About Town

Trying to save a big-business handout

2008-03-19T16:20:53.2075-04:00

Maine lawmakers, having cut $140 million from the state's education, health, human services, and the criminal-justice system budgets, have asked the business community to contribute $10 million to the $200 million in cuts being sought to balance the state budget, according to state Senator Lynn Bromley (D-South Portland), who is the senate chairman of the Legislature's Business, Research, and Economic Development Committee.

Today, in response to a claim by Maine State Chamber of Commerce president Dana Connors that it the state's businesses shouldn't offer their ideas of where to cut spending, Bromley essentially called Connors's bluff, and invited his organization and other businesses to do just that.

The carrot she laid out, she told the Phoenix, was that if they can cut $10 million, then they could preserve the state's Business-Equipment Tax Reimbursement program (called BETR, the program was extended indefinitely in 2006, just before it was slated to expire, in what a recent Portland Phoenix story by Lance Tapley called the "Payments Forever" tax break). If they don't come up with $10 million, then the state's $66-million BETR fund could be cut, she says, not noticing the other millions we already give to massively profitable out-of-state companies (see "Tax Break Heaven," by Lance Tapley, February 22).

Of course, even if the businesses do agree to pitch in $10 million to fill that 5 percent of the state's budget hole, they'll still be receiving $670 million in tax breaks in fiscal 2009, as we reported last month (see "Tax Break Heaven" again). And the state's general practice of balancing the budget on the backs of poor, elderly, and sick Mainers - and continuing to give lavishly to out-of-state corporations (Wal-Mart, here's $439,000) - will continue.

Lawmakers are even still talking about creating a new tax break for businesses, which would be a blank check for the wealthiest Mainers and developers to refit old buildings with taxpayers' money - with almost no limits. We reported on that, too (see "A 'Good' Tax Break In the Making," by Lance Tapley, February 22). Bromley says she doesn't think new tax breaks should be considered given the budget situation.

But she's quite happy to keep the old ones, and keep the $140 million in cuts to education, health, human services, and the justice system.

Rustic Politics - Overtones of Protest

2008-03-18T13:20:43.941-04:00

Rustic Overtones have released a video from a song off their once-and-future "new" album, Light at the End (reviewed by Sam Pfeifle back in July), in honor of today's national release on Velour.

The song is "Letter to the President," which is in rotation on the Overtones' MySpace page if you want to just listen to it. You can see the video here, if you have QuickTime (or click here to see the video in Windows Media Player, whose embedding doesn't seem to be working just now).

Press Herald sale - who would buy?

2008-03-18T10:54:37.395-04:00

UPDATE: With Crosscut Seattle story link (also here). Definitely read that story - it has great analysis and some new ideas of who might buy the papers - including a possibility of the union taking it employee-owned.

Yesterday's announcement that the Portland Press Herald and the rest of the Blethen Maine Newspaper group are up for sale has a lot of attention in the expected arenas.

The Press Herald has a story here. The Seattle Times has a story here. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's story is here. I'm told Crosscut Seattle will have a story later today (UPDATE: It does, and that must-read story is here.) ~~(and I'll post an update to this story when it's live).~~

The PressingTheHerald blog (which I wrote about in the latest issue of the Phoenix) has declared an end to its six-day-old "Blethen Maine Death Watch," and "T. Cushing Munjoy" has resumed buying the paper, only to find that he and Frank Blethen agree on something - that the Blethens will be lucky to recoup half of the $200-million-plus purchase price they paid for the Maine papers in 1998.

Even PortlandPressHarried's "T. Flushing Funjoy" is digging around, unearthing the Blethens' corporate memos and exec-speak from five years ago and ten years ago.

But nobody has addressed what appears to be a clear fact, which doesn't bode well for the papers' future: The Blethens likely have no prospective buyers.

Most businesses, and particularly privately-owned ones, don't generally announce that parts of their companies are "for sale." They announce that they have been sold, complete with answers to the "who bought it" and "when do they take over," even if not the "how much did they overpay" questions, and reassuring quotes about the future.

Not so this time - the Blethens have basically said, "We need to get rid of these companies - would anyone like to make us an offer?" They have also engaged the services of a major newspaper brokerage company, the New Mexico-based Dirks, Van Essen & Murray, which again suggests they have no idea who might buy the papers.

