byte&chew

A tangled web

In speaking with several people in and around Berlin, I’ve come to the conclusion that, the average person doesn’t have a clue as to what’s going on with the “Laidlaw” biomass project. If speaking to a pro biomass person you hear things like, “I don’t know what’s holding it up, I just wish they would get going”. And there’s the comment, “Why doesn’t the State get out the way, we need the jobs up here right now”. The people against the biomass project say things like, “They should just tear down that chimney and ugly building” and, “Too bad they didn’t tear the whole thing down when they were at it”. When pressed further for why they believe the way they do, just about everybody grasps for a reason for their opinion and almost nobody can state facts related to the project. How can this be when the front page of our local papers has carried stories about the “Laidlaw” project for years? In digging further with the people I spoke to, it became clear that they were confused about the issues, “One day the paper says this and then the next day they say that” most people told me, “I’m just sick of it all”. It’s been my personal experience that when something confuses us, we want to push it away/make it go away. So it is with the biomass issue, I believe most people are confused, just sick and tired of the whole thing and wish for it to be resolved. So how did the biomass issue get to be this ….thorn in our side? Well, our local media, local politicians and local businesses have all contributed to the process. Notice that I put the local media first on my list of reasons for people being poorly informed about the biomass issue. Now take today’ (5/26/11) issue of The Berlin Daily Sun. The top and front page/feature article goes on to exploit the position and almost quotes word for word from the ad found in the Sun yesterday paid by Isaacson Steel. Now it’s not easy to criticize Mr. Steve Griffin and Issacson Steel, both have a long history of doing great things for Berlin/Gorham and giving generously of their time and money to the local communities. As flawed as I believe Mr. Griffin’s argument is in his open letter/ad (I’ll get back to that later), it’s the biased and deceptive tactics of The Berlin Daily Sun that I find troubling. Please notice that the Sun finds it appropriate to make the Isaacson letter "front page news", but buried the fact that mayor Grenier and councilman Rozek had to issue an “official retraction” to Jon Edwards on page 5 where the story is surrounded by ads and is easily missed. The comments by the mayor and councilman were libelous and false, but according to the Sun, apparently not as important as Mr. Griffin’s paid advertisement/views. Do you think that this is either accidental or an isolated event? Hell no, that’s yellow journalism at its best practiced at the Sun! What kind of message does that send, both explicitly and incidentally, to the average person on the street?  Is it any wonder the average person can’t figure out what’s going on, who’s right and who’s wrong. If The Berlin Daily Sun wants to be involved in the decision making process by the PUC on the Laidlaw project, they have several options open to them, including writing an editorial. Managing the news is nothing new at the Sun, it’s been an ongoing practice for years and has corrupted the credibility and integrity of the paper. ….Now back to Isaacson’s open letter/advertisement. Both the Isaacson and unions ads would make you believe that there’s a conspiracy by the other biomass plants in the State to ruin Berlin.  Don’t you think that there may be some legitimate reason for them to oppose the Laidlaw plant? Do you really think they’re going through this costly exercise just because they hate Berlin? (Don’t you think that The Berlin Daily Sun could have provided more useful information to its readers by also running a story about the IPP’s position and let the readers form their own opinion? Are we that afraid of the whole truth or too stupid to understand?) Now Mr. Griffin, if there was a project somewhere in New Hampshire that threatened the survival of Isaacson Steel and other small steel companies, would you sit on your hands and not become involved in the decision making process? If what was being proposed would create a monopoly or raise your cost for steel by 25%, would you remain quiet? Mr. Griffen, would you appreciate your concerns about the survival of your company being twisted around and portrayed as hate towards the people of the host community of the unfair competitor?  ...It’s my opinion that PSNH is orchestrating this political/propaganda campaign behind the scenes and, it’s next to impossible for the average person to figure out what the real issues are and who’s telling the truth.  The Sun has contributed to the confusion not to the clarification of the issues which is unfortunate. Along with its rights to gather information the press has the responsibility to be truthful in its reporting and its conduct.

