Editorials from around New England

Editorials from around New England:

___

VERMONT

The Caledonian-Record

Oct. 25

Earlier this year President Donald Trump joined both parties in Congress to toss all provisions to restrain deficit spending.

They got together and agreed to give big tax cuts and simultaneously to increase spending. “Congress solved their partisan differences by spending other people’s money,” Peter Baker, of the New York Times, explained.

Americans were told, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the tax cuts would pay for themselves. And “leaders” from both parties universally ignored bell-weather signals from the U.S. Treasury Department that interest rates would rise on the nation’s $21+ trillion national debt.

Sen. Rand Paul, a libertarian fiscal hawk, explained at the time. “When the Democrats are in power, Republicans appear to be the conservative party. But when Republicans are in power, it seems there is no conservative party.”

Add it all together and we weren’t surprised to read the end-of-year report from Treasury that says the nation’s budget deficit increased 17-percent above projections, to $779 billion.

As Taxpayers for Common Sense explain:

So the country now finds itself deficit spending at a close-to-unprecedented level in a time of economic growth. That, in turn has contributed to the largest debt as a percentage of GDP since shortly after World War II. As a result, the costs of our debt service are slated to be more than we will spend on the Pentagon by 2028. In FY2018, interest payments set the taxpayers back $316 billion, or 7.6 percent of federal spending. In 2019 the corresponding numbers will be $390 billion/8.7 percent. In 2022: $643 billion/12+ percent.

With record deficit spending and precisely zero leadership, there’s nothing to slow the steady upward march of the national debt. Because neither party can summon the courage to put the brakes on spending, nor survive by calling for the higher tax revenues needed to cover it . The only question remaining is who will be in charge when the fiscal roof caves in.

Online: https://bit.ly/2CK7fqG

___

NEW HAMPSHIRE

The Telegraph

Oct. 22

Thoughtful Americans ought to be concerned about the murder of a journalist who wrote columns about Saudi Arabia for the Washington Post. But what about the other 44 journalists who have met violent deaths this year? What about the 48 who perished in 2017?

Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi Arabian native who had moved to the United States, disappeared earlier this month. He was seen last as he entered Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.

Both Turkish and Saudi authorities are looking into murder. So are U.S. officials, after President Donald Trump was pressured to rethink this country’s relationship with Saudi Arabia. One allegation is that Khashoggi was killed on orders of some in the Saudi royal family.

A certain amount of international outrage is being expressed over the situation. It clearly is focused on the Saudi regime. For example, Germany’s foreign minister postponed a trip to Saudi Arabia over the disappearance.

Again, concern about Khashoggi is not misplaced. But one wonders why similar outrage is not seen when other journalists are murdered - sometimes clearly for political reasons.

What about Brazilian reporter Jefferson Pureza Lopes, murdered in January? He was a frequent critic of government.

What about Pamela Montenegro, a Mexican journalist who frequently criticized politicians in her country? She was murdered in February.

And what about Navin Nischal, whose reporting had been zeroing in on police corruption in India when he was killed in March?

There are others on the list of assassinations of journalists who may well have died because they angered powerful public officials in their countries.

Curious, is it not, that you have never heard of them or of any international campaign against the governments of their countries?

Of course, if Saudi officials were involved in Khashoggi’s disappearance, some action should be taken against that regime. The fact Saudi Arabia is a U.S. ally should have no bearing on the situation.

Neither should international alliances of any kind protect murderous government officials in other countries, however.

Online: https://bit.ly/2EGxlO2

___

MAINE

The Bangor Daily News

Oct. 24

Health care has the lead this election season, as the top issue for voters as they decide which candidates will get their support.

Meanwhile, climate change hasn’t really registered with voters as a top-of-mind priority, even among those who profess to care most about it.

Climate change has struggled to gain traction, even as President Donald Trump has canceled Obama-era, climate change-fighting policies and taken steps to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord.

It’s still far from the talk of the town, even as climate scientists with the United Nations warn that our time to keep global warming to a moderate level is running out - and soon.

And as unusually strong hurricanes have battered the Florida Panhandle and the Carolinas this fall, more Republican holdouts have been persuaded that climate change is real and likely to have a negative impact, but climate change still hasn’t busted its way to the top of political consciousness.

