Impolite to stare at it
“Beyond 2’’(acrylic) by Nancy Hayes, in her show “Thought Translated Into Form,’’ at the Art Complex Museum, Duxbury, Mass.
She says:
“Painting permits direct access into my own personal laboratory where I develop forms and visual landscapes built from my imagination. I work with color, line, pattern and shape, arranging and rearranging until I am inspired to elaborate on a composition, going deeper into its texture, its biology.’’
Myles Standish Monument, in Duxbury.
Mulch more
Adapted from an item in Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24. com
November seems a good month to sleep in. The nights are long and the major colors outside are brown and gray. There are, it it true, a couple of holidays – Veterans Day (which we used to call Armistice Day, after the armistice that ended World War 1 – aka “The War to End War,’’ followed a couple of decades later by the worst war in history) and Thanksgiving, whose inconvenient placement on the last Thursday of the month tends to make it rather low key. I’ve long been impressed by the masochism of those traveling then. Then the Christmas/New Year’s mania sets in, with more travel masochism.\
Meanwhile, if you have a yard, resist the temptation to remove all those fallen leaves, leaving the ground looking like a putting green. Fallen leaves are good for the soil and the overall ecosystem. Mulching the leaves and spreading the result is particularly admirable. And yes, there are nonpolluting and fairly quiet electric mulchers. You can also put some lime on the leaves, mulched or not. This helps make such nutrients as nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and calcium more available to plants when the growing season resumes.
All this is good therapy for dealing with the political and cultural squalor that slob America has soaked itself in.
Chris Powell: Immigration-fraud racket in Bridgeport; The sad end of Peanut and Fred
The P.T. Barnum (as in the circus) Museum in Bridgeport.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Having stuffed absentee ballot boxes for Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim and the city’s Democratic machine only to be caught on surveillance video and charged criminally and belatedly fired from her patronage job as official greeter at City Hall, Wanda Geter-Pataky has found what may be a more lucrative racket.
The New Haven Independent reported this month that Geter-Pataky had become a marriage broker. She was bringing to City Hall in New Haven older foreigners, apparently legal but time-limited visitors, together with much younger U.S. citizens, getting them marriage licenses, and then, as a justice of the peace, performing marriages in the hall outside the office of Mayor Justin Elicker.
Connecticut's Hearst newspapers then reported that Geter-Pataky long had been doing similar business at City Hall in Bridgeport.
How much she has charged for these services is not known.
The couples involved have no obvious connection to their betrothed. According to The Independent, the 114 couples whose marriages Geter-Pataky facilitated in New Haven included many people from India and some from Tajikistan, Georgia, Turkey, Russia, Egypt and Jamaica.
Geter-Pataky told The Independent that the couples live in New Haven, but the newspaper found that only three included a city resident. When The Independent asked a young woman about to be married if she was being paid to do it, Geter-Pataky told her to say no.
If such a marriage is genuine, the foreigner would be entitled under federal immigration law to stay in the country. And if such a marriage is a fraud for evading immigration law, who in authority in New Haven or state government would care?
After all, New Haven is a "sanctuary city," Connecticut a "sanctuary state," and a New Haven city clerk who got suspicious about similar marriage licenses early this year and told immigration authorities was suspended for violating the city's "sanctuary" ordinance. (So much for "If you see something, say something.") The clerk retired rather than be fired.
After The Independent discovered Geter-Pataky’s racket in New Haven she moved it back to Bridgeport City Hall. Though she is awaiting trial in connection with the latter racket, she remains vice chairwoman of the city’s Democratic committee.
As The Independent was compiling its report about the racket conducted in the hall outside his office, Mayor Elicker issued a statement lamenting Donald Trump's election as president.
"Just like when Donald Trump was president before, we will once again come together as a city to stand up for what is right and just," the mayor said. "We will continue to work together to ensure New Haven is a city where all are welcome and where all can thrive."
By "all" the mayor presumably means even those who contrive and profit from fake marriages to break immigration law. How "right and just"!
Three Republican state senators reacted to the Independent’s story with alarm. (Democratic state legislators seemed to ignore the story.) The Republicans urged state Attorney General William Tong to investigate the matter. Journalists at the state Capitol should press Gov. Ned Lamont about it too.
But since, like the segregationists of old, the governor and attorney general seem happy to be nullifiers, maybe they will construe Geter-Pataky’s racket as a great new way for Connecticut to boost tourism, as with abortion.
R.I.P., PEANUT AND FRED: People not on government's payroll may say a prayer of thanks for social-media star Peanut the Squirrel and Fred the Raccoon, the indoor pets of animal rescuer Mark Longo of Pine City, N.Y. As the country prepared to vote for president, Peanut and Fred were seized from Longo’s home in a five-hour raid by six agents of the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, killed, and tested for rabies, which they almost surely didn’t have.
Their martyrdom has given the country what I see as a metaphor for its government -- assiduously intervening in trivia while failing catastrophically with its most important responsibilities, such as immigration and public safety.
Yet some people still wonder where all those votes for Trump came from.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net.)
A poem for this time
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
“The Second Coming,’’by W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)
‘An easy business’
Oliver Ellsworth in an engraving.
“When we become ignorant, vicious, idle, our liberties will be lost — we shall be fitted for slavery, and it will be an easy business to reduce us to obey one or more tyrants.’’
— Oliver Ellsworth (1745-1807), of Connecticut, a U.S. Founding Father and the third chief justice of the United States,in which position he served in 1796-1800.
