News
by Tom Vannah | Jun 3, 2010 | News
The day after the storm, it didn’t seem all that odd to be without cable TV, without phone or Internet service. We felt lucky to have electric power, which many of our neighbors in Franklin County remain without as I write this. We awoke that first morning to...
by Stephanie Kraft | Jun 3, 2010 | News
Beaches uninhabitable, the sand soaked with grunge. Plants, including those that hold the marshlands together by preventing erosion, smothered. Crabs, shrimp, oysters, fish and birds facing death either because of the oil itself or because of the killoff of their...
by Stephanie Kraft | Jun 3, 2010 | News
It was news late in May when Gov. Deval Patrick tried to cap off a gushing scandal about patronage in hiring at the Massachusetts Probation Department by calling the department, headed by John O’Brien, a “rogue agency.” It sounded tough, it sounded...
by Maureen Turner | Jun 3, 2010 | News
Last week’s passage of a crime reform bill by the Massachusetts House is being seen by activists as an important, but not complete, step toward the reforms that need to take place. Activists have been pushing for years to change the Criminal Offender Record...
by Our Readers | Jun 4, 2010 | News
Cut Subsidies for “Bioenergy” Our coalition applauds this week’s decision by the U.S. House of Representatives Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee to slash Biomass Crop Assistance Program (BCAP) funding for 2012. The U.S. Department of...
by Maureen Turner | Jun 4, 2010 | News
As if last week’s meeting of the Springfield City Council to consider rescinding the permit for a controversial wood-burning power plant in the city wasn’t already heavy with import—about the public health and environmental implications, the effects...
by Maureen Turner | Jun 4, 2010 | News
Here are some reasons you might know of Ayelet Waldman: She’s the author of a number of well-received novels, including, most recently, the absorbing Red Hook Road, about the effects on two families when a young bride and groom are killed in a wedding-day limo...
by Maureen Turner | Jun 4, 2010 | News
The fiscal 2011 budget passed by the state Senate last week included a provision that will help protect library services in Western Mass.—although not as completely as some had hoped. Adopted as part of the $28 billion budget was an amendment, sponsored by Sen....
by Maureen Turner | Jun 8, 2010 | News
At 11 o’clock on a chilly, sunny March morning, Inez Williams’ house is scheduled to be sold at a foreclosure auction. Williams and her husband, Bill, bought the house—a 1,428-square-foot, three-bedroom home on St. James Avenue in...
by Stephanie Kraft | Jun 10, 2010 | News
What with the shouting about socialism during the health care debate, the caricaturing of Obama as a socialist and the shrillness of rightwingers tossing the term around like paper airplanes, you’d think socialism was still a McCarthy-era scare word in this...
by Maureen Turner | Jun 10, 2010 | News
There aren’t a lot of industries seeing dramatic growth in this economy—which makes the continuing expansion of the local food market even more impressive. Last week, South Deerfield’s Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture, or CISA—the...
by our readers | Jun 10, 2010 | News
It’s About the Environment Developers are currently proposing the construction of biomass plants in Greenfield, Springfield, Pittsfield, Russell, and Fitchburg that would burn more than 13 million pounds of green wood a day and would add only 1 percent to our...
by Robert B. Reich | Jun 10, 2010 | News
We’re falling into a double-dip recession. The Labor Department reports that the private sector added a measly 41,000 net new jobs in May. (The vast bulk of new jobs in May were for temporary government census workers.) But at least 100,000 new jobs are needed...
by Maureen Turner | Jun 10, 2010 | News
Efforts to make inmates in county jails pay room-and-board and other fees continue to march forward in the state budget—but not without considerable resistance from activists and criticism from some Valley sheriffs. In late May, the state Senate approved a...
by Maureen Turner | Jun 15, 2010 | News
Last weekend, it was the cops who hit the streets in Springfield, as about 100 local, state and federal law enforcement officers were deployed over a period of about 12 hours in “Operation Blue Knight,” described by officials as an effort both to deter...
