Left In Lowell

I am taking advantage of the access I have to this bully pulpit to ask you to consider joining hundreds of thousands of e-advocates across the U.S. to help end the cycle of genocide. As the granddaughter of survivors of the Armenian Genocide, I commemorate today, April 24th, as the day of remembrance for the 1.5 million Armenians who died as a result of this century’s first Genocide, and as we all know, not the last.

Currently in Congress there is a House (H.Res.106) and Senate (S.Res.106) resolution that ask “the President to ensure that the foreign policy of the United States reflects appropriate understanding and sensitivity concerning issues related to human rights, ethnic cleansing, and genocide documented in the United States record relating to the Armenian Genocide.”

For geo-political reasons, the U.S. State Department does not recognize that the Armenian Genocide carried out by the Ottoman Turks between 1915-1923. Of course, this is the same Administration that has just begun to discuss sanctions in Darfur. That Genocide has been going on for four years; and this week finally Busch said he may have had enough. However, instead of intervention and ending it, he is discussing imposing sanctions.

Currently the Armenian National Committee of America is coordinating a nation-wide effort to “End the Cycle of Genocide” and through webmail is asking supporters to contact their elected officials.

I am proud to say that our two Senators as well as the entire Massachusetts congressional delegation are co-sponsors of this Resolution.

On again, Sun’s local corporate pooh-bah and chairman of the board, Kendall Wallace (kwallace@lowellsun.com), is at odds with his own paper — this time over the issue of Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick.

The Sun’s editorial pages campaigned against him, and its news pages and editorials overplayed Patrick’s early, silly mistakes. But Wallace’s “Chat” column for Saturday, April 20 was full of praise for Patrick and ripe with condemnation of his Republican predecessor, Mitt (Flip-flop) Romney.

The issue that turned Wallace pro-Patrick and anti-Romney was the new Interstate 93 interchange that would serve Andover, Tewksbury and Wilmington. The interchange would “could pave the way for up to 9,000 new jobs for the region and the potential development of an upscale shopping/business mall,” Wallace wrote. Hot damn (and maybe more advertising for The Sun and its parent NewsMedia’s other papers in the region).

Wallace praised the entire cast and crew of town and state officials who helped make the case to the Federal Highway Administration, which last week gave its preliminary okay for the project. But Wallace reserved special praise for Patrick and Lt. Gov. Tim Murray:

“Lt. Gov. Tim Murray, who understands regional economic issues, jumped in quickly and helped coordinate the state and federal approvals.”

Then he slammed Romney:

“Unlike the Romney administration, when the Patrick/Murray administration term ends in four years, they will be able to point to the fact they added thousands of jobs for folks in the Merrimack Valley, the only area of the state, by the way, in which Patrick didn’t do well in the election.”

Don’t Wallace and Sun Editor James Campanini work off the same page anymore?

It was with great enthusiasm that I began to read Mike LaFleur’s article in Saturday’s Sun, “Lowell project makes wishes come true. They need help, too.”

I was already quite familiar with the Lowell-based charity that is the subject of the article, The Wish Project since Kristin (K-R-S) is a member of the Board of Directors and volunteer extraordinaire.

For the most part, the Sun article did focus on the role of the project – a primary source of furniture, home and baby goods for the needy of Lowell. When shelters and housing assistance groups place a previously homeless person in a new apartment, in many cases, the Wish Project provides the furniture.

But I found some of the information inconsistent with my personal knowledge of the Wish Project and its Founder and Executive Director, Donna Hunnewell. For example, the decision by the Board of Directors to pay her was made after losing two grants. Organization and government agencies which distribute grants demand stability and sustainability. (more…)

Here’s where I start to get primary-partisan. I always knew, at some point, there would be disagreements between the candidates, and some of them would be deal-breakers for me, and that I couldn’t be shy in voicing them. There are other concerns I have about Tsongas as a candidate, on issues of trade, and on substance in general. The most clear issue, however, has become very apparent. That would be her position on universal heath care.

