I've owned this blog for years now, dormant and untended to. I've decided to tentatively dip my toe back in the water of daily blogging, something I haven't done since blogging for the American Prospect in the middle of the last decade.
Reading today's "This Land" column by Dan Barry - about the movement of the NCR corporation from Dayton,Ohio to Atlanta reminded me of this piece I wrote early on in my time at the New Republic. I'll repost here, as TNR no longer has online archives.
My grandmother was still alive when I wrote this, though ailing, like her city. Unlike her husband, who I've written about more extensively, my grandmother was raised in the Northeast, by immigrant parents, and, though she traveled extensively - from Morocco to Japan to Peru and beyond - it was Pittsfield, Ma and its neighboring, lakeshore community, Lanesboro, that she called home.
Pittsfield somehow has avoided the posh Berkshire summer hoards, though even Pittsfield is changing now. In truth, it's a beautiful city with stately turn-of-the-last century homes set against the Berkshire mountatins. But it struggles, still.
The New Republic
MARCH 6, 2000
City Limits
BYLINE: Sarah Wildman(Copyright 2000, The New Republic)
SECTION: Pg. 46
LENGTH: 1758 words
HIGHLIGHT: Pittsfield Diarist
During the sundaymorning talk shows, a barrage of General Electric commercials drive home the company's corporate message: "We're a good neighbor." G.E. employees and retirees, one ad tells us, will spend more than a million hours this year doing community service. But none of the glossy spots--invariably showing beautiful people, presumably G.E. employees, teaching disadvantaged children to read and dance--mention the countless hours the company will spend this year dredging up pollutants in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
growing up, i always thought it odd that my grandparents lived in Pittsfield. Technically, the city is in the Berkshires, a region renowned for gorgeous mountains, crystalline lakes, Tanglewood, the Williamstown Theater Festival, and Jacob's Pillow. But "summer in the Berkshires," as the tourist brochures read, doesn't come to Pittsfield. The downtown is dead, empty of pedestrians and consumer life. "Red Lobster comes to Pittsfield and closes," one local restaurateur observed to a trade magazine in 1998. "What does that tell you?"
it wasn't always this way. in 1903 G.E. purchased its first building in Pittsfield, and for the next 70 years the company--and the city--prospered. Pittsfield became a center for G.E.'s transformer, plastic, and defense industries. At its height, during World War II, the company's Pittsfield plant employed close to 14,000 people; in the '50s, three of every four town workers were employed by G.E. "Graduate from high school on Friday," the saying went, "start working at G.E. on Monday." And G.E.'s high wages made Pittsfield a prosperous place. Photographs from the '50s show North Street, today a desolate strip of boarded-up buildings, alive with activity: spanking new sedans cruise the streets, shoppers crowd the sidewalks, and merchandise fills every storefront window. A few blocks away was the train station--an architectural gem modeled after the old Pennsylvania Station in New York City- -through which hundreds of travelers passed each day. It has since been torn down.
but in the '70s g.e.'s eye began to wander. As foreign competition increased and prices for raw materials rose, the company began to shift its operations to the nonunion South, where production costs were lower. By the early '90s, G.E. had shuttered all but one plant in Pittsfield. The company now employs about 700 people, a mere five percent of its wartime high.
a pretty typical story, really. Over the past three decades, vast chunks of industry have moved from the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt. While G.E. may have shown a lack of loyalty, corporate willingness to shed unprofitable plants is at least part of the reason for America's recent manufacturing revival. What G.E. did to Pittsfield would have been sad but hardly criminal, except for one thing: pollutants. In 1977, the Environmental Protection Agency revealed that the Housatonic River (which runs through Pittsfield) and the town's groundwater were heavily contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs. Fill contaminated with the chemicals was used by the city to build everything from schoolyards and playgrounds to backyards. PCBs were one of G. E.'s ultramodern tools: nonflammable fluids used as insulation in electric transformers. G.E. workers had been, quite literally, knee-deep in the stuff from the late '20s until 1977, when its use was outlawed. That year, the EPA declared that PCBs were probable carcinogens with definitive noncancer health effects that included liver and nervous-system damage. They were also thought to cause developmental abnormalities, including lower IQs, in fetuses and young children.
the neighborly thing to do, of course, would have been for G.E. to clean up the mess it made. After all, there was ample evidence of the damage PCBs had wrought in Pittsfield. One study revealed that children exposed for just one summer to a stretch of the Housatonic "face d noncancer risks 200 times higher than the hazard-index level EPA considers safe." G.E.'s industrial park, which the company had abandoned, was so contaminated that no other industry could move into it. And 130 residential properties were found to have alarming levels of PCBs. But G.E. didn't do the neighborly thing. Although the company stopped using PCBs when the EPA outlawed them, G.E. didn't take sufficient measures to prevent the pollutants underneath its plant from seeping into the groundwater and nearby river. When the EPA proposed designating Pittsfield a "Super Fund" cleanup site, the company threatened to close its one remaining local office. Officially, G.E. was just looking out for Pittsfield--Super Fund status, it claimed, would "saddle the city unnecessarily with the stigma." But, in reality, it was G.E. that didn't want to fork over hundreds of millions of dollars for cleanup, or the stigma an EPA designation would create. A company with one of the highest market capitalizations of any U.S. corporation was crying poverty.
