Left In Lowell

If you want to point out a major factor in reducing gang presence more than a decade ago in Lowell, you have only to point to the teens themselves, and the United Teen Equality Center. And now their “Streetworker” program is getting national recognition because of a study being published by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

From UTEC’s press release:

The study’s interviews with UTEC staff and local community groups found five major contributing factors to UTEC’s success in the SW program: involvement of youth in hiring SWs; investment in quality training for the SWs; providing SWs with a comprehensive benefits package and team retreats to prevent staff turnover and burnout; establishment of community partnerships; and incorporation of peacemaking into outreach.

“These features should be considered both by communities with existing street outreach worker programs and by communities in the process of establishing one, as they have demonstrated importance for both program success and sustainability,” said Shannon Frattaroli, PhD, MPH, assistant professor with the Johns Hopkins Center for Injury Research and the paper’s lead author.

Congrats to an excellent community group on the getting the recognition it deserves. We know it works; now the rest of the nation’s cities can learn from UTEC.

Or rather, it’s full of sh*t. Probably another edition of Jim “Logic? What’s that?” Campanini drivel. It has his signature pull-it-out-of-my…well. You know.

In it, he blames Obama, Patrick, and the Democrats for the reslumping economy we are, it appears, going through now. Of course, Campanini (ahem, I mean “the editor who wrote this”) has a real, electoral reason for doing this - he wants Republicans to win, so he’s gotta paint this as a problem with the leadership of the Democrats. To do so, he has to ignore general consensus of real economists (the reality-based ones who don’t work for the Heritage Foundation). Particularly with Mass job increases at 20 year highs, he has to make you think that despite this progress, it’s not progress.

All the real economists (the ones that win Nobel Prizes) have rejected trickle down (hey even Bush Sr. called it “voodoo” after all), affirmed Keynesian economics, and basically have said for a couple YEARS now that the big problem with the economy is that we didn’t stimulate it enough - and 1/3 of that stimulus bill we did get was, actually, useless tax cuts, to boot. (I find it odd how this is never mentioned in the context of conservative rants about the stimulus package. Maybe because it would help prove they are full of crap?)

These smart economists are now saying that what we’re seeing has an awful lot in common with the slowdown and retrenching of the unemployment rate in the 1930s after FDR and Congress got all deficit-hawky. And they are right, there’s a ton in common. And this deficit worry is the prevailing idiocy here and around the world. End result? Since we haven’t yet dug ourselves out of the hole we were in, we’re sliding back in now that we put the brakes on powering our way up.

It’s sort of like worrying about how to fix the patient’s broken arm while he’s still on the surgeon’s table having a heart attack. Simple triage dictates you deal with the worst problems first, then move on once you’ve stabilized the patient. This is pretty conventional wisdom for those who don’t still believe in the tooth fairy and Reaganomics.

And I love, just adore the whole concept of ignoring why we’re in this mess of a economic pothole in the first place - the tender ministrations of one George W. “I went to business school!” Bush. Who. Cut. Taxes.

Here’s the other piece of logic stupidity this editorial commits - it fails to take into account that the ONLY reason Obama has not fixed the economy more substantially (besides just how bloody deep it was to begin with) is the Republicans (and the few conservaDems) watered down any attempt to actually do the real things that needed doing - like going all in on stimulus rather that doing what most economists tell us is dipping one’s toe in.

If anyone’s to blame for the failures of this economy, it’s Bush, first, and second, Republicans in the Senate who prevented Obama from enacting a decent agenda that had a shot at actually working. But I can tell you, far smarter people than Jim Campanini say that the only reason we’re treading water instead of drowning to our deaths is because of the stimulus that was put into place. Without it, we’d be far, far worse off.

Oh, hell, for fun, because I haven’t done this in a while, let’s pick apart the arguments in the editorial one at at time…

Both Obama and Patrick have tried to tax and spend their way out of the recession rather than rein in fiscal policies and promote business investment.

In a recession, (says all the smart people in the world), if unemployment is high and there are no buyers, businesses will not invest in anything. Why in the hell would they?? They won’t create widgets (or houses, or sell services) if people are not buying them. Businesses are not stupid. They know that a widget sitting on a shelve is lost revenue. Apparently, this editor thinks that businesses are dumb and will build widgets if they get tax cuts - regardless of whether or not they have buyers!