Most appreciated in winter
“Ram Island Ledge’’(acrylic on linen), by Gail Spaien, in her show “Light in Every Room,’’ at Moss Galleries’ (in Maine) Portland gallery through Jan.4
—-Photo courtesy of Luc Demers
Ram Island Ledge Lighthouse, in Casco Bay
Month’s loveable mud and the cleanest skies
November’s days are thirty:
November’s earth is dirty,
Those thirty days, from first to last;
And the prettiest thing on ground are the paths
With morning and evening hobnails dinted,
With foot and wing-tip overprinted
Or separately charactered,
Of little beast and little bird.
The fields are mashed by sheep, the roads
Make the worst going, the best the woods
Where dead leaves upward and downward scatter.
Few care for the mixture of earth and water,
Twig, leaf, flint, thorn,
Straw, feather, all that men scorn,
Pounded up and sodden by flood,
Condemned as mud.
But of all the months when earth is greener
Not one has clean skies that are cleaner.
Clean and clear and sweet and cold,
They shine above the earth so old,
While the after-tempest cloud
Sails over in silence though winds are loud,
Till the full moon in the east
Looks at the planet in the west
And earth is silent as it is black,
Yet not unhappy for its lack.
Up from the dirty earth men stare:
One imagines a refuge there
Above the mud, in the pure bright
Of the cloudless heavenly light:
Another loves earth and November more dearly
Because without them, he sees clearly,
The sky would be nothing more to his eye
Than he, in any case, is to the sky;
He loves even the mud whose dyes
Renounce all brightness to the skies.
— “November,’’ by Edward Thomas (1878-1917), English poet. He was killed on the Western Front in World War I.
Jim Hightower: Let mobile-home residents buy their parks, as in Maine
Via OtherWord.org
Even in a barrelful of rotten apples, you might think there’d still be a few good ones. But don’t get your hopes up looking into barrels labeled “private-equity investors.”
These esoteric, multibillion-dollar Wall Street schemes rig the marketplace so “high-net-worth individuals” can grab fat profits and special tax breaks to buy up doctors’ offices, hometown newspapers, child care centers, etc.
Consider America’s humble but beneficial mobile home parks. Homeownership has become so pricey that these affordable manufactured units now make up 10 percent of all single-family home sales.
But while the buyers own the houses, they must rent lots from mobile park owners. This has generally been a square deal — at least when park owners live among the renters, providing decent services at reasonable rates. One such park is Linnhaven Center with some 300 mobile home residents in Brunswick, Maine.
But these homes for millions of people have become a quick-buck target for Wall Street’s equity profiteers.
Waving cash at longtime trailer-park owners, private-equity investors have been snatching up thousands of these lots. Without warning, people’s homes are literally being bought out from under them. The absentee predators then raise rents to drive out residents, clearing the spaces for high-dollar renters or buyers.
But there’s good news for a change.
A new law in Maine gives mobile home residents a chance to buy their park — and community cooperatives exist to help arrange financing. That’s what the modest-income people of Linnhaven have now done.
Such a big leap isn’t easy, but give people a fair chance and they can make it work. As one Linnhaven woman put it, the community effort was much more than a property deal: It felt like “a chance to control your own destiny.”
Jim Hightower is a long-time columnist.
Llewellyn King: Myths about Musk and Trump will unravel as electricity crisis grows
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
I would like to lay before you two powerful myths that are very present in the United States in this post-election hiatus.
The first is that business people, because they have had a record of making money, will be good at running the government.
The second is that because one has been a successful inventor, one can fix everything.
No president, including Donald Trump in his first term, has been able to apply the harsh lessons of business to the infinitely complex task of taking care of all of the people.
Equally, inventors can’t invent the nation out of every challenge; they fail more often than they succeed. If Elon Musk had launched his Boring Company before Tesla, he likely wouldn’t be known today.
No one should underestimate the entrepreneurial genius of the man and the brilliance of his engineers. Just think of the engineering feat of Musk’s SpaceX “catching” the first-stage booster of its Starship mega-rocket as it returned to the launch pad after a test flight.
But that doesn’t mean that Musk is qualified to overhaul the government or that he will have a simpatico relationship with Trump for long. Trump has suggested that Musk will be the architect of a new streamlined government. Maybe.
The Trump-Musk entwining of two myths isn’t likely to endure.
Trump, always used to getting his way, will come into office with the knowledge of where he failed the first time. He will take control as though he had won the nation not at the ballot box, which he assuredly did, but in a takeover battle, and he will do with the company he has bought what he will. He found that hard to do the first time, but he is better-equipped this time with a substantial mandate that he will employ.
Even though he has been designated by Trump as an agent of change, Musk is unlikely to last.
Musk won’t bow to Trump for long. He is like Rudyard Kipling’s cat: He walks by himself, alone and capriciously. He embodies many of the strengths and limitations that marked the late Howard Hughes: vision and willful eccentricity.
Trump has disparaged electric cars and renewable energy, two of the cornerstones of the Musk empire. Musk is a man who dreams of a future that he can invent, with automated cars, space habitation, and solar power dominating electric supply.
Trump’s vision is not soaring. It is a backward look to a time that has passed. It is a vision that recalls the Reader’s Digest view of America in the heyday of that magazine, wholesome, patriotic, simple but fundamentally unreal.
The first crisis that might divide the two men, and challenge the Trump administration, is energy.
An electricity shortage is bearing down on the nation and there are no easy fixes. Trump has laid out an energy policy that would emphasize oil and gas drilling and environmental controls and curbs on the rate of wind generation deployment.
None of that will get us through the impending crisis as the demand for more electricity is surging. It is driven by more electric vehicles, greater use of electricity in manufacturing, and by the huge and seemingly limitless demands of data centers being built across the country to serve the needs of a data-driven, AI economy and its relentless electricity demand.
The fixes for the electricity shortage are all just over the horizon: new nuclear plants, more solar and wind, more transmission, and a more efficient use of the generation we have at hand.