g.e.'s hard line divided pittsfield. In 28 full-page ads in the local newspaper, The Berkshire Eagle, the company continued to deny its responsibility for decontamination.The city's business community, worried that publicity about the pollution might further damage Pittsfield's already depressed economy, warned community activists to keep quiet. Meanwhile, activists working to hold G.E. accountable for the PCBs split into two groups: one worried about making Pittsfield safe for homeowners, while the other was primarily concerned with cleaning up the river. Various attempts to remodel Pittsfield into a Berkshires tourist attraction--like the neighboring towns of Lenox and Great Barrington--foundered. Right now, Pittsfield's most promising redevelopment plan comes from folksinger Arlo Guthrie, who wants to open a nightclub and restaurant in the abandoned downtown.
last october, 22 years after the pollution was first revealed, G.E. signed what residents hope is the first of many cleanup deals. The company agreed to begin dredging the first two of the 55 miles of the Housatonic that are contaminated by PCBs; G.E. estimates this will take about $150 million, but some believe the cleanup may eventually reach $800 million. And the October environmental agreement only covers the pollution of east Pittsfield. In December the EPA announced that west Pittsfield, long thought to be free from pollutants, was similarly contaminated. "We're going to have to take a look at the findings," said one G.E. spokesman, "and review the data before we can draw any conclusions"--as if the pollutants could have come from any other source.
my grandfather died in 1990. but my grandmother still lives in Pittsfield. If you ask her, she'll happily recall the days when she went to the Pittsfield station to take the train to New York or fought the crowds on North Street to get into stores. But she doesn't venture out too much anymore. She tells me, "I'm not the gal I used to be." Neither is Pittsfield.
LOAD-DATE: March 1, 2000
Western Countries´ Dirty Democracy
I am a writer and human rights activist, but the ways I have been treated by the Australian, Canadian and German governments are inhumane. Australian Indigenous communities remain the most vulnerable sectors of the society throughout Australia. Some parts of indigenous communities are worse than the poorest Africans in the remotest regions of Africa. Australia’s injustice was systematically engineered by the best political minds, in order to use indigenous communities’ resources without any restriction. It is very apparent that at each historical point in time, indigenous communities suffered from a deep rooted distrust of giving practical effect to their rights, and the idea of justice. Among Australia's elite today there is a habit of blaming indigenous communities for their harsh lifestyle, in order to hide the Australia’s deficit of justice. The lack of justice is affecting all citizens; especially it is affecting Australians ethically and morally around the world. This deficit of justice has impacted the indigenous communities adversely throughout many generations, resulting in the deaths, physical and mental torture, and enforced separations from their family members. 'Importantly, this phenomenon has not been manifested not only during the British colonization, but also at the present time'. Due to the Australia’s injustice in the outback and detention centres, I wrote many letters to the federal and local ministers about their awful treatments of the Indigenous people in the outback; and refugees in the detention centres. But I was threatened by the government intelligence members, that if I continued to lobby for indigenous people and refugees they would find a way to connect me with drug trafficking or terrorism. I was banned from a university in Australia in 2004, while I was making awareness among the students about the Australia’s treatment to its Indigenous people and refugees. When I started to make awareness internationally, the Australian government not only stopped me from getting a job, but they even stopped me from selling my house, and made me to go bankrupt. They have also stolen my passport, and cancelled my citizenship, then threatened me that they were going to throw me in a detention centre as an illegal immigrant. I wrote to the United Nations, Canadian and New Zealand High Commissions about this barbaric action. Due to the international pressure, the Australian government had decided to include my name in the citizenship database. But they deliberately added my name in the database incorrectly, and refused to correct my name for a long time. And they also refused to give me a passport, in order to stop me leaving the country. Finally, I have got a new passport and moved to Canada under the skill migration program to live a normal life; and also to have freedom of opinion and expression to carry on my writings to promote human rights. But after four years living in Canada, I found that Canada does not practice what it preaches to the developing countries, in term of democracy. Since I landed in Canada, my emails and phone calls were closely monitored by the Canadian Security intelligence Service (CSIS). Since I started to expose Canada’s dirty democracy, the CSIS has been deliberately diverting incoming calls to the voice mail and deleting the messages to keep in isolation. I have changed three cell phone companies and cell phones, but still incoming calls were getting diverted to the voice mail, but I did not get the messages. Since last December I have applied hundreds of jobs in Canada, including seasonal Christmas jobs, but the CSIS has been stopping me getting a job. The CSIS has placed me in extreme financial difficulty. According to the UN human rights article 23, everyone has the right to work, but my right has been denied due to my writings. I was denied access to my Facebook account, since I started to expose the western countries’ dirty democracy on the Facebook Now I am in Germany to tell Australia’s and Canada’s story to the world. But I was forced to live in a filthy camp in Germany. Now I am forced to live with three others in a one bedroom apartment. I am not allowed to work. I am not allowed to leave the city without permission. I cannot even afford to buy a winter jacket. I never lived in this kind condition in my life, but only in Germany. After living in Germany for six months, I have concluded that the Nazism still exists in Germany. During the First World War the world joined together and bombed Germany, but the Germans still did not get rid of their Nazism. So the world had to do it again during the Second World War, the allied forces dropped nearly two million tons of bombs on Germany, and killed more than half a million German men, women, children, and destroyed their cities and towns. Yet the Germans have not changed. Today the Greeks dislike them. In the near future the Italians, Spanish, and Protégées will dislike them too. The people who dislike the Germans will continue to increase. The Germans have been forcing extreme austerity measures on the other European countries to expand their market. Expanding Germany in Europe is, expanding Nazism in Europe. This is a crime against humanity. I urge you to speak out against the western countries’ human rights abuses, and stop the European leaders imposing extreme austerity measures in their countries to expand Germany, at the expense of their own countries’ economic growth.
Contact details: Antany Peter, Mobile phone: 01749514788, email: antany.peter@gmx.de
Posted by: Antany Peter | January 18, 2012 at 08:12 AM