Defining success

If I was a gambler, I would now put my money on the fact that Berlin will be blessed with an extra large sized and noisy power plant in its downtown. (Sorry neighbors) For months I’ve been saying that the project had a 50/50 chance of being successful, I’m now changing those odds to 80/20 in the affirmative. I believe it’s important to recognize that the project can be successful without that success being shared by the community as a whole. A few years ago there was another project just up the street/river in Dummer that is a close cousin of the Laidlaw project. Pontook Hydro was built with the same type of hype and political crass that we’ve seen here in Berlin. Pontook too had a “wanna-be” developer much like Mr. Bartoszek who had neither money nor experience, but managed to pull off the project by seducing the right politicians who are easily swayed since they have no sense of place or value. The outcome in Berlin will be the same as it was in Dummer, the community prostitutes its resource for the crumbs that will fall from the corporate table in the form of taxes. (After abatements, depreciations, exemptions etc). Both projects will have negative impacts on their respective communities for generations to come and, most importantly, they close the door to other projects with much more potential and higher returns for their citizens. Just a few days ago I accidently came across a developer who has been waiting in the wings to see if the so called Laidlaw project was going to collapse under its own weight. He has an industrial project that will employ 200 people and his project was probably going to pay twice as much in taxes due to a higher capital investment. At this time this developer has begun scouting other communities to locate his project and Berlin will again end up the loser. I’ve written several posts about the need for Berlin and the region to define a vision and establishing some goals and criteria. If such a strategy existed we wouldn’t be sacrificing our quality of life, our downtown and the mill property for 40 jobs. Without a vision of its future and in the absence of anything better, plus being desperate, Berlin will again settle for… ….”whatever”. So yes, the Laidlaw project will more than likely succeed and those without an ounce of imagination or vision will cheer, but Berlin will continue to fail as a successful community. Once the noise keeps us awake and the smoke starts coming out of the stack (Barry Kelley will smile again), Berlin will be ready for the next smooth talking salesman to sell them another bill of goods. How does that saying go……..doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is a form of…. insanity?

Another chance?

A couple days ago I heard that the deal to purchase the Cascade Mill had gone through, certainly a day to celebrate! I believe it’s too early for anyone to know for sure how many people will eventually be hired and at what wage, but regardless, this is good news for the people of Berlin/Gorham.  What concerns me for the second or third time, (Over the past 10 to 20 years) is the fact that we might again just sit back and stop the efforts to identify and develop a new economy for our North Country communities. When American Tissue filed for bankruptcy, community leaders mobilized and created strategies to deal with the impact of the mill closings. Eventually this mobilization led to the Fraser purchase which should have given us time to develop a full fledge effort at creating and diversifying our economy. But as is often the case, the Fraser purchase was seen as the economic salvation of the region. Soon the committee members lost interest, disbanded and we went on to do business as usual as if all had been resolved. Of course nothing could have been further from the truth and, if you doubt that this was a false conclusion then just look at the empty pulp mill site and the closed Cascade Mill. So, are we going to behave the same way again? My fear is that we will. Each time we recycle our old paper mill economy it shrinks and we end up with fewer and fewer jobs. I believe that we need to be thankful for the purchase of the Cascade Mill, but re-opening the Cascade Mill is not the answer to our shrinking communities and failing economy. We need to realize that the purchase of Cascade is no more than a calculated gamble by investors who will attempt to squeeze a return on their investment. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with them making a profit or that we shouldn’t be grateful for this positive development, it’s that this is not the answer to our long term economic survival and the need to develop a sustainable economy for the region. Our task remains to identify what makes sense for us to promote and develop going forward. The Cascade Mill purchase buys us time to do this. We must not repeat for the third or fourth time the mistake of the past where we sit back and wait for the next crisis to occur and where again, our backs will be to the wall. Have we learned our lesson?

From TomDispatch.com

Tomgram: William Astore, A New Age of "Enlightened" War

Posted by William Astore at 10:00AM, May 12, 2011.