by Maureen Turner | Jun 15, 2010 | News
In recent months, both the Massachusetts House and Senate have passed bills that would ban texting while driving. Those bills, however, have languished in a conference committee ever since—prompting some communities to pass their own local texting bans,...
by Our Readers | Jun 17, 2010 | News
Environmental Disasters: Following Fast and Following Faster The crisis in the Gulf shows a lack of responsibility for the?natural world?and a lack of laws in place to protect it. For 30 years BP has funded research for drilling further and deeper offshore but has not...
by Stephanie Kraft | Jun 17, 2010 | News
The Jason Vassell case, which drew hundreds of people from Amherst and beyond to protest the actions of the Northwest District Attorney’s office (see “The Eve of Instruction,” Feb. 12, 2009), has been concluded. The black UMass student who stabbed...
by Stephanie Kraft | Jun 17, 2010 | News
Without much fanfare, a movement to keep the Electoral College from undermining the popular vote in presidential elections is gaining ground. The drive for electoral votes that gave us a president not elected by popular vote in 2000—and that has turned...
by Maureen Turner | Jun 17, 2010 | News
At Margaret Christie’s home, there are goats and sheep and chickens and, periodically, pigs. Her family raises almost all of the vegetables, and most of the fruit, that they eat over the course of the year—fresh in season, frozen or canned or otherwise...
by Tom Vannah | Jun 17, 2010 | News
A much-anticipated study of biomass by the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences has found that burning wood to make electricity is potentially worse for the environment than burning coal. The Manomet study, commissioned by the state Executive Office of Energy and...
by Stephanie Kraft | Jun 18, 2010 | News
Bernie Sanders, the Independent (and self-styled socialist) U.S. senator from Vermont, has given the country a present. It was planned as a Fourth of July present, but it’s ready ahead of schedule. It seems that last Christmas, Sanders was doing some Christmas...
by Maureen Turner | Jun 18, 2010 | News
The most progressive elements of the Massachusetts Democratic party chalked up some satisfying victories at the recent state party convention. Among the items added to the party’s “action agenda”—which the party calls its “road map to...
by Stephanie Kraft | Jun 18, 2010 | News
So Anthony Weiner becomes the latest politico to jeopardize his career by making a fool of himself on the sexual front. A man with an informed, detailed familiarity with issues surrounding health care reform, who so humanely advocated for medical aid for the 9/11...
by Maureen Turner | Jun 18, 2010 | News
In May of 2010, six ships carrying humanitarian aid left port in Turkey and sailed across the Mediterranean Sea to the Gaza Strip. Organized by the Free Gaza Movement and the Turkish Foundation for Human Rights, Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief, the “Gaza...
by Maureen Turner | Jun 18, 2010 | News
This spring Tim Purington, city councilor for Holyoke’s Ward 4, raised the idea of allowing city residents to keep a small number of chickens in their yards, with an OK from the Board of Health. The idea would have put Holyoke smack in the middle of a trend;...
by Robert B. Reich | Jun 24, 2010 | News
The man who electrified the nation with his speech at the Democratic National Convention of 2004 put it to sleep the other night. President Obama’s June 15th address to the nation from the Oval Office was, to be frank, vapid. If you watched with the sound off...
by Stephanie Kraft | Jun 24, 2010 | News
Communications technology keeps us in touch. Medical technology saves our lives. Other forms of technology do our math and accounting for us, support our welfare on nearly every front. But technology also puts us at risk, and never more than when we extrapolate from...
by Amy Littlefield | Jun 24, 2010 | News
Laura Adkins still remembers the empty feeling in the pit of her stomach. For the seven months she spent incarcerated, one month in Greenfield at the Franklin County House of Corrections and six at the Women’s Correctional Center in Chicopee, the absence of her...
by Our Readers | Jun 24, 2010 | News
The Big Spill: Obama Could Do More In the June 21 issue of the Greenfield Recorder, the newspaper’s editor writes of President Obama and the BP oil spill, “…I just can’t see how he could be doing any more than he’s doing.” First,...
