Bai, of Johns Hopkins, collaborated on a 2021 study that found for every $100 in total spending, nonprofit hospitals provided $2.30 in charity care, while for-profit hospitals provided $3.80.
Last month, another study in Health Affairs reported substantial growth in nonprofit hospitals’ operating profits and cash reserves from 2012 to 2019 “but no corresponding increase in charity care.”
And an April report by the Needham, Mass.-based Lown Institute, a health-care think tank, said more than 1,350 nonprofit hospitals have “fair share” deficits, meaning the value of their community investments fails to equal the value of their tax breaks.
“With so many Americans struggling with medical debt and access to care, the need for hospitals to give back as much as they take grows stronger every day,” said Vikas Saini, president of the institute.
The Lown Institute does not count compensating for the Medicaid shortfall, spending on research, or training medical professionals as part of hospitals’ “fair share.”
Hospitals have long argued they need to charge private insurance plans higher rates to make up for the Medicaid shortfall. But a recent state report from Colorado found that, even after accounting for low Medicaid and Medicare rates, hospitals get enough from private health insurance plans to provide more charity care and community benefits than they do currently and still turn a profit.
The American Hospital Association strongly disagrees with the Lown and Johns Hopkins analyses.
For many hospitals — after dozens of closures over the past 20 years — “just keeping your doors open is a clear community benefit,” said Melinda Reid Hatton, general counsel for the AHA. “You can’t focus entirely on charity care” as a measure of community benefit. Hospitals deliver nine times the community benefit for every dollar of federal tax avoided, Hatton said.
The 2010 Affordable Care Act, she noted, imposed additional community benefit mandates. Tax-exempt hospitals must conduct a community health needs assessment at least once every three years; establish a written financial assistance policy; and limit what they charge individuals eligible for that help. And they must make a reasonable attempt to determine if a patient is eligible for financial assistance before they take “extraordinary collection actions,” such as reporting people to the credit bureaus or placing a lien on their property.
Still, the Government Accountability Office, a congressional watchdog agency, argues that community benefit is poorly defined.
“They’re not requirements,” said Jessica Lucas-Judy, a GAO director. “It’s not clear what a hospital has to do to justify a tax exemption. What’s a sufficient benefit for one hospital may not be a sufficient benefit for another.” The GAO, in a 2020 report, said it found 30 nonprofit hospitals that got tax breaks in 2016 despite reporting no spending on community benefits.
The GAO then recommended Congress consider specifying the services and activities that demonstrate sufficient community benefit.
The tax and benefit question has become a bipartisan issue: Democrats criticize what they see as scant charity care, while Republicans wonder why nonprofit hospitals get a tax break.
In Georgia, Democratic lawmakers and the NAACP spearheaded the filing of a complaint to the IRS about Wellstar Health System’s nonprofit status after it closed two Atlanta-area hospitals in 2022. The complaint noted the system’s proposed merger with Augusta University Health, under which Wellstar would open a new hospital in an affluent suburban county.
“I understand you pledged over $800 million” in the deal with AU Health, state Sen. Nan Orrock, an Atlanta Democrat, told Wellstar executives at a recent legislative hearing, citing the system’s disinvestment in Atlanta. “Doesn’t sound like a nonprofit. It sounds like a for-profit approach.”
Wellstar said it provides more uncompensated health care services than any other system in Georgia, and that its 2022 community benefit totaled $1.2 billion. Wellstar attributed the closures to chronic financial losses and an inability to find a partner or buyer for the inner-city hospitals, which served a disproportionately large African American population.
In North Carolina, a Republican candidate for governor, state Treasurer Dale Folwell, said many hospitals “have disguised themselves as nonprofits.”
“They’re not doing the job. It should be patients over profits. It’s always now profits over patients,” he said.
Ideas for reforms, though, have run up against powerful hospital opposition.
Montana’s state health department proposed developing standards for community benefit spending after a 2020 legislative audit found nonprofit hospitals’ reporting vague and inconsistent. But the Montana Hospital Association opposed the plan, and the idea was dropped from the bill that passed.
Pennsylvania, though, has a unique but strong law, Bai said, requiring hospitals to prove they are a “purely public charity” and pass a five-pronged test. That may make the state an easier place to challenge tax exemptions, Bai said.
This year, the Pittsburgh mayor challenged the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center over the tax-exempt status of some of its properties.
Nationally, Bai said, “I don’t think hospitals will lose tax exemptions in the short run.”