However, if more people are employed (those much-maligned teachers and fire fighters and public employees whose essential jobs were saved, to name a few), they buy things. They buy services. They, in effect, create, what’s that word…demand. But this writer here thinks the Demand Faerie brings that to businesses in the night, I guess…

Democrats who once hailed the Obama administration’s $787 billion economic stimulus plan are now making excuses for its failure to create jobs. They say the package wasn’t big enough. What gall.

Who has gall? This writer ignores the fact that fully one third of the stimulus was in tax cuts as a sop to the GOP to get them to stop filibustering it. Otherwise, it would have been 1/3 more effective than it was. It was, at the time, being lamented as too small - our economy is just too big for a few hundreds of billions to drag us out of a Bush-dug recession.

Reviving the economy should have been Obama’s No. 1 priority.

I agree. And it was. The Republicans however, prefer a shitty economy so they could run on it, and blocked all the effective stuff that would have been otherwise directed towards the economy. Note, however, that the stimulus bill was basically one of the first things Obama ever worked on - a fact conveniently not noted here.

Instead, he directed Democrats to push through a costly health-care law that, when it kicks in in 2014, will add more financial burdens on business and workers.

Again, that was after the stimulus-that-was-small-and-1/3-tax-cuts was passed, and it was evident that none more would be had with the Republican filibuster threat. Also, health care is a huge, just ginormous portion of our GDP - more than all the socialized countries who’ve taken health care off the books of their private sector. Addressing it was a necessary long-term help to our economy, though obviously not a short term solution. Our businesses are drowning in health care costs that are just insane.

The bulk of the money has gone to protect government jobs — union teachers, police, firefighters, etc. — while ignoring the private sector, which creates jobs.

Yeah, cuz we don’t need those stinkin’ police, firefighters, and teachers…or their spending money to stimulate the economy, either. And of course, the editor here ignores the 20-year-high rate of private sector job increases in MA in the last few months. Funny how that happens. How much better does he think the private sector job growth can get, without breaking all records??

With more one-time stimulus money on the way, Patrick will be spreading the wealth to municipal governments to protect even more union jobs. It’s an election year, after all. A responsible leader, however, would tuck that money away in the state’s rainy-day fund, leaving it for the challenges of fiscal 2012.

Shorter Jim Campanini: unions suck. I hate them! Damn the weekends they gave us, and damn them for serving the Commonwealth with crazy policing, firefighting, and teaching all over the place. They should paid $20K a year, or not at all!

And, in the middle of the worst recession in ages, we should be SAVING! Saving for a rainy day! The hell with the reason we have a rainy day fund in the first place!

God, can you get any sillier than pretty much this entire editorial?

Of course, if you’re Campanini (*ahem* this editorial writer), facts and the words of real smart economists don’t really influence your view of the universe. You have your narrative all picked out and then torturously try to twist everything fit it. Reality doesn’t really factor in to it.

Whereas I’d rather actually solve the real problems of our time. But hey, that’s just me.

As a follow-up to Lynne’s post on the release of the Donoghue and Dogherty donors list, I decided to review the names, or more precisely the city or town of the donors. These are my unofficial statistics. I say unofficial, because I printed the list and counted the names and towns; and no one reviewed my work. But if you have any questions on the validity of my findings, you can always check the candidates’ website.

Here are the numbers:

Donoghue: Total = 456; District = 264; Lowell = 213
Dogherty: Total = 418; District = 113; Lowell = 83

I do not have any problem with people raising money outside of the district. On many occasions I have donated to candidates that run outside of my district and even outside of Massachusetts; you may be a relative, a friend or colleague. Why not help them?

Both candidates had donations from the “usual suspects.” You know the business owners who give to everyone.

And if you are into statistics, 58% of Eileen’s donations are in-district while Chris‘ are 27%. How does this translate into votes? I do believe that these figures as well as lawn signs, bumper stickers, endorsements and volunteers do contribute to a successful campaign. To what degree? No one really knows.

By the way, Eileen will have one more financial contributor today, me. I have to go by the campaign headquarters to pick up something and I will drop off my check.


For those of you who have not been following this race on LiL, both Lynne and I are ardent supporters of Eileen’s campaign and we publicly endorsed her candidacy on this blog on June 1st.