“It’s too remote. It’s not today. It’s not conflict,” California Gov. Jerry Brown told Politico last month.

But beer? That’s not remote. That’s something many will drink today. And if it’s threatened? Well, conflict could be in the offing.

It turns out, the threat climate change poses to people’s ability to drink beer could finally get more people to take climate change seriously and treat it as an issue that demands urgent attention.

A study published Oct. 15 in the journal Nature Plants took a look, for the first time, at how vulnerable the world’s beer supply is to severe weather such as drought and extreme heat that’s expected to grow more common as the planet warms. Yields of barley, beer’s main ingredient, drop significantly under those weather conditions, according to the researchers.

There’s little in the way of encouraging news in the findings for beer fans.

Depending on how severe weather conditions become, barley yields could drop anywhere from 3 to 17 percent under the multiple climate models the researchers examined. That would translate into major decreases in beer consumption - 32 percent less beer consumption in Argentina, for example - as well as stiff increases to the price of beer. The researchers projected a 193 percent rise in the price of beer in Ireland, which ranks sixth in the world for per-capita beer consumption.

Published just days ago, the research on climate change and the world’s beer supply has already proven pivotal.

“Not sure what to make of the fact that in one day our paper on climate and beer has garnered considerably more attention than any of my previous work on energy transitions or even air pollution deaths,” Steven J. Davis, an earth systems scientist at the University of California, Irvine, wrote on Twitter.

Altmetric, a service that rates the amount of online attention academic research attracts, already ranks the beer study in the top 5 percent of more than 12 million studies it’s tracked. It’s No. 1 for the journal in which it appeared, Nature Plants.

What is it about beer that focuses the mind on climate change more than the prospect of death? Perhaps it’s the threat to a way of life rather than just life itself.

Online: https://bit.ly/2Jk1jGj

___

MASSACHUSETTS

The Boston Globe

Oct. 26

People are threatening and killing journalists around the world because they think they can get away with it. And all too often, they’re right.

The premeditated murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi captured worldwide attention in recent weeks, not least because of the gruesome circumstances of his death and the Saudi government’s ever more preposterous efforts to explain it. When two bombs turned up this week at the New York offices of CNN, it made national news because of the network’s high profile.

Yet most of those targeted in the assault on the free press worldwide have garnered far less attention. So far this year, 68 journalists have been killed around the world, according to a tally the Globe compiled from press advocacy groups and news reports. That’s almost certainly an incomplete list.

When even the president of the United States - long a global beacon for free expression - endorses physical violence against reporters, it’s no wonder strongmen and gangsters think they can attack the press with impunity.

When reporters are killed, their deaths often receive attention that’s only proportional to the size of the organizations they worked for. The shooting death of independent YouTube journalist Zack Stoner in downtown Chicago in May, for instance, barely made the national news. But even reporters with local niche audiences are exposing truths that the public needs to know - and may cost the reporters their lives.

Threats to journalists at major organizations with resources to protect their staff are alarming in their own right. This newspaper received threats of violence earlier this year. But both in the United States and around the world, most people who gather news do so for small outlets with few and dwindling resources. Threats carry more weight against small publications or against independent journalists who work alone.

This year, reporters have been killed in war zones, in the presumed safety of their own homes, and everywhere in between.

Around 3 p.m. on Jan. 13, Carlos Domínguez Rodríguez was stopped at a traffic light in Nuevo Laredo, not far from the Texas border, when two men opened the driver’s side door of his vehicle, yanked him out, and stabbed him 21 times. He was 77 years old and wrote columns about local politics.

Investigative reporter Ján Kuciak was shot in the chest and his girlfriend Martina Kusnírová in the head at their home in southwestern Slovakia on Feb. 25. In life, he wrote about tax fraud by local politicians.

Navin Nischal wrote about child marriage for a newspaper in the town of Arrah in Northwestern India. On the evening of March 25, he was riding on a motorbike with another reporter when they were both run over by an SUV reportedly driven by the village chief.

In these three cases, the police have confirmed that the journalists became victims of violence because of the work that they did.