But, she added, “there will likely be more pressure from the public and policymakers for hospitals to provide more community benefit.”
Andy Miller and Markian Hawryluk are KFF Health News reporters. KFF States editor Matt Volz contributed to this report.
Borders, seen and unseen
“The Beirut Memory Project #56, 2018-2021,’’ in the show “Disrupted, Borders,’’ by Ara Oshagan (digital collage, archival pigment print on velvet fine art paper), at the Armenian Museum of America, Watertown, Mass.
— Photo courtesy of the Armenian Museum of America
The museum says:
Oshagan is a "diasporic multi-disciplinary artist, curator, and cultural worker whose practice explores collective and personal histories of dispossession, legacies of violence, identity, and (un)imagined futures." The show "weaves together different geographies and spaces that considers the impact of borders (both visible and invisible) on our personal and collective history, past-present-future, and the disruption of dislocation."
Chris Powell: Wretched excess in the deep; Ellsberg’s lesson
— Photo by Jjm596
MANCHESTER, Conn.
As they descended toward their target 2½ miles under the North Atlantic, the five people aboard in the OceanGate Expeditions submersible vessel Titan were, at least superficially, aware of the risks they were taking for a close look at the wreck of RMS Titanic. They apparently had been compelled to provide a waiver of the company's liability, a waiver that repeatedly noted that the journey could be fatal.
But no one had been killed yet on such expeditions, and the five could consider themselves heroic explorers.
Since the wreck of the Titanic already had been discovered and extensively photographed, there was no necessity for the trip. To the vessel's pilot, the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, it was a way of making a lot of money -- $250,000 per passenger. For his passengers the trip was more than a bit of arrogance and wretched excess.
Because the vessel imploded at great depth, there is little chance that its occupants suffered or even knew they were being killed. As many in the submarine service and industry in Connecticut know, death by implosion in the deep is instantaneous, a matter of milliseconds, too fast for the human brain to perceive.
In exchange for this mercy there will be no bodies to recover.
Many prayers sought the rescue of the occupants of the Titan, and their loss has been felt throughout the world. Instead of the granting of those prayers, the world has gotten two valuable reminders: first, of the limits imposed on mankind by the natural world, and second, of the incredibly precious smallness of the environment in which humans can survive. Despite many science-fiction movies to the contrary, the environmentalists are right in one respect: There is no Planet B.
While the ocean bottom holds many secrets, as the infinity of the universe does, mankind hardly needs to learn them as much as how to get along with itself and improve life where it can be lived: on the surface of the planet. Lives can be expended far better than in pursuit of another look at a shipwreck, and while the deep will always have to be challenged now and then, the poet George Gordon Byron (1788-1824) saw long ago that it would remain master.
Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean -- roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain.
Man marks the earth with ruin. His control
Stops with the shore. Upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
A shadow of man's ravage, save his own,
When, for a moment, like a drop of rain,
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.
xxx
How should the country remember Daniel Ellsberg, who died the other week?
As national security adviser in 1971, Henry Kissinger called him “the most dangerous man in America” for copying classified documents about the Vietnam war -- the Pentagon Papers -- and distributing them to news organizations.
Ellsberg was charged with espionage. But the Pentagon Papers revealed nothing of battlefield use to the enemy. Instead they showed that the administrations of Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon had been lying to the country about the war. Ellsberg was dangerous only to dishonest and criminal government officials.
Ellsberg might have been convicted except for the crimes the Nixon administration committed in pursuit of him, illegally wiretapping him and burglarizing his psychiatrist's office. So the charges against him were dismissed.
The Ellsberg affair may have been understood best by Nixon aide H.R. Haldeman, a criminal himself. He was taped telling Nixon: "To the ordinary guy, all this is gobbledygook. But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing. .... You can't trust the government. You can't believe what they say. And you can't rely on their judgment. The implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things the president wants to do even though it's wrong, and the president can be wrong."
Has anything changed in 50 years?
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics and other topics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
WPA art
"Skyscrapers” (circa 1937) (oil on canvas), by Joseph Stella (1877-1946), in the WPA Collection, at the T.W. Wood Gallery, Montpelier, Vt.
The Federal Art Project (1935-1943) was a New Deal program to fund America’s arts projects under the Works Progress Administration (WPA). It sustained some 10,000 artists during the Great Depression.
In 1940, Magnus Fossum, a WPA artist, copying the 1770 coverlet "Boston Town Pattern" for the WPA’s Index of American Design.
WPA Pump Station, in Scituate, Mass., built in 1938