The most immediate fix is a so-called virtual power plant that coordinates energy saving with new sources, like rooftop solar and surplus self-generation at industrial facilities, under the rubric of distributed energy resources. That is already underway and beyond that looms the potential of blackouts.
California and Texas, along with parts of the Midwest, are precariously balanced. Any severe weather interruptions, such as extreme heat or extreme cold, and the electricity supply could fail to meet demand.
Trump is likely to react with fury and to lash out at renewable energy (solar and wind) and electric vehicles. In a way, he will be blaming his new best friend, a principal creator of the current electric landscape, Elon Musk.
The myths will unravel, but the underlying truth is that we are going to have five or more years of acute electric shortage without a quick fix, from an inventor or a businessman.
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS.
White House Chronicle
David Warsh: Trump’s second-term chaos may give foes a break; secular time and political time
`1940 movie poster
SOMERVILLE, MASS.
Aside from Donald Trump, the biggest winner in the Republican blowout may be a Yale University political theorist by the name of Stephen Skowronek. Little known beyond circles of political science and legal scholarship, Skowronek is better able than anyone else I know to explain what just happened.
In 1982, Skowronek published Political Leadership in Political Time, soon after the presidency of Ronald Reagan began. Ever since, he has argued the significance of “political time,” by which he means cyclical time, as opposed to “secular time,” time measured by the calendar. The durability of his essay is underscored by the appearance of a third edition in 2011.
Skowronek identified five major systems that unfolded in the years since the American Civil War, each driven by the ambitions of a strong political leader at their beginning: the presidencies of Abraham Lincoln to Grover Cleveland, 1861-1897; William McKinley to Herbert Hoover, 1897-1933; Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson 1933-1968, Richard Nixon to George H. W. Bush 1969-93; and Bill Clinton to Joe Biden 1993-2025. Each may be described by their ideological commitments and coalition support.
“Political time” time is different from calendar time that measures the term of each president because it is, by its nature, both dynastic and progressive, meaning nothing more than that it moves steadily toward an end-state quite different from what the Founders who wrote the Constitution intended. The election of a strong leader who promises sweeping change in the way things are done marks the beginning of each new cycle.
Succeeding presidents seek to follow his (or her) lead, but are increasingly constrained by emerging coalitional issues, until finally each episode ends with a whimper, a president deemed weak who is unable to sell the program of the original strong president to the voters. Another strong leader emerges. A new cycle begins.
In less democratic nations than ours, we call this “regime change.” In democratic America, we call it “realignment.” In fact, President-elect Trump already has called it just that.
In Skowronek’s reading, each new cycle has revolved around ever-more expansive interpretations of the U.S. Constitution, tending inexorably towards what he calls a “unitary executive.” Unconstrained by a lap-dog Congress and a Supreme Court of his choosing, the president has all the power.
In current circumstances, then, Skowronek’s scheme might predict administrations of populist presidents, backed by “the base,” stretching well into the future. These administrations might begin with J.D. Vance, giving way gradually to ever-more constrained presidents until at last the pale imitation takes the helm, is defeated, and the promised renewal begins. In this view, 2044 may be the time to begin to look for the next chance to re-set the political clock.
For those with a taste for such things, Skowronek elaborated the intricate theory underlying his analysis in an essay in the Harvard Law Review that I can’t link normally but you can find it easily enough via Google. (or try this https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-122/the-conservative-insurgency-and-presidential-power-a-developmental-perspective-on-the-unitary-executive/ It took me 30 minutes yesterday to read it. Something like the same point was made recently by the superb columnist of the Financial Times Janan Ganesh.
Sounds pretty bleak, doesn’t it? There is, as always, a hitch. Donald Trump probably isn’t a strong leader. He seems more like a unstable man with a good political intuition now coming apart. The likely chaos of his second term may give the Democratic Party an opportunity.
If the Dems come up with new leadership, and strong candidates, who swiftly learn the lessons Trump taught about appealing to voters of wide-ranging identities, they just might be able to defeat J.D. Vance in the next presidential election, after the mid-term congressional elections return them to power in the Senate.
Who knows? Today it is just a comforting thought. But today is the time to start.
David Warsh is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com.
Scott Van Voorhis: Half-empty Boston buildings won’t get tax break
The Charles River in front of Boston's Back Bay neighborhood, in 2013
New England Diary’s editor, Robert Whitcomb, is chairman of The Boston Guardian.
Boston’s top office towers lost a combined $450 million in value, the Boston Business Journal reported last week, noting it was not as “significant” as earlier forecasts.
Yet the hit to Boston office building values amid the shift to remote work is likely far greater than what the numbers in city records currently suggest.
Boston’s assessing department appears to have obscured the full extent of the decline through its aggressive pushback against requests for tax abatements from owners of struggling older office buildings, often half or even mostly empty, critics contend.
The assessing department’s efforts, in turn, come against the backdrop of a larger effort by Mayor Michelle Wu, who is up for reelection next year, to downplay the severity of the collapse of the office market on city finances.
Boston faces a looming, $1.5 billion revenue gap over the next few years, the Boston Policy Institute has estimated.
Paying the price for this exercise in political damage control have been the owners of Boston’s older office addresses, some of whom have just received quite the surprise on their estimated tax bills for the coming year.
These so-called Class B buildings have borne the brunt of the exodus of office workers from downtown Boston, with the market value of their properties at times just a fraction of what they were once worth.
Yet in several cases, city officials have assessed the value of these hard-hit buildings at the exact same amount, with the exact same tax bill, as the year before.
One example is 95 Berkeley Street in the South End. Just 12 percent of the 107,000-square-foot office building is leased. The Los Angeles-based owner is looking to convert the building to residential under a city program and has put it up for sale.