We know from my story on the impending sale of the Press Herald back in 2006 that some of Maine's big players aren't interested, and they've likely gotten even less so. The Bangor Daily News has laid off workers since then, and while the Lewiston Sun Journal has been expanding, their merger-and-acquisition people seem to be focused on weeklies, rather than dailies. Maybe the Sample Group, who own the Biddeford Journal-Tribune and just bought the Brunswick Times-Record, would be interested, but they just laid off people at the Times-Record, only days after begging the state for a loan they said would allow them to keep the newspaper operating.

Who's left? It's anybody's guess - even the Blethens don't have any ideas.

Prison life ain't so good

2008-03-18T10:45:30.73875-04:00

Well, we knew that. But here's an edited transcript of a talk Phoenix freelancer Lance Tapley gave last week at the Meg Perry Center, home to Peace Action Maine and the Foglight Collective.

By the way, you can hear this talk online at ThinkTwiceRadio.com (mp3 here) or rent it and many other progressive videos from Roger Leisner's Radio Free Maine at Videoport in downtown Portland.

Prison folly

Why? And what can be done?

The following is an edited excerpt from a speech given by Phoenix contributing writer Lance Tapley on “Human Rights and Maine’s Prisons” at a Peace Action Maine meeting in Portland on March 7. Since 2005, he has written about physical abuse and other wrongdoing in the prisons, especially in the maximum-security, solitary-confinement Special Management Unit or “Supermax” inside the Maine State Prison in Warren.

By Lance Tapley

I knew nothing about this subject. Most people don’t. Unfortunately, most people don’t care about it—at best. Including many who consider themselves compassionate liberals. They appear to care more about the wrongs at Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo than about the abuse suffered by tens of thousands of human beings within America’s punishment system.

“Prisoners have rights?” a liberal friend, a good man, asked me. This was an admission that he didn’t think of them as human. All human beings have rights.

Why is this horror happening? And what can be done about it?

Let’s start with a few statistics:

--2.3 million people are imprisoned in the United States, one in every 100 adults. No other country comes close.

--We have 5 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of prisoners.

--The US keeps 35,000 human beings in solitary confinement. This is unprecedented in world history. Only the US has been able to afford it.

--We incarcerate at a rate five times the rate of 30 years ago.

Here is my best understanding, to date, of what has happened historically. To be disingenuous, so many people are in prison because they’ve been arrested, convicted, and sentenced for crimes. In other words: lots of arrests, a high rate of conviction, and long sentences.

Accounting for the arrests, we have seen a massive increase in the number of police. Bill Clinton is partly responsible for this phenomenon. There has been an enormous police campaign against small-time drug dealers and users. Twenty-five percent of people in prisons and jails are there for drug offenses.

Accounting for the convictions, the poor are often unable to get proper legal representation.

Accounting for the harsh—often, by law, mandatory—sentences, the mainstream—dare I say, corporate—news media amplify every violent incident into a world-historic event, scaring and angering people to demand locking up every possible threat: Jessica’s Law, Megan’s Law, etc.

There is an underlying theme in these arrests, convictions, and sentences: racism. Nationally, 50 percent of prisoners are black; 30 percent are Hispanic.

The scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore believes prisons are where many of the uneducated manufacturing workers of the past, in the age of globalization, are being taken care of, so to speak—especially the African-American ones.

There is another, related theme: Thirty years ago the country took a sharp political turn to the right in reaction to the racial and other social revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s. The US became very authoritarian, stern, macho, aggressive in dealing with threats and perceived threats to law and order. And the liberal leadership didn’t put up much of a fight because they didn’t have a basis anymore in the working class, and they got their campaign money from the corporations, too.

Speaking of corporations, another phenomenon to note is the growth of the corporate prison industry. It is not as big a factor in explaining what happened as some liberal critics believe, but it is a growing factor.

Much more important, the mental hospitals began closing down 30 years ago, but governments didn’t fund adequate community support for the mentally ill. So now many mentally ill people are housed in jails and prisons.

Let’s just touch upon some deeper underlying themes: Ruth Wilson Gilmore also suggests that the prison madness has occurred because Americans believe the key to safety is aggression. . . . So here is the connection with my subject to Peace Action Maine.