In case you missed it at last night City Council’s meeting a gratifying (for me) exchange took place between Mayor Jim Milinazzo and CC Bud Caulfield, who presented the following motion: “Mgr. finds ways/means of replacing sidewalks on Stevens St. ”

Here is a 4 minute clip of the discussion:

I can understand a City Councilor’s concerns about raising taxes, fees or the budget. What I cannot understand is when the same CC has no problems bringing motions that put additional financial demands on the City Budget without making any provisions.

You cannot have it both ways. Also, during the discussion CC Joe Mendonca mentioned that Stevens Street was a gateway road to the City. Yes, it is. But have the CCs walked on Gorham, Bridge or Middlesex lately?

A nod to Mayor Milinazzo for looking out for the tax payer.

By the way, there was another interesting discussion and vote on the new police vehicle garage. I will write about that later today.

Massachusetts has won $250M in educational funding in the second round of the federal program, Race to the Top.

While I am skeptical of adopting the federal education standards in general (i worry there might not be enough room for the arts, music and other essential parts of a well rounded education), this is good news for Mass school budgets which are struggling.

(Bumped - it’s tonight!)

The folks at Trinity Financial are hosting their first informational session for interested artists as they work to complete the 130 units of affordable artist live-work rental spaces at Appleton Mills. As someone who gets to regularly see the progress as I drive into work, I simple will say that I am really excited for this new chapter in the life of Lowell’s artist community. It is really coming together over there, and despite the construction chaos, you can almost see the finished product in the half-built structure.

The meeting will be held at the Brush Art Gallery on Tuesday, August 24th, 6:30 - 8 pm. Wine and cheese will be served. If you can’t attend, visit LiveAppletonMills.com or call 978-458-0588.

I’ve had the privilege of several tours of the building as it has been built (I’m going to attempt to make a documentary!). The process is absolutely mind boggling - literally taking the shell of a building and making something sturdy and lasting from it. That it will be an anchor point for expanding the artist community in Lowell is definitely something extra special.

This happened a while back (according to the Column - see below - last Friday) but I was offline all weekend with the nieces. Eileen Donoghue’s campaign has posted their donors, with a prominent link in the menu at the top, and in PDF format unencrypted and searchable. (OK, browser spellcheck, when is “searchable” going to be a real word??). You can find it here.

Something of note, in general - a very large portion of Chris Doherty’s donors are out of district. By contrast, Donoghue has a lot more in district. Take from that what you will, but I tend to prefer a candidate who feels beholden to the actual constituents they will be representing, in general.

Also, of note, the American Federation of Teachers Massachusetts, which includes the United Teachers of Lowell, has endorsed Eileen Donoghue. It rather makes sense, given she has a history working on the School Committee as its chair and working at issues teachers care about.

—

I have to question both the legality and the tactics of posting the entire Sun Sunday Column on Chris Doherty’s website.

First, there’s a fair use problem with taking the entire thing wholesale and posting it. Unless the Doherty campaign got permission from the Sun, they basically are stealing the work. Fair use generally says quoting a portion of the work for commentary might be fair use - though that even is no guarantee. You’ll note that on Donoghue’s site, they take a short summary and link to the real article in question. This has the bad side effect of sending the user to dead links since Sun articles expire after two weeks, but it’s most definitely a very safe and sound way to legally talk about media writing about Eileen Donoghue.

The Doherty violation of copyright is particularly egregious because The Column isn’t even online for free consumption on the Sun’s own website, so they are depriving the Sun of that “exclusivity” as well. (This, notwithstanding the idea that I think it was a bad idea to firewall the Column in the first place. I will say that this is the first time I’ve read the Column in like, ages.)

Second, the tactical mistake. The Column piece is posted in its entirety. As in, the parts that have nothing to do with the race (St. Hilaire, etc). So not only really going all the way on the copyright infringement, but also, relevancy. Why would you post something not relevant to your campaign on your site? Just quote the stuff that makes sense. If you’re going to steal something verbatim. Weird.

Thirdly, the Column isn’t all complimentary of Doherty (in fact, it’s rather even handed in the content). For instance, it calls him out for his last minute posting of his donors to be able to use that in the debate. It also states that Doherty, by not losing, but drawing even, made him the “winner” of the debate. Just what I want to tout about my candidate…”Chris Doherty…he didn’t lose!” Okaaay. Not exactly a ringing endorsement. I probably myself (if I were campaign media person) wouldn’t even quote it at all unless it said something like “slam dunk for Doherty!” or something like that.