I attended the GLAD (Greater Lowell Area Democrats) breakfast today, where candidates Niki Tsongas, David O’Brien, Barry Finegold, and Jamie Eldridge all stopped by before their Methuen campaign stop (another…breakfast?). Tsongas and O’Brien had never attended a GLAD meeting as candidates before, so they got to take more time to speak, then answer questions.

Although there have been indicators in the past that Tsongas is not for true single-payer universal health care, and that she has mentioned her time on the Board of (I think) Fallon, it became perfectly clear to me today that she is completely wrong, wrong, wrong on how to fix our health care system.

One statement she made was that we underestimate the power of the market for keeping costs down. What the heck planet is she from?

Last I checked, we had double-digit increases on a regular basis. I’ve heard of cost increases as high as 15-18% some years. There are numerous studies like this one citing that administrative overhead accounts for somewhere around 30% of private US health care versus half or less that in other industrialized countries where they have universal health care. Private companies are hiring people to deny you care, along with increasing their advertising and red tape. All along, our quality of care has diminished. I am not getting better service for my increased premiums, thanks very much. (As someone who was off of health care for 6 years because we were contract/self employed, I can tell you that the quality of care has certainly gone down since I was last insured. It’s like having a baby nephew in another state that you only see once a year - you can see how much he’s grown even if his mother doesn’t realize it.)

What Niki Tsongas doesn’t get is that if you want to deliver health care to a population, it is an inherent conflict of interest for a private system to be the vehicle. Why? Because for a private corporation, their bottom line is more important than the right of every person to have quality health care. This is borne out by the experiences of millions of Americans, who understand they are getting less for their hard-earned money. Critics of a universal health care plan say that it will lead to rationing. It’s not rationed now? How long does it take to get a doctor’s appointment these days? This last time, I had to make an appointment about 5 months ahead. How much time did we get with the doctor, despite the need we had? We were lucky to get 20 minutes.

That’s not to say private companies have no place in health care. I would be happy to see their role shrunk down to supplying the market with supplimental plans that richer people can add to their basic government health care if they so choose. You know why health care companies are so scared of the universal health care debate? Because if they were forced to compete even in a limited capacity with the government, whose administrative overhead percentage on Medicare/Medicaid is a tiny fraction of the private insurers, they would be shown to be the money-hogging buffoons that they are. They couldn’t compete, because the free market has not worked for bringing better quality care for less cost. Instead, we have skyrocketing premiums and nothing to show for it.

I don’t know where Niki Tsongas gets the idea that the market has been successful at bringing down costs. But I do know even if it has gotten cost effective in any area, that has been far outstripped by increasing costs of their own making elsewhere.

This is a deal breaker for me in this race. My husband and I, as I mentioned, were uninsured for six years. In that time, my husband’s and my health deteriorated for want of preventative care. Private companies don’t want to (affordably) insure the self-employed or the poor or the old or the sick; the more they externalize that cost the more money they make. It’s time to externalize the entire system and offer fair, quality, universal single-payer health care like every other first world democracy in the world. If you want that too, then Tsongas is not the candidate who will deliver.

The “in-state tuition” issue for undocumented residents is back on the table.

According to yesterday’s Boston Globe, ‘the [Massachusetts] Board of Higher Education gave its stamp of approval Thursday to a document that looks favorably on legislation to let illegal immigrant students pay in-state tuition at state colleges.”

Last January, Massachusetts lawmakers defeated a measure that would have allowed undocumented residents of our state to pay the same tuition rate as other residents. (more…)

We have the standard global warming naysayers in comments of my post about this year’s flood. And one of the chief arguments of these people (since they now cannot deny that the past 600,000 years of ice core data produced a picture of massive increases of CO2 from human industry) is that hey, the earth’s been here before, it’s been this hot before, whatever.

What I see is a total lack of imagination on the part of people denying that global climate crisis will be all that bad. Not because global climate change data needs imagination to understand, but what will happen if even the moderate predictions come true certainly does.

I have long been an avid reader of science fiction, practically since I was old enough to read. Many scifi writers tackle the sticky sociological and technological results of various apocalypses. These are obviously fictitious leaps of imagination; however, they are also intelligent thought experiments exploring the fragility of civilization after various catastrophic events.