Forgive me for getting even more theoretical, but I tend to think the prison madness also results from a national philosophy of materialism, which is based on the stoking of individual desire and dissatisfaction—that is, of unhappiness.

Happiness is bad for the corporations. They will sell fewer goods and services if people are feeling satisfied with their lives, with what they have. Strong families and communities are bad for business because sharing means fewer goods and services will be sold. Labor insecurity and mobility is obviously good for business. This is not a plot but a system. In an unsettled society, when your family is broken, if you are rootless, if you are poor and uneducated, if you are unemployed, if you are perhaps mentally unstable, and if you can’t buy, buy, buy . . . In this situation, I can’t understand when people don’t steal and strike out in anger.

An unhappy society not only produces criminals, it finds scapegoats.

A prisoners’ spiritual guru who spoke in Maine last year, Bo Lozoff, put it this way: We’re in an forlorn, declining empire of “narcissistic consumerism.” . . . And maybe liberals are too busy buying things to look into the prisons.

But, as I read in a recent Maine newspaper editorial, at least locking up so many people is driving the violent crime rate down.

This cannot be correct, mathematically. We have four times as many people in prison as we had 25 years ago, and we started imprisoning people in big numbers at that time. But the violent crime rate only began dropping in 1995, and it has dropped only by 55 percent. That’s impressive, but it can’t be just because so many people are locked up.

Imprisoning so many people also is a factor in increasing the crime rate. Prisoners teach crime to other prisoners, and the prison administration teaches antisocial behavior. For example, there are rules against sharing in prison. The recidivism rate—the return to crime—is extremely high. It is 70 percent in California.

So what can be done? To deal simply with a not-simple question, I want to read a list of 15 prison-reform ideas I have collected from reading, discussions, and emails from friends and colleagues in the prison-reform effort, including from prisoners. Some of these are pretty obvious, but they are not being done:

1. Creation of a state-level group to watchdog constitutional and human rights of prisoners.

2. Journalist access to prisoners without censorship by officials.

3. A state-funded, independent ombudsman to investigate claims of official misconduct and rights violations.

4. To reduce recidivism, more effort toward rehabilitation—less warehousing—including more prison jobs, job training, and educational opportunities.

5. Parole reinstituted, instead of more prisons (30 years ago in Maine, murderers served, on average, less than 10 years of hard time before going out on parole).

6. Shorter sentences, instead of more prisons.

7. More alternatives to automatic imprisonment for small probation violations, instead of more prisons.

8. More alternative treatment for drug-addicted petty criminals.

9. More alternative treatment for mentally ill offenders.

10. More alternative treatment for sex offenders.

11. Mental illness treated better in the prisons.

12. Abolish the state prison’s Supermax, which is a torture chamber, and retain a small number of maximum-security cells, which was the case everywhere previous to the Supermax construction binge.

13. Better pay and training for prison guards; end of arbitrary discipline by guards.

14. End of the surprising nepotism among prison officials.

15. New, enlightened leadership: governor, corrections commissioner, wardens, Criminal Justice Committee members in the Legislature.

The biggest reform would occur—everything else would fall into place—if a lot more people recognized that prisoners were human beings like themselves. As the old saying puts it, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

Many reformers say citizens will only respond to economic logic: locking up so many people is terribly expensive. I think that’s a good secondary argument, but if we don’t place the moral argument first—the argument for human rights—we run the risk of continuing to see prisoners only as objects, which is fundamentally why we treat them as we do. What if it could be proven that torture is cost-effective?

As Rama Carty, a prisoner at Windham, wrote me, “Being human means evolving toward the humane.”

Both those within and without the prison walls need this evolution.

Press Herald For Sale - For Sure

2008-03-17T14:25:57.066-04:00

In August 2006, we used the above graphic to illustrate a story called "Press Herald For Sale?" in which I posited that all signs were pointing to an impending sale of the Portland Press Herald, and quoted owner Frank Blethen as asking, in a September 2003 Press Herald article, "Can you just keep going?"

The answer: Not much longer at all now, what with layoffs, an impending price hike, circulation drops, and shrinking area for news.

The following is a memo from the Seattle Times corporate office to company employees that went out this morning.