Even so, city assessors have pegged the value of the 1899 building at $22.5 million, the same as last year, and more than $3 million more than what it was worth in 2019, before the pandemic and the rise of remote work.
Another example is 123 North Washington Street, an old and tired office building near North Station that is just 28 percent leased and is being sold, with the new owner planning a residential conversion.
One thing that hasn’t changed is the building’s assessed value, pegged at $8.6 million. Then there’s 179 Lincoln Street near South Station, which recently sold for just $10 to Synergy Investments, who assumed the building’s $76.5 million mortgage, Universal Hub reported back in March. That, however, is far below the $155 million that the previous owner had paid for the building in 2020.
But the city has assessed its value at $86.3 million, the same as last year, records show.
One possible common denominator is that the owners of the abovementioned buildings have filed abatement requests challenging the prior year’s assessment.
That should have no impact on the assessment for the current year. However, in the view of one expert on tax assessments, it has the look of a negotiating ploy, or even the exertion of leverage, by city assessors against the owners of struggling office buildings.
“It’s startling,” the tax assessment expert noted, adding the values “are way out of line.” In fact, if Boston’s assessing department was to persist and forge ahead with these estimated values, they would likely open the city to a lawsuit.
These odd assessments are not an isolated incident. City assessing officials raised eyebrows earlier this year when they rejected hundreds of abatement requests by downtown office building owners.
In the end, they only a granted a handful of those requests, with just one from a for-profit office tower owner.
It’s pretty clear the Wu administration is doing all it can to deny abatement requests and to take a hard line on assessed values, which have the benefit of reducing any decline in city revenue.
The mayor’s press office, the Boston Planning Department and the City Assessor have not responded to calls and emails.
At some point, market reality and the legal system will catch up, possibly as it did back in the late 1970s, when a much poorer Boston was struggling with a host of problems, including a big drop in the value of older office buildings and other commercial properties. Mayor Kevin White’s administration took a hard line, ignoring the protests of building owners and insisting on effectively overassessing their value to keep the tax money rolling in.
Eventually, a fed-up office building owner named Norman Tregor took the city to court and forced Boston to cough up millions to compensate for the city’s policy of over taxing their properties.
To pay the Tregor judgement and deal with the fallout from the then newly passed Proposition 2 1/2, Boston had to borrow $80 million, the equivalent of nearly $320 million today.
“The B buildings are in far worse shape. It reminds me of the 1970s,” said Larry DiCara, a former Boston City Council president and one of the city’s top lawyers. “Inevitably, just like Mr. Tregor almost 50 years ago, they will seek relief.”
Scott Van Voorhis is a l
Phil Galewitz: Well-insured Vermont’s medical woes
At the University of Vermont Medical Center, in Burlington.
RICHMOND, Vt. — On a warm autumn morning, Roger Brown walked through a grove of towering trees whose sap fuels his maple syrup business. He was checking for damage after recent flooding. But these days, his workers’ health worries him more than his trees’.
This story also ran on The Daily Yonder. It can be republished for free.
The cost of Slopeside Syrup’s employee health insurance premiums spiked 24% this year. Next year it will rise 14%.
The jumps mean less money to pay workers, and expensive insurance coverage that doesn’t ensure employees can get care, Brown said. “Vermont is seen as the most progressive state, so how is health care here so screwed up?”
Vermont consistently ranks among the healthiest states, and its unemployment and uninsured rates are among the lowest. Yet Vermonters pay the highest prices nationwide for individual health coverage, and state reports show its providers and insurers are in financial trouble. Nine of the state’s 14 hospitals are losing money, and the state’s largest insurer is struggling to remain solvent. Long waits for care have become increasingly common, according to state reports and interviews with residents and industry officials.
Rising health costs are a problem across the country, but Vermont’s situation surprises health experts because virtually all its residents have insurance and the state regulates care and coverage prices.
For more than 15 years, federal and state policymakers have focused on increasing the number of people insured, which they expected would shore up hospital finances and make care more available and affordable.
“Vermont’s struggles are a wake-up call that insurance is only one piece of the puzzle to ensuring access to care,” said Keith Mueller, a rural health expert at the University of Iowa.
Regulators and consultants say the state’s small, aging population of about 650,000 makes spreading insurance risk difficult. That demographic challenge is compounded by geography, as many Vermonters live in rural areas, where it’s difficult to attract more health workers to address shortages.
At least part of the cost spike can be attributed to patients crossing state lines for quicker care in New York and Massachusetts. Those visits can be more expensive for both insurers and patients because of long ambulance rides and charges from out-of-network providers.
Patients who stay, like Lynne Drevik, face long waits. Drevik said her doctor told her in April that she needed knee replacement surgeries — but the earliest appointment would be in January for one knee and the following April for the other.
Drevik, 59, said it hurts to climb the stairs in the 19th-century farmhouse in Montgomery Center she and her husband operate as an inn and a spa. “My life is on hold here, and it’s hard to make any plans,” she said. “It’s terrible.”
The Phineas Swann Inn & Spa in Montgomery Center, Vermont, owned by Lynne Drevik and her husband, Darren. Lynne is waiting over nine months for knee replacement surgeries.(Phil Galewitz/KFF Health News)
Health experts say some of the state’s health system troubles are self-inflicted.
Unlike most states, Vermont regulates hospital and insurance prices through an independent agency, the Green Mountain Care Board. Until recently, the board typically approved whatever price changes companies wanted, said Julie Wasserman, a health consultant in Vermont.
The board allowed one health system — the University of Vermont Health Network — to control about two-thirds of the state’s hospital market and allowed its main facility, the University of Vermont Medical Center in Burlington, to raise its prices until it ranked among the nation’s most expensive, she said, citing data the board presented in September.
Hospital officials contend their prices are no higher than industry averages.