But hey, what do I know? I’ve only been posting stuff on the internets for over five years…eight if you count the years I’ve been building websites and helping clients write for the web.

The country might be in a bit of trouble, but the trends in MA have so far survived. Massachusetts added 19,200 private sector jobs in July, losing some (primarily federal census workers) to create a net gain of 13,200 jobs. This held the unemployment rate steady, but the jobs creation in MA this year is the best growth in 20 years. This graph in johnk’s BMG post really just sums it up - not only are we growing jobs, but we’re increasing the total workforce number, so far. (Numbers in graph are in the thousands - johnk’s source according to him via email.) If you click on that link, you’ll see a pretty even distribution of job growth in the private sector categories across the board.

In all, 60,200 jobs have been added in MA since December. And Massachusetts in the second quarter has grown at twice the rate as the nation.

It’s not all great news. While we’re doing much better here, nationwide, a mere 71,000 private-sector jobs were added nationwide in July. Mass’s share of those jobs (if the national number is the total # of jobs, not net) is an astounding 27%. Even if the 71,000 jobs is the net number, MA would account for 18%. But it’s hard to know how sustainable our decent level of growth is while the rest of the nation slows. So cautious optimism is called for.

Still, these are really impressive numbers, and as johnk says, “It’s getting more and more difficult to take other candidates seriously when they repeat how Massachusetts is losing jobs.”

And it’s about time. Without dogs to abuse, and with slots at racetracks dead, the Revere track has decided to go out of business.

This Sun article overemphasizes the positives of the closing track (the jobs left there, its long glorious history as a place to break the delicate bones of greyhounds, etc). I do feel bad for the 100 people losing their jobs as I would any workers in any industry, but the idea of putting the welfare of 100 people in largely low-wage jobs ahead of the welfare of the thousands in the area who could potentially become addicted to slots (and commit crimes to feed their disease, and the victims of the crimes…etc etc) and the welfare of our Commonwealth, is, well, a bit disingenuous.

Maybe these 100 people could be better put to work to redeveloping that prime real estate, and into jobs that are created once that land has been put to other use.

Something I noticed out of the corner of my eye while researching my last post, but didn’t have time to delve into deeply, is the fact that Chris Doherty’s donation page does not appear to have an SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificate indicator. The donor page asks for your full information, including all credit card info, and claims at the top that “This is a secure page” with a padlock image, but what is more important than easily made in-page claims, is the missing padlock you should be finding on the bottom bar of your browser when you hit that page.

The donation form itself is in an iframe - embedding code from another site, the URL of which is:
http://secure.sage-systems.com/cms/chrisdoherty/?l=donate

But just because “secure” is in the subdomain of the page being pulled, it does not mean security. That page URL also does not have the “https” prefix - https indicates a secure URL. The form script appears to resubmit to itself via relative URL (web talk for using the same prefix and domain).

Curious, I put my IT husband on the case, and he used what’s known as a “packet sniffer” - software that monitors the pieces of information, called packets, that are sent to and fro whenever you submit something and then receive something through the web (or rather, through a network then the web). An encrypted (SSL) packet is indecipherable via packet sniffer. However, the test data that we submitted through the form on that page was perfectly intact in the packet sniffer. That means a knowledgeable computer person (with malicious intent) can, particularly if you are on say, an unsecured network at a coffee shop or library, grab 100% of your credit card information, everything that person needs to use the card themselves online (including the CVV, address, name, and expiration date).

If I were Chris Doherty, I would be really pissed off at my web design firm. This is a terribly amateur mistake that could compromise the personal information of donors. And it needs to be fixed ASAP.

UPDATE: Looking at the code for the page now, the iframe now links to “https://secure.sage-systems.com/cms/chrisdoherty/?l=donate” which appears to be a secure site (the certificate doesn’t name ownership info, but it at least has SSL).

This means the parent page (the contribute page) itself does not have SSL, but the transaction should be secure. It’s not how I would set it up - in that people do look for that padlock on the bottom bar when they are on a page asking for credit information, and it will not appear there, but it should be secure. I don’t have a packet sniffer here with me so I can’t check it but my guess is it’s encrypted. So good on the web updater for getting to it quickly. Still, pretty rookie move…