When governments and the officials who run them have secrets to hide, they’re only too happy to see the press in retreat. “Hostility towards the media, openly encouraged by political leaders, and the efforts of authoritarian regimes to export their vision of journalism pose a threat to democracies,” warned Reporters Without Borders in an annual report on press freedom around the world.

When demagogues stoke hostility on a big stage, the vitriol also spreads locally. Earlier this month, a viral photo of a bumper sticker on a truck in Brooklyn read: “Fight for the Truth / Punch a journalist.” Only after a gunman killed five people at the offices of the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Md., this summer did the online retailer CafePress stop selling t-shirts that said “Rope. Tree. Journalist. / Some assembly required.”

Meanwhile, earlier this month at a political rally in Missoula, Mont., President Trump lavished praise on Representative Greg Gianforte for attacking a reporter last spring. “Anybody that can do a body-slam,” Trump said, “that’s my kind of guy.”

From the bumper sticker to the president’s Twitter account, the assault on the free press is suffocating democracy. “The fact is that while we are awash in information, there are tremendous gaps in our knowledge of the world,” writes Joel Solomon, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. “The gaps are growing as violent attacks against the media spike, as governments develop new systems of information control, and as the technology that allows information to circulate is co-opted and used to stifle free expression.”

Democracy is brittle. When Trump uses “enemy of the people” as an applause line, it echoes everywhere from the Philippines, where strongman Rodrigo Duterte rails against the “fake news,” to Hungary, which has seen an alarming decline in press freedom under the government of Viktor Orbán.

It was once possible to dismiss the rhetoric of rage - even from the powerful - as harmless ranting. But when hateful acts follow hateful speech, it’s democracy itself that suffers.

Online: https://bit.ly/2Pryq0i

___

CONNECTICUT

Hartford Courant

Oct. 26

For the past year, Jonathan Gourley, with his students, has knocked on neighbors’ doors, gone down rail trails and through forests, and stopped at roadside cliffs to pick up fistfuls of rocks. The Trinity College geology professor is trying to find out more about the pyrrhotite that might lie within them.

That’s the dangerous mineral that has wreaked havoc with homes east of the Connecticut River. Too little is known about exactly where it lies in Connecticut’s bedrock.

Professor Gourley is trying to come up with some answers. “If there are going to be standards for quarries, some detailed studies of known problem formations like the Brimfield Schist will be useful,” he says.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is recommending that Connecticut adopt some of the toughest quarry standards in the U.S. because of the state’s problems with pyrrhotite in home foundations.

Given what Connecticut is going through, the Army Corps is dead-on.

The Army Corps, which is better known for building dams, studied Connecticut’s crumbling home foundations at the request of Gov. Dannel P. Malloy. Its experts came to the state’s Legislative Office Building this past week to present their findings.

They suggest that Connecticut reject any quarry material that contains more than 0.1 percent of sulfur. Sulfur can signal the presence of pyrrhotite.

This is the standard in Europe, where pyrrhotite has caused dams to crumble. If adopted, Connecticut would be the first state in the nation with such a requirement for concrete going into new homes, condos and other residential buildings.

If this strict standard can stop pyrrhotite from getting into basement walls and septic systems in Connecticut, it’s the right thing to do. Pyrrhotite from a quarry in Willington has already ravaged foundations throughout northeastern Connecticut.

This new standard wouldn’t help homeowners whose basements are already heaving. But it could stop the dreaded mineral from getting into new homes.

Right now, the state only tests crushed rock from quarries for state construction jobs - not for private homes. The state does not inspect the quarries themselves. Nor does the state test for pyrrhotite, says Kevin Nursick, a spokesman for the state Department of Transportation.

Testing for pyrrhotite can be expensive. A sulfur test is a faster and cheaper way to rule out any harmful materials that could include pyrrhotite. “If there is high sulfur, that should send out warning signals,” says Professor Gourley.

Builders and quarry owners will argue that this new standard is an expensive and unnecessary burden. They’ll point out that pyrrhotite has been traced to only one quarry, Becker’s in Willington.

But Connecticut might be richer in pyrrhotite than it knows, said Christopher Moore, chief of the concrete and materials branch of the Army Corps: “It’s better at this point to be a little harsher … to be more conservative.”