But for 2025, the board required the University of Vermont Medical Center to cut the prices it bills private insurers by 1%.
The nonprofit system says it is navigating its own challenges. Top officials say a severe lack of housing makes it hard to recruit workers, while too few mental health providers, nursing homes, and long-term care services often create delays in discharging patients, adding to costs.
Two-thirds of the system’s patients are covered by Medicare or Medicaid, said CEO Sunny Eappen. Both government programs pay providers lower rates than private insurance, which Eappen said makes it difficult to afford rising prices for drugs, medical devices, and labor.
Officials at the University of Vermont Medical Center point to several ways they are trying to adapt. They cited, for example, $9 million the hospital system has contributed to the construction of two large apartment buildings to house new workers, at a subsidized price for lower-income employees.
The University of Vermont has spent millions of dollars to help build apartments a short drive from its main hospital to alleviate the shortage of housing that’s been a barrier to recruiting and retaining employees.(Phil Galewitz/KFF Health News)
The hospital also has worked with community partners to open a mental health urgent care center, providing an alternative to the emergency room.
In the ER, curtains separate areas in the hallway where patients can lie on beds or gurneys for hours waiting for a room. The hospital also uses what was a storage closet as an overflow room to provide care.
“It’s good to get patients into a hallway, as it’s better than a chair,” said Mariah McNamara, an ER doctor and associate chief medical officer with the hospital.
Mariah McNamara — an emergency room doctor at the University of Vermont Medical Center in Burlington, the state’s only academic medical center — in an ER hallway where patients are treated when the hospital is full.(Phil Galewitz/KFF Health News)
For the about 250 days a year when the hospital is full, doctors face pressure to discharge patients without the ideal home or community care setup, she said. “We have to go in the direction of letting you go home without patient services and giving that a try, because otherwise the hospital is going to be full of people, and that includes people that don’t need to be here,” McNamara said.
Searching for solutions, the Green Mountain Care Board hired a consultant who recommended a number of changes, including converting four rural hospitals into outpatient facilities, in a worst-case scenario, and consolidating specialty services at several others.
The consultant, Bruce Hamory, said in a call with reporters that his report provides a road map for Vermont, where “the health care system is no match for demographic, workforce, and housing challenges.”
But he cautioned that any fix would require sacrifice from everyone, including patients, employers, and health providers. “There is no simple single policy solution,” he said.
One place Hamory recommended converting to an outpatient center only was North Country Hospital in Newport, a village in Vermont’s least populated region, known as the Northeast Kingdom.
North Country Hospital in Newport, Vermont, faces financial challenges. (Phil Galewitz/KFF Health News)
The Newport, Vermont, marina on Lake Memphremagog, 5 miles from the Canadian border. Newport is so close to Quebec, most radio stations are French-language and a Canadian flag flies downtown. (Phil Galewitz/KFF Health News)
Denise Carter, chief nursing officer, and CEO Tom Frank in North Country Hospital’s recently expanded emergency room.(Phil Galewitz/KFF Health News)
The 25-bed hospital has lost money for years, partly because of an electronic health record system that has made it difficult to bill patients. But the hospital also has struggled to attract providers and make enough money to pay them.
Officials said they would fight any plans to close the hospital, which recently dropped several specialty services, including pulmonology, neurology, urology, and orthopedics. It doesn’t have the cash to upgrade patient rooms to include bathroom doors wide enough for wheelchairs.
On a recent morning, CEO Tom Frank walked the halls of his hospital. The facility was quiet, with just 14 admitted patients and only a couple of people in the ER. “This place used to be bustling,” he said of the former pulmonology clinic.
Frank said the hospital breaks even treating Medicare patients, loses money treating Medicaid patients, and makes money from a dwindling number of privately insured patients.
The state’s strict regulations have earned it an antihousing, antibusiness reputation, he said. “The cost of health care is a symptom of a larger problem.”
About 30 miles south of Newport, Andy Kehler often worries about the cost of providing health insurance to the 85 workers at Jasper Hill Farm, the cheesemaking business he co-owns.
“It’s an issue every year for us, and it looks like there is no end in sight,” he said.
Andy Kehler, a co-owner of Jasper Hill Farm, inside a vault in the caves where the farm ripens its cheeses, which sell across the country. Often on his mind is the cost of providing health insurance for his 85 workers. “It’s an issue every year for us, and it looks like there is no end in sight” to double-digit increases, he says.(Phil Galewitz/KFF Health News)
Jasper Hill pays half the cost of its workers’ health insurance premiums because that’s all it can afford, Kehler said. Employees pay $1,700 a month for a family, with a $5,000 deductible.
“The coverage we provide is inadequate for what you pay,” he said.
Phil Galewitz is a KFF News reporter. pgalewitz@kff.org, @philgalewitz
Related Topics
Make peace with the bleakness
My sorrow, when she’s here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.
Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted grey
Is silver now with clinging mist.
The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.
Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.
— “My November Guest,’’ by Robert Frost (1874-1963)
Adriana Craciun: In the Arctic, the essential Global Seed Vault
The Global Seed Vault
BOSTON
Two-thirds of the world’s food comes today from just nine plants: sugar cane, maize (corn), rice, wheat, potatoes, soybeans, oil-palm fruit, sugar beet and cassava. In the past, farmers grew tens of thousands of crop varieties around the world. This biodiversity protected agriculture from crop losses caused by plant diseases and climate change.
Today, seed banks around the world are doing much of the work of saving crop varieties that could be essential resources under future growing conditions. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway supports them all. It is the world’s most famous backup site for seeds that are more precious than data.
Tens of thousands of new seeds from around the world arrived at the seed vault on Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, in mid-October 2024. This was one of the largest deposits in the vault’s 16-year history.