From: Company Communications
Sent: Monday, March 17, 2008 11:02 AM
To: All Seattle Times
Subject: Message from Carolyn Kelly

I wanted to let you know about an announcement we are making this morning related to Blethen Maine Newspapers.

The Blethen family has made the decision to explore the sale of Blethen Maine Newspapers. As you all know, the industry economics have been particularly challenging for us as a small, independent newspaper company. The unrelenting challenges and unique circumstances here have led us to conclude that scaling back to a smaller organization is necessary at this time. Doing so provides the best opportunity for success in the long term for both the Seattle Times Company and for Blethen Maine Newspapers.

The Blethen family will continue to own and operate The Seattle Times and the Washington affiliates: the Yakima Herald-Republic, the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin, the Issaquah Press and Rotary Offset Press.

Today's announcement does not mean that we are out of the woods; we hope it buys us some breathing room as we transform ourselves. We do not anticipate any changes to our operations here; we will continue to redefine our business model and work to align our cost structure with our revenue.

A copy of the press announcement is attached. If you have any questions, please ask your manager or department head.

Carolyn Kelly

Seattle Times Company to Explore Sale of

Blethen Maine Newspapers

Seattle – Citing ongoing challenges in the industry and the need to focus on the future of its flagship newspaper and affiliate newspapers in the State of Washington , the Seattle Times Company has announced that it will explore the sale of its Blethen Maine Newspapers.

The sale would include the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram, the Kennebec Journal, the Morning Sentinel and MaineToday.com, a Web site that serves as a news and information portal for the state of Maine .

"We have been proud to be the stewards of these newspapers for the last 10 years. They provide their communities with high quality, independent journalism that is in keeping with the best traditions of the Seattle Times Company," Seattle Times CEO and Publisher Frank Blethen said. "We wish our stewardship could continue indefinitely, but the difficult business environment and continuing uncertainties require we consider other options.

"The decision to explore a sale was painful. But a sale may be the best opportunity for the long-term survival of our newspapers in Washington and those in Maine . "

Chuck Cochrane, CEO and Publisher of Blethen Maine Newspapers, said he does not anticipate this decision will require changes in policies or operations of the newspapers while a sale is being explored. The three Blethen Maine Newspapers have about 500 employees and combined circulation of about 101,000 daily and 136,900 Sunday.

The Seattle Times Company has engaged Dirks, Van Essen & Murray of Santa Fe, NM, the nation's leading newspaper merger-and-acquisition firm, as a broker to assist with the potential sale. Blethen said the goal is to have the process completed by at least the end of the year.

Blethen Maine Newspapers is a unit of the Seattle Times Company.

###

Cleaning up

2008-03-14T14:51:25.713-04:00

It's kind of a strange day here at the office, as we're all making sure we vote for Portland in the Bushmills 400 Years contest (at www.Bushmills400years.com), which you can read about in Deirdre Fulton's story in this week's paper.

But then I look at the pile of mail from yesterday and notice that strange box I picked up, opened, and left on the couch in the middle of the afternoon. It's a sample of Listerine Smart Rinse, some new mouthwash, apparently. It's one of the odder samples we get mailed here in the office, in hopes, I assume, that we'll write about the product in some way. (You caught me!)

Investigating this package is a lesson in modern marketing, and a cautionary tale for anyone who might think there's such a thing as truth in advertising. It's touted as having "Magnetic Cleaning Action," which seems odd, because I don't think many people have trouble with too many iron filings or steel girders in their mouths.

Then I notice that it's in "Berry Shield" flavor, which makes me wonder what it actually tastes like. (You thought I was going to try that? Wrong. I smelled it, though, and it smells like berries, I guess, perhaps with a hint of shield.)

This particular product goes even further, offering to show "proof of a cleaner mouth," by which the literature appears to mean that there's some sort of dye in this liquid that tints "food particles and bacteria" so they're easier to see when you spit it out into the sink. What's preventing them from just dyeing everything you spit out some color, and then claiming it's all bad stuff the product has "cleaned" out? Nothing.

Making matters worse, they don't actually tell you what's in this liquid. The "active ingredient," sodium fluoride, is 0.0221 percent of the total. What about the other 99.9779 percent? We're left to guess. What do you think is in it? And would you try it if you didn't know?