by Our Readers | Jun 24, 2010 | News
Rape and the Soldier: The Right to Heal Bravo to the Advocate for the article “Of Rank and Rape” [May 26, 2011], about the epidemic of military sexual trauma (MST). We are familiar with Panayiota Bertzikis and the work of the Military Rape Crisis Center,...
by Stephanie Kraft | Jun 29, 2010 | News
The old stereotype has hardly changed. It wasn’t three white men in front of the microphones during the gubernatorial debate at WRKO in Boston last week. It was two white men, Tim Cahill and Charlie Baker, and one black man—Gov. Deval Patrick—in the...
by Maureen Turner | Jun 29, 2010 | News
An effort to allow county sheriffs to charge fees to inmates has failed, after fierce opposition from critics who say the policy would end up hurting inmates’ families and make it that much harder for people to re-enter society after their sentences end. In...
by Maureen Turner | Jul 1, 2010 | News
If you happened to notice a 20-foot-tall baby bottle hanging around the streets of Northampton last week, don’t panic—the city has not been overtaken by a band of giant marauding infants. The oversized, inflatable bottle was brought to the city by...
by Gwynne Dyer | Jul 1, 2010 | News
General Stanley McChrystal deserved to be fired as the U.S. commander in Afghanistan because he and his staff were openly contemptuous of their civilian superiors. It’s a popular attitude among the dimmer sort of military officers, but for a theater commander to...
by Our Readers | Jul 1, 2010 | News
Dog’s Life—or Death In a town populated by people as supposedly progressive and well educated as Northampton’s, I’m daily shocked to see the treatment meted out to Northampton’s dogs! Tied to parking meters on Main Street, unattended, in...
by Maureen Turner | Jul 1, 2010 | News
Ron Patenaude wears his heart not on his sleeve, but just below it. On his left arm is a tattoo reading “UAW Local 2322,” the labor union to which Patenaude has belonged for the past 12 years, the last six as president. On his right arm is another tattoo,...
by Maureen Turner | Jul 1, 2010 | News
Political support continues to grow for “enhanced producer responsibility”—a rather grand-sounding term for the notion of making corporations deal with the fallout from the products and packaging they send out into the marketplace, and, eventually,...
by Stephanie Kraft | Jul 6, 2010 | News
Last year Facebook got some new faces—faces that everyone on the ubiquitous social network should know about because their influence on it has been growing. One is the face of Yuri Milner, a Russian with an M.B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania’s...
by Our Readers | Jul 8, 2010 | News
Lion and Tiger Meat, Oh, My I was shocked to hear that lion burgers are being served at a restaurant in Arizona. I was even more upset to hear that this isn’t something new or out of the ordinary. That this meat is considered game meat and is so easily...
by Stephanie Kraft | Jul 8, 2010 | News
With more and more people facing destitution as their unemployment benefits run out, the reasons Republicans have given for not extending those benefits in a timely way suggest that another set of reasons underlies the ones loudly voiced. Extending unemployment...
by Maureen Turner | Jul 8, 2010 | News
With the state budget now signed off on, and casino legislation flying, undeservedly, through the Legislature (its progress unimpeded by any substantial public debate or objective analysis), the clock is now ticking for any number of pet proposals that lawmakers and...
by Maureen Turner | Jul 8, 2010 | News
In 2008, 5,071 people in the U.S. died from injuries sustained in the workplace, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. Another 3.7 million cases of non-fatal, workplace-related injuries and illnesses among private-industry workers, and 940,000 cases...
by Maureen Turner | Jul 8, 2010 | News
Backyard chickens are all the rage in the Valley these days (well, except in Holyoke, where the City Council appears convinced that homey little chicken coops are dens of poultry iniquity, breeding grounds for cock-fighting and horrid disease). And with that...
by Tom Vannah | Jul 13, 2010 | News
Stan Rosenberg a key architect of legislation enabling casino gambling in Massachusetts? That’s how news accounts last week described the veteran Amherst lawmaker, a Democrat, in the wake of a 25-15 state Senate vote to license three resort-style casinos in the...