And on Oct. 31, crop scientists Cary Fowler and Geoffrey Hawtin, who played key roles in creating the Global Seed Vault, received the US$500,000 World Food Prize, which recognizes work that has helped increase the supply, quality or accessibility of food worldwide.
The Global Seed Vault has been politically controversial since it opened in 2008. It is the most visible site in a global agricultural research network associated with the United Nations and funders such as the World Bank.
These organizations supported the Green Revolution – a concerted effort to introduce high-yielding seeds to developing nations in the mid-20th century. This effort saved millions of people from starvation, but it shifted agriculture in a technology-intensive direction. The Global Seed Vault has become a lightning rod for critiques of that effort and its long-term impacts.
I have visited the vault and am completing a book about connections between scientific research on seeds and ideas about immortality over centuries. My research shows that the Global Seed Vault’s controversies are in part inspired by religious associations that predate it. But these cultural beliefs also remain essential for the vault’s support and influence and thus for its goal of protecting biodiversity.
The Global Seed Vault gives scientists the tools they may need to breed crops that can cope with a changing climate.
Backup for a global network
Several hundred million seeds from thousands of species of agricultural plants live inside the Global Seed Vault. They come from 80 nations and are tucked away in special metallic pouches that keep them dry.
The vault is designed to prolong their dormancy at zero degrees Fahrenheit (-18 degrees Celsius) in three ice-covered caverns inside a sandstone mountain. The air is so cold inside that when I entered the vault, my eyelashes and the inside of my nose froze.
The Global Seed Vault is owned by Norway and run by the Nordic Genetic Resources Centre. It was created under a U.N. treaty governing over 1,700 seed banks, where seeds are stored away from farms, to serve as what the U.N. calls “the ultimate insurance policy for the world’s food supply.”
This network enables nations, nongovernmental organizations, scientists and farmers to save and exchange seeds for research, breeding and replanting. The vault is the backup collection for all of these seed banks, storing their duplicate seeds at no charge to them.
Potatoes and sweet potatoes cultivated at the International Potato Center in Lima, Peru. Seeds of these plants are stored at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Ernesto Benavides/AFP via Getty Images
The seed vault’s cultural meaning
The vault’s Arctic location and striking appearance contribute to both its public appeal and its controversies.
Svalbard is often described as a remote, frozen wasteland. For conspiracy theorists, early visits to the Global Seed Vault by billionaires such as Bill Gates and George Soros, and representatives from Google and Monsanto, signaled that the vault had a secret purpose or benefited global elites.
In fact, however, the archipelago of Svalbard has daily flights to other Norwegian cities. Its cosmopolitan capital, Longyearbyen, is home to 2,700 people from 50 countries, drawn by ecotourism and scientific research – hardly a well-hidden site for covert activities.
The vault’s entrance features a striking installation by Norwegian artist Dyveke Sanne. An illuminated kaleidoscope of mirrors, this iconic artwork glows in the long Arctic night and draws many tourists.
Because of its mission to preserve seeds through potential disasters, media regularly describe the Global Seed Vault as the “doomsday vault,” or a “modern Noah’s Ark.” Singled out based on its location, appearance and associations with Biblical myths such as the Flood, the Garden of Eden and the apocalypse, the vault has acquired a public meaning unlike that of any other seed bank.
The politics of seed conservation
One consequence is that the vault often serves as a lightning rod for critics who view seed conservation as the latest stage in a long history of Europeans removing natural resources from developing nations. But these critiques don’t really reflect how the Global Seed Vault works.
The vault and its sister seed banks don’t diminish cultivation of seeds grown by farmers in fields. The two methods complement one another, and seed depositors retain ownership of their seeds.
Another misleading criticism argues that storing seeds at Svalbard prevents these plants from adapting to climate change and could render them useless in a warmer future. But storing seeds in a dormant state actually mirrors plants’ own survival strategy.
Dormancy is the mysterious plant behavior that “protects against an unpredictable future,” according to biologist Anthony Trewavas. Plants are experts in coping with climate unpredictability by essentially hibernating.
Seed dormancy allows plants to hedge their bets on the future; the Global Seed Vault extends this state for decades or longer. While varieties in the field may become extinct, their banked seeds live to fight another day.
Storing more than seeds
In 2017, a delegation of Quechua farmers from the Peruvian Andes traveled to Svalbard to deposit seeds of their sacred potato varieties in the vault. In songs and prayers, they said goodbye to the seeds as their “loved ones” and “endangered children.” “We’re not just leaving genes, but also a family,” one farmer told Svalbard officials.
The farmers said the vault would protect what they called their “Indigenous biocultural heritage” – an interweaving of scientific and cultural value, and of plants and people, that for the farmers evoked the sacred.
People from around the world have sought to attach their art to the Global Seed Vault for a similar reason. In 2018, the Svalbard Seed Cultures Ark began depositing artworks that attach stories to seeds in a nearby mine.
Pope Francis sent an envoy with a handmade copy of a book reflecting on the pope’s message of hope to the world during the COVID-19 pandemic. Japanese sculptor Mitsuaki Tanabe created a 9-meter-long steel grain of rice for the vault’s opening and was permitted to place a miniature version inside.
Seeds sleeping in Svalbard are far from their home soil, but each one is enveloped in an invisible web of the microbes and fungi that traveled with it. These microbiomes are still interacting with each seed in ways scientists are just beginning to understand.
I see the Global Seed Vault as a lively and fragile place, powered not by money or technology but by the strange power of seeds. The World Food Prize once again highlights their vital promise.
Adriana Craciun is a professor of English and the Emma MacLachlan Metcalf Chair of Humanities at Boston University
She doesn’t work for or receive any compensation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond her academic appointment.
Windblown joy
”If Milkman Can Fly So Can I” (acrylic and metallic leaf foil foil on canvas), by Yowshien Kuo, at the Bates College Museum of Art, Lewiston, Maine.