In case you hadn’t noticed, they are -- no kidding around -- absolutely the niftiest non-humans on Earth.  I’m speaking about the special operations force of Navy SEALs that took out Osama bin Laden.  They and their special ops colleagues are “supermen” (ABC News), “X-men” (Jon Stewart), “America’s Jedi Knights” (the New York Times), and that’s just to pick the odd example in a sea of churning hyperbole.  For the last week, while the bin Laden operation swallowed almost 69% of all news space according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, they have been the most reported upon Xtra Special Soldiers anywhere, possibly of all time -- from the “square-jawed admiral from Texas” who commanded them right down to the dog (oops... “possible war hero”) they reportedly took along. 

In an era when U.S. troops have become little short of American idols, seldom have the media gone quite so nuts as over those SEALs and the other military and CIA “teams” that make up our counterterrorism forces.  You couldn’t pay for this sort of publicity.  It would, in fact, hardly be an exaggeration to say that all of American society has, for the last 10 days, been “embedded” with them. But here’s the strange thing (or perhaps I mean the strangest thing of all): if you read most of the over-the-top press about America’s special ops troops, you probably think that they are tiny crews of elite forces divided into even tinier teams trained to dispel global darkness and take out the bin Ladens of the world.

No such thing. Almost a year ago, the Washington Post reported that there were at least 13,000 U.S. special operations troops deployed overseas in (no, this is not a typo) 75 countries, a significant expansion of these forces in the Obama era.  Since thousands of them remain in the U.S. at any moment, Washington may now have up to 20,000 special operations troops on hand and the odds are that there will be even more after the bin Laden publicity blitz has had a chance to work its charms.  In the latest Pentagon budget, the Obama administration had already asked for $10.5 billion to pay for special forces, a tripling of their budget since 2001 -- and that figure is sure to rise in the years to come, as media slavering turns into congressional slavering. 

Keep in mind that this growing set of secret forces cocooned inside the U.S. military, along with the missile-armed pilotless drones fighting the CIA’s semi-secret war in Pakistan (which also got a modest publicity boost from the bin Laden operation), add up to the newly dominant form of American conflict: presidential war fought on the sly and beyond any serious kind of accountability to the American people.  In return for ponying up the necessary dough, for instance, Congress is now practically begging just to be updated on the executive’s counterterror operations four times a year.  

As TomDispatch regular and retired Lieutenant Colonel William Astore makes clear, “remote war” on the imperial peripheries of the planet is a direct danger to this country, to us, and it’s growing by the day.  Tom

With permission

Osama bin Laden’s American Legacy
It’s Time to Stop Celebrating and Go Back to Kansas
By Tom Engelhardt

Back in the 1960s, Senator George Aiken of Vermont offered two American presidents a plan for dealing with the Vietnam War: declare victory and go home. Roundly ignored at the time, it’s a plan worth considering again today for a war in Afghanistan and Pakistan now in its tenth year.

As everybody not blind, deaf, and dumb knows by now, Osama bin Laden has been eliminated.  Literally.  By Navy Seals.  Or as one of a crowd of revelers who appeared in front of the White House Sunday night put it on an impromptu sign riffing on The Wizard of Oz: “Ding, Dong, Bin Laden Is Dead.”

And wouldn’t it be easy if he had indeed been the Wicked Witch of the West and all we needed to do was click those ruby slippers three times, say “there’s no place like home,” and be back in Kansas.  Or if this were V-J day and a sailor’s kiss said it all.   

Unfortunately, in every way that matters for Americans, it’s an illusion that Osama bin Laden is dead.  In every way that matters, he will fight on, barring a major Obama administration policy shift in Afghanistan, and it’s we who will ensure that he remains on the battlefield that George W. Bush’s administration once so grandiosely labeled the Global War on Terror.   

Admittedly, the Arab world had largely left bin Laden in the dust even before he took that bullet to the head.  There, the focus was on the Arab Spring, the massive, ongoing, largely nonviolent protests that have shaken the region and its autocrats to their roots.  In that part of the world, his death is, as Tony Karon of Time Magazine has written, “little more than a historical footnote,” and his dreams are now essentially meaningless.

Consider it an insult to irony, but the world bin Laden really changed forever wasn’t in the Greater Middle East.  It was here.  Cheer his death, bury him at sea, don’t release any photos, and he’ll still carry on as a ghost as long as Washington continues to fight its deadly, disastrous wars in his old neighborhood.