This testing is affordable, he says - less than 1 percent of a quarry’s operational costs.

For the legislature to get going on the Army Corps’ recommendations, however, House Speaker Joe Aresimowicz needs to appoint, posthaste, the final member of the Working Group to Develop a Model Quality Control Plan for Quarries.

The group has a Dec. 31 deadline to deliver its plan, by law.A strict standard would definitely stop pyrrhotite from getting into new homes. But what about homes that already have it?

Kevin Oleskewicz, a student at Trinity College in Hartford, on a field expedition with Professor Jonathan Gourley collecting rock samples for testing for sulfur. (Special to the Courant)

Trinity College is in the early stages of building a risk model for those homes. “This will be especially important for foundations that contain only low levels of pyrrhotite, show no signs of deterioration to date, and whose owners are having difficulties selling their home and/or keeping the value of their home because they are pyrrhotite-positive,” said Professor Gourley.

Too little is known about how pyrrhotite works, and whether low levels in concrete are safe, because outbreaks like Connecticut’s are, at least for now, rare in the United States - rare enough that there is no federal funding for the important research that’s being done in Connecticut.

That’s shameful.

The Army Corps says Connecticut’s problem will “require R&D ranging from months to years to develop a solution.” Why not help Connecticut with the costs of that R&D?

Given the constant thirst for new homes in the United States - and the constant need to blast new quarry ledges - Connecticut probably won’t be the last place in America to suffer from this pernicious mineral.

Online: https://cour.at/2CHGPWB

___

RHODE ISLAND

Providence Journal

Oct. 25

Former Providence City Councilman Kevin Jackson is probably going to jail. This is the long-awaited consequence of his tawdry behavior and embezzlement from the youth athletics non-profit he founded and ran for years.

The wheels of justice have ground exceedingly slowly in his case, but they ground in the proper direction and ultimately, to the appropriate place. It is unfortunate that it took so long, but it is heartening to see that corruption involving politicians, including from the majority party, is being prosecuted in this state.

A refresher on the particulars:

Jackson was serving as City Council majority leader when he was arrested in May 2016 on charges that he took more than $127,000 intended for the Providence Cobras, the youth track program he founded and operated, as well as other election-related charges.

He also was accused of spending money from his campaign account for his personal purposes and of failing to file required campaign reports with the Rhode Island Board of Elections.

Shortly afterward, he was indicted and stepped down from his leadership position, but, outrageously, didn’t resign his seat on the council, where he represented Ward 3.

His constituents had to fight for a recall election. Through their landslide vote, they removed him from office in May 2017.

That kept him out of a position of power, but justice was incomplete until this month, when Jackson waived his right to a trial on various charges related to his corrupt actions.

And now he can look forward to his sentencing in early December. If prosecutors have their way, he will serve up to 10 years in jail.

As City Council President David Salvatore told Providence Journal reporters, Mr. Jackson’s plea highlights the continuing need to increase transparency in local government. It also argues that the Council should pass an ordinance that would at least temporarily deprive members of leadership positions if they were indicted on felony crimes.

It is to the credit of Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea, the office of Attorney General Peter Kilmartin and others who pursued justice in the face of some political resistance that Mr. Jackson was brought to account. And kudos also to Gov. Gina Raimondo, who, as Mr. Jackson’s constituent, voted for his recall, telling reporters Providence residents need to be able to trust their local government.

Well before his arrest, The Providence Journal asked: “Where’s the AG?” (editorial, Jan. 26, 2016). The state Board of Elections had referred concerns about his campaign filings to the attorney general more than two years earlier.

While year after year passed, Mr. Jackson held onto his leadership post on the council with no word from the attorney general. That was disconcerting.

Still, the removal and prosecution of a leading figure in local government for embezzlement is a victory for the public.

Meanwhile, an official of the Board of Elections said Mr. Jackson still owes fines amounting to more than $33,000. We look forward to Mr. Jackson’s full payment of these fines, as a means of showing others that they must obey the rules, designed to protect the public from political corruption.

Online: https://bit.ly/2EJjxTa

___