-- Courtesy of the artist.
Llewellyn King: Immigrants’ buoyancy, including success in science
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
I have been exploring the heights of scientific endeavor in reporting on artificial intelligence, from its use in medical research (especially promising) to its use in utilities and transportation. It is notable that many of the high achievers weren’t born here.
They have come here from everywhere, but the number of Asians is notable — and in that group, the number of women stands out.
As an immigrant, originally from what was called Rhodesia and is now called Zimbabwe, I am interested in why immigrants are so buoyant, so upwardly mobile in their adopted countries. I can distill it to two things: They came to succeed, and they mostly aren’t encumbered with the social limits of their upbringing and molded expectations. America is a clean slate when you first get here.
A friend from Serbia, who ascended the heights of academe and lectured at Tulane University, said his father told him, “Don’t go to America unless you want to succeed.”
A Korean mechanical engineer, who studied at American universities and now heads an engineering company that seeks to ease the electricity crisis, told me, “I want to try harder and do something for America. I chose to come here. I want to succeed, and I want America to succeed.”
When I sat at lunch in New York with an AI startup’s senior staff, we noticed that none of us was born an American. Two of the developers were born in India, one in Spain and me in Zimbabwe.
We started to talk about what made America a haven for good minds in science and engineering and we decided it was the magnet of opportunity, Ronald Reagan’s “shining city upon a hill.”
There was agreement from the startup scientists-engineers — I like the British word “boffins” for scientists and engineers taken together — that if that ever changes, if the anti-immigrant sentiment overwhelms good judgment, then the flow will stop, and the talented won’t come to America to pursue their dreams. They will go elsewhere or stay at home.
In the last several years, I have visited AI companies, interviewed many in that industry and at the great universities, such as Brown, UC Berkeley, MIT and Stanford, and companies such as Google and Nvidia. The one thing that stands out is how many of those at the forefront weren’t born in America or are first generation.
They come from all over the globe. But Asians are clearly a major force in the higher reaches of U.S. research.
At a AI conference, organized by the MIT Technology Review, the whole story of what is happening at the cutting-edge of AI was on view: faces from all over the world, new American faces. The number immigrants was awesome, notably from Asia. They were people from the upper tier of U.S. science and engineering confidently adding to the sum of the nation’s knowledge and wealth,
Consider the leaders of top U.S. tech companies who are immigrants: Microsoft, Satya Nadella (India); Google, Sundar Pichai (India); Tesla, Elon Musk (South Africa); and Nvidia, Jensen Huang (Taiwan). Of the top seven, only Apple’s Tim Cook, Facebook’s Jeff Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Andy Jassy can be said to be traditional Americans.
A cautionary tale: A talented computer engineer from Mexico with a family that might have been plucked from the cover of the Saturday Evening Post lived in the same building as I do. During the Trump administration, they went back to Mexico.
There had been some clerical error in his paperwork. But the humiliation of being treated as a criminal was such that rather than fight immigration bureaucracy, he and his family returned voluntarily to Mexico. America’s loss.
Every country that has had a large influx of migrants knows that they can bring with them much that is undesirable. From Britain to Germany to Australia, immigration has had a downside: drugs, crime and religions that make assimilation difficult.
But waves of immigrants have built America, from the Scandinavian and German wheat farmers that turned the prairies into a vast larder to Jews from Europe who moved to Hollywood in the 1930s and made America pre-eminent in entertainment, to today’s global wave that is redefining Yankee know-how in the world of neural networks and quantum computing.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island.
Pictures with words
From Jane Kent’s show “Between the Covers” at Burlington (Vt.) City Arts through Jan. 18.
The gallery says her show features books, broadsheets, prints, and working drawings created by the artist in collaboration with six authors over the past 25 years. Here, Kent’s artist’s books are shown together with a selection of working drawings for the first time. Each project incorporates text written by a distinguished poet or writer: Privacy, 1999 (Richard Ford); The Orchid Thief Re-imagined, 2003 (Susan Orlean); Skating, 2011 (Richard Ford); Untitled, 2015 (Dorothea Grossman); The Flaneur Tends a Well-Liked Summer Cocktail, 2019 (Major Jackson); and Little Albert, 2023 (Joyce Carol Oates).
Her political profession brought triumph and tragedy
Rose Kennedy with President John F.Kennedy in 1962.
“I looked on child-rearing not only as a work of love and duty but as a profession that was fully as interesting and challenging as any honorable profession in the world and one that demanded the best that I could bring to it.”
— Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy (1895-2005), matriarch of the Massachusetts-based Kennedy political family.
Rachel Meade: RFK Jr. and the left-to-far-right populist pipeline
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. endorsing Trump at a rally in Arizona on Aug. 23, 2024.
BOSTON
When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ended his independent presidential run in August 2024 and endorsed Republican Donald Trump, it might have seemed a surprising turn of events.
Kennedy began his presidential run as a Democrat and is the scion of a Democratic dynasty. Nephew to former President John F. Kennedy and the son of former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, Kennedy spent most of his career as a lawyer representing environmental groups that sued polluting corporations and municipalities.
Yet Kennedy, 70, has long held positions that put him at odds with the Democratic mainstream. He pushes public health misinformation around vaccines and HIV/AIDS, opposes U.S. military involvement in foreign wars, including in Ukraine, and claims that the CIA assassinated his uncle.
Kennedy’s ideologically mixed politics are hard to categorize in traditional left-right terms.r
My political science research finds that Kennedy’s journey from left-aligned skepticism into Trumpism is part of a broader trend of contemporary left-to-right populist transformations happening across the United States.