I know, your house seems solid. Your computer seems solid. You drive down the solidly paved road in your solid metal car. Everything seems so permanent.

But some of you reading this blog remember one certain 1970s oil crisis. Long lines at gas stations. The cost of everything went up, because the cost of delivery of goods did.

Now ask the Iraqis if civilization can break down with one catastrophe. They once had the largest professional middle class societies in the Middle East. It was eroded by a decade of sanctions; but it was torn asunder by an invasion.

Remember Katrina? Imagine almost-yearly floods in Boston as storms grow worse (we ain’t seen nothing yet) and the sea levels rise. It may happen in my lifetime, so I should well be able to imagine it. How much damage will each storm bring? And in the aftermath, how much will rebuilding (or relocating) of city property cost? Multiply that by all the coastal cities in the US, and you can start to see the economic damage it will inflict. Then factor in that some areas of the US will go into drought. Mass migration from these places will displace whole populations. Famine will be widespread as crops fail in the nation’s heartland.

If you think the 1970s oil crisis caused price inflation, just wait until coastal docks are flooded and inaccessible, infrastructure that will entirely have to be rebuilt. If you think it was hard to get gas for your car, wait until delivery from overseas is curtailed by devastated oil refineries and oil wells are destroyed and sunk.

Now, ask an Iraqi how often they drive a car, or turn on a computer, or even watch TV. With intermittent electricity in their largest cities, ask them if life hasn’t completely been reduced to its basics - find food, protect the family. Now imagine this happening in the Western world, all over.

Our civilization is so fragile, and it only takes one generation to lose all the progress we have made. That’s something I’ve learned from my scifi books. Once life is diminished by devastation to the basest survival, who needs to pass on computer skills? Or how to fix a car? How to pave a road? Why would you even need a road?

That is the biggest danger we face: widespread technological setback. If global climate shifts are already happening faster than predicted, it’s very possible that the devastation will outstrip our ability to adapt to it. If you think it can’t happen, look at other countries who have experienced other types of catastrophic events…and then remember, they recovered with the world’s help. What if the whole world was just trying to survive? Who would help us then?

Rome wasn’t built in a day, but it was sacked in one. And a theory gaining ground is that it was climate change - regional cooling because of sunlight-blocking ash - which caused crop failure and prompted the barbarians to attack, thrusting Europe into the Dark Ages. It took hundreds of years to recover the technological advances of the Romans. Our climate change could be as devastating, or worse. And keep in mind if we change none of our behaviors, we’ll have used up most of the carbon-based fuels that took the industrial age from burning wood and using water wheels to airplanes and automobiles. It takes tens of millions of years to form oil deep in the ground. That’s a step in our civilization’s development that is crucial - carbon-based oil has the highest energy output of anything you can pull up out of the earth. If we fail over the next 100 years to retain the knowledge that can get us beyond carbon-based energy, we may not see this chance come again for a long time.

Our way of life, our democracy, our art, our technology, could be at stake. Some may call that overdramatic. I call it too serious a potential to ignore. Wouldn’t it be better to reorganize our energy infrastructure, create jobs, and have individual energy-independence now rather than wait until it is too late? Even if no climate crisis existed, carbon-based fuels are finite and running out. This is a hit to our economy we will have to endure sooner or later. It’s less painful to adjust now than when carbon-fuel prices are skyrocketing, don’t you think? There is absolutely no argument for retaining the status quo. There’s no good in waiting, only good in pushing forward as far and as fast as possible. To the world beyond carbon fuels, where our real future lies.

Yesterday, I managed to get my new digital SLR camera together in time to take some photos of the rising flood waters. Despite my inexpert photography skills, the camera is amazing and a vast improvement on ye olde cheap digital camera. Though while on Pawtuckette Blvd, I thought, I’ve been here before…

Great big metal beams protect the city from its canal system at Francis Gate.

Putting the beams into place.

It was nasty, raining, and cold out.

These steps, choked with water and debris, usually go down quite a ways when the water is normal.

The Francis Gate from Broadway St.

Sheehy Park under water, near UML’s South Campus

No picnic, today.