by Our Readers | Jul 15, 2010 | News
Change of Command If, as you say, Obama must withdraw the troops, “declare a victory and leave,” fine (see “the Fall of Stanley McChrystal,” July 1, 2010). But do it now. General McChrystal understands something you do not, namely, that every...
by Stephanie Kraft | Jul 15, 2010 | News
Who are our leaders? Where do we find them? So many times the real leaders aren’t in Washington, New York or Los Angeles; often they’re people we don’t even know by name. To the Leadership Hall of Fame let’s nominate the residents of...
by Maureen Turner | Jul 15, 2010 | News
The new Springfield city budget has been finalized for a couple of weeks now—but don’t expect the political aftershocks it created to die down any time soon. The municipal budget process has never exactly been smooth sailing for the Sarno administration....
by Maureen Turner | Jul 15, 2010 | News
Franklin County peace activists are expecting some unwelcome guests at their weekly vigil this Saturday: local Tea Partiers. The peace vigil, which has been held regularly on the Greenfield Common since 2003, has been selected as the site of a competing rally on July...
by Tom Vannah | Jul 20, 2010 | News
After years of controversy and mounting public opposition to a proposed expansion of the city’s municipal landfill, Northampton city councilors last week approved an ordinance banning the development or expansion of landfills over aquifers and water supply...
by Maureen Turner | Jul 20, 2010 | News
It’s been almost a year since the Springfield City Council voted to take the former Mason Square Library building at 765 State Street by eminent domain and restore it to its original purpose. And the Springfield Urban League—which bought the building, in a...
by Stephanie Kraft | Jul 22, 2010 | News
The ancient oath of Hippocrates, which underpins medical ethics, has a long reach. In the wake of the debate about torture that grew out of the Bush administration’s management of Guantanamo and the war in Iraq, the spirit of that oath is stirring up controversy...
by Robert B. Reich | Jul 22, 2010 | News
President Obama pronounced on June 15 that “because of this [financial reform] bill the American people will never again be asked to foot the bill for Wall Street’s mistakes.” As if to prove him wrong, Goldman Sachs simultaneously announced it had...
by Maureen Turner | Jul 22, 2010 | News
In the city of Springfield, one out of every five residents speaks a language other than English at home, according to federal Census figures from 2003. Forty-one percent of them report that they do not speak English “very well.” The majority of city...
by Our Readers | Jul 22, 2010 | News
Water Conservation: Get Used to It On behalf of local water utilities throughout Massachusetts, I urge the public to use water wisely, especially during the remaining summer season. Despite abundant precipitation earlier this year, minimal rainfall in recent weeks,...
by Tom Sturm | Jul 22, 2010 | News
A historically polluted site in Easthampton just got a big boost in its quest for remediation. A 2.3-acre parcel on Wemelco Way, owned by Oldon Limited Partnership and confirmed by the Environmental Protection Agency to have been contaminated with asbestos, will...
by Maureen Turner | Jul 27, 2010 | News
Gov. Deval Patrick announced last week grants to the 35 municipalities that have qualified for “Green Community” status, under a program through the state Department of Energy Resources. (See “Green Rush,” April 29, 2010,...
by Markos Moulitsas | Jul 27, 2010 | News
Thanks to Barack Obama, conservatives now hate Chicago. “Today I’m inviting you to the exciting premiere of a new channel. It’s called Obama’s Chicago Network, and is the best place on the Web for viewers to learn more about President...
by Samantha Presnal | Jul 27, 2010 | News
Arts initiatives in the Pioneer Valley have been bolstered by two substantial grants awarded to the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum and the Enchanted Circle Theater of Northampton. Both institutions focus on learning about and learning through the arts. With $150,000...
by Maureen Turner | Jul 28, 2010 | News
Massachusetts Congressman Ed Markey and two colleagues last week filed a bill designed to get harmful chemicals out of personal care products. The Safe Cosmetics Act of 2010 would tighten up standards for ingredient safety, which, in their current form, are shamefully...