Rise of the populist alternative media
Populism is a political story that presents the good “people” of a nation as in a struggle against its “elites,” who have corrupted democratic institutions to further their own selfish interests. It cuts across the ideological spectrum, often combining left-wing economic critiques with right-wing cultural ones.
Based on my research, I find that Kennedy uses a populist style of speech that matches the rhetoric of today’s online alternative media, also known as the “alternative influence network.”
Robert Kennedy Jr., a onetime Democrat, after endorsing Republican Donald Trump on Aug. 23, 2024. AP Photo/Evan Vucci
If populism cuts across the ideological spectrum, so does the alternative media.
This network of politically diverse independent podcasters, YouTube hosts and other creators connects with young, politically disaffected audiences by mixing politics with comedy and pop culture, and presenting themselves as embattled defenders of free thinking – in opposition to mainstream media and mainstream parties.
Top-rated shows include “Breaking Points,” “Stay Free with Russell Brand,” “The Joe Rogan Experience,” The Culture War with Tim Pool and “This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von.”
While many of these shows have been around since the 2010s, the network expanded throughout the Trump era. Their popularity skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic, when public distrust in government, anger over pandemic restrictions and vaccine skepticism surged.
These shows hosted Kennedy frequently throughout his presidential run in 2023 and 2024.
Kennedy finds his audience
I analyzed a set of Kennedy’s appearances for this story. Both Kennedy and alternative media hosts claim to care about “the real issues” facing Americans such as war, corporate and political malfeasance and economic troubles. They condemn the “mainstream” for promoting frivolous “culture war” topics related to race and identity politics.
Kennedy and the alternative media hosts also combine left and right arguments in a typically populist way. They claim that corporations control the government and that liberals and corporations censor free speech.
For example, on a May 2024, episode of “Stay Free with Russell Brand,” Brand asserted that corrupt institutions are backed by the “deep state.” He asked Kennedy how he would fight these powerful interests.
“The major agencies of government have all been captured by the industries they’re supposed to regulate and act as sock puppets serving the mercantile interests of these big corporations,” responded Kennedy. “I have a particular ability to unravel that because I’ve litigated against so many of these agencies.”
My research found that Kennedy often bonded with his alternative media hosts over his perception that liberal media sources – allegedly controlled by the Democratic National Committee or the CIA – were censoring his campaign.
Like Kennedy, alternative media hosts often identify as former or disaffected Democrats. Many used to work at mainstream left news sites, where they say they experienced censorship.
‘This little island of free speech’
In a June 2023 episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Rogan explained that he no longer identifies as a liberal because of the “orthodoxy it preaches” around issues like vaccines. He then cited YouTube’s removal of some of Kennedy’s vaccine-related videos for violating its COVID-19 misinformation policy.
Kennedy had just spent 90 minutes outlining his journey toward vaccine skepticism, which started with meeting a mother who believed vaccines caused her son’s autism.
“If a woman tells you something about her child, you should listen,” he said.
Kennedy also described being convinced by a set of studies that public health officials had ignored.
“Trust the experts is not a function of science, it’s a function of religion,” he said. “I’ve been litigating 40 years; there’s experts on both sides.”
Afterward, he thanked Rogan for maintaining “this little island of free speech in a desert of suppression and of critical thinking.”
Kennedy reiterated this point in the Aug. 23, 2024, speech that ended his campaign, saying the “alternative media” had kept his ideas alive, while the mainstream networks had shut him out despite his historically high third-party poll numbers of 15% to 20%.
“The DNC-allied mainstream media networks maintained a near-perfect embargo on interviews with me,” Kennedy said.
Speaking directly to the reporters in the room, he added, “Your institutions and media made themselves government mouthpieces and stenographers for the organs of power.”
So far, Democrats have largely ignored the political power of alternative media shows. bsd studio via Getty Images Plus
Left-to-right pipeline
Trust in a range of U.S. institutions is at historical lows. Americans on both the right and the left are skeptical of power and crave radical change.
Alternative media hosts tap into this desire, helping to push some disaffected listeners down the same left-to-right pipeline that landed Kennedy in Trump’s orbit.
Trump and his allies are adept at harnessing the power of the alternative media ecosystem. Trump has appeared on male-centric shows like “This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von and ”The Joe Rogan Experience,“ and he founded the alternative social media platform Truth Social.
Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon hosts an influential podcast called the "War Room” on another MAGA alternative media platform, Rumble. Known for its fiery populist rhetoric, the “War Room” broadcasts live for an astonishing 22 hours a week.
Until recently, Democrats have largely embraced traditional media. During the first months of her 2024 presidential campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris appeared on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” ABC’s “The View” and MSNBC’s “Stephanie Ruhle.”
Then, on Oct. 12, Harris appeared on “Call her Daddy.” Spotify’s second-most popular podcast, it has a young, female audience. Days later, she sat down for an interview with Fox News and is reportedly in talks to appear on Joe Rogan’s show.
Kennedy might approve of all this aisle-crossing.
“Step outside the culture war!” he tweeted in July 2024. “Step outside the politics of hating the other side!”
Rachel Meade is a lecturer in political science at Boston University.
She does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment
‘Metaphorical women’
“In Concert” (archival pigment print), by Wendy Seller, in her show "Hybridized Worlds,’’ at Kingston Gallery, Boston, through Dec. 1.
The gallery says:
“Wendy Seller’s practice explores the fusion of traditional painting techniques and digital image-building. Seller’s embrace of these polar-opposite art making approaches enables her to create intangible, hybridized worlds that integrate past and present, populated by magical figures and surreal landscapes….
“In ‘Hybridized Worlds,’ Seller uses collected imagery to create metaphorical women who emit internal power, fortitude, assertiveness, and wit. Seller sees her collages as decisively positive as she observe changes within society concerning women’s lives.’’