More of Sheehy Park

Pawtucket St., with some adventurous kids.

The river was wider…

Contemplating a daring crossing…they wisely decided against it.

From Pawtucket Blvd.

The wild power of the river.

The state park underwater.

It engulfed Pawtucket Blvd.

What is normally a waterfall, almost flat with excess water.

This sort of leadership has been a long time coming…from a Patrick press release (bold mine):

GOVERNOR PATRICK SETS AMBITIOUS NEW ENERGY STANDARDS FOR STATE BUILDINGS
Executive Order mandates tough conservation measures and requires greater use of renewable energy in state facilities

BOSTON – Wednesday, April 18 – Joined by Senate President Therese Murray and House Speaker Sal DiMasi, Governor Deval Patrick today issued an Executive Order setting higher standards for energy efficiency and mandating greater use of renewable energy throughout state government.

The “Leading By Example – Clean Energy and Efficient Buildings” Executive Order raises the Commonwealth’s clean energy and efficiency goals in the operation of state buildings. State agencies are responsible for consuming over 1 billion kilowatt hours of electricity, 22 million gallons of heating oil, and 46 million therms of natural gas annually, resulting in emission of 1 million tons of carbon dioxide – the equivalent of 200,000 automobiles.

Given the need to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases that cause global climate change, as well as cut electricity costs, throughout the Commonwealth, Governor Patrick insisted that state government “lead by example.” That, he said, means doing far more to constrain energy consumption and make use of renewable energy sources.

“In my administration, we intend to practice what we preach,” said Governor Patrick. “This Executive Order supersedes all previous administrative actions on energy conservation, and sets the clean energy bar far higher than ever before.”

The release gives some specifics. The part that everyone can agree on, is that this will save money on electricity as well as reduce greenhouse gas emissions:

Over the last weekend, approximately 170 light bulbs were changed in the Governor’s office. In total 1,000 bulbs will be changed in the State House which will mean $15,000 in savings and a reduction of 56 tons in carbon emissions per year.

There’s more, lots more… (more…)

It was a pretty uneventful Lowell City Council meeting with a relatively light agenda. It lasted exactly 1 hour.

At the request of Mayor Bill Martin, Lieutenant Governor Tim Murray came to Lowell tonight to visit the flood area. The Mayor had been an early supporter of Murray’s campaign for Lieutenant Governor and had served on the Patrick/Murray Transition Team, so I am sure when Mayor Martin called, Lieutenant Murray was happy to oblige.

Because of the visit and a subsequent meeting with the Lieutenant Governor, the weekly City Council meeting was delayed by a half hour.

City Manager Bernie Lynch gave an up-to-date report on the 2007 Flood. As previously discussed on this blog, this is the 5th worst flood the City has ever experienced. According to the CM, the damage to personal property was not as extensive as the 2006 Flood. But the bowling alley, the luxury and the high rise condos got hit; so didn’t the Davidison Parking Lot. Apparently, the Concord River will not crest for another two days. (more…)

The city website has an update on how flooding has affected us. In talking to Bernie Lynch today on an unrelated matter, he mentioned the level of the river was the fifth highest it has been, not too much under last year’s flood levels. I admit I wasn’t expecting this, because last year’s flood event was caused by weeks of rain in May, as opposed to one large storm in April coinciding with the northern snow melt, an element that we in the south don’t think much about, with no snow on the ground here. The results of both are nearly the same, however.

I fear this is only the beginning of frequent rain activities in the spring and fall, a pattern I’ve noted before that appears to be related to the global climate crisis. CM Lynch said that they had put measures into place to protect some areas from flooding and that much of that effort appears to have worked, but there are several roads closed once again, and places in Lowell (and elsewhere locally) flooded. You can get a complete list of current road closures on the city’s website.

If this sort of flooding is to be a yearly event, we will have to dig into an already crippled city budget to build the infrastructure to protect the city, and will need to rethink future development on vulnerable land. When a 100 or even 50 year flood becomes commonplace, our economy has to soak up the damage in one capacity or another. It might be too much to hope that this is as bad as it will get.