Archive for January 15th, 2012

January 15th, 2012

“A Bet on Savings” by John Edward

by DickH

John Edward, a resident of Chelmsford who earned his master’s degree at UMass Lowell and who teaches economics at Bentley University and UMass Lowell, contributes the following column.

Many Greater Lowell legislators made a big mistake in 2011. My State Representative, James Arciero, was one of them. In this column, I will offer them a chance to do something right in 2012.

People who should be saving for the future are instead gambling on their future. The state legislature can help solve that problem.

The savings rate in the United States is too low. After the Great Depression and through the mid eighties the personal savings rate was around 10 percent. In subsequent years, the rate fell sharply. During brief periods it even went negative – we were spending more than our income.

During the Great Recession, the savings rate increased, but only to 5 percent. Despite the recovery being weak, people are again saving less. The personal saving rate was only 3.5 percent in November.

Insufficient saving is bad for individuals and bad for the overall economy in the long run. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the problem is most severe for low-income families.

Among other reasons, the poor do not save because:
- they often have nothing left to save after spending on necessities,
- they know a modest hard-saved bank account can be wiped out with just one unexpected financial hardship,
- they typically get much lower returns or negative returns after bank fees,
- saving implies thinking about the future whereas the poor are struggling to make it through the present,
- they are encouraged to spend by both Madison Ave. and Pennsylvania Ave. read more »

CategoryCurrent Events, Greater Lowell | Comment2 Comments »

January 15th, 2012

Chest thumping on China gives insight into GOP candidates by Marjorie Arons-Barron

by Tony

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Check it out.

Mitt Romney should “get a grip” in considering how punitive the United States should be in responding to China’s often unfair (but enormously successful) industrial policy. So said former US Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky after speaking to a crowd of more than 700 executives and professionals at The Boston Club’s Corporate Salute on Thursday.

Barshefsky, Ambassador in the Clinton Administration, had been asked about a debate discussion between Jon Huntsman and Romney about how the United States should deal with the powerful and growing Chinese economic threat. Romney had been defiant, wanting, in effect, to slap them around, and Huntsman took a more nuanced position born of information and experience as U. S. Ambassador to China

Barshefy said Romney should take a lesson from our experience with Cuba. She noted that, despite a harsh embargo against Cuba, Fidel Castro has outlasted 11 U.S. Presidents, none of whom was able to bend Cuba to our free-market brand of democracy. “Who does he (Romney) think he is,” she posed, adding that Huntsman’s approach to working with China was the better way to go. The other GOP candidates are closer to Romney and it appears Huntsman is now a dead man walking.

The Boston Club, which identifies a pool of top female talent for corporate leadership positions, holds the annual event was to honor Massachusetts-based corporations with two or more women directors. There are still 41 of the largest 100 companies in the Commonwealth with no women on their boards. Twenty-nine companies have neither a woman director nor a woman executive officer, despite growing evidence that board diversity adds measurably to a company’s bottom line and shareholder value. [ Full disclosure: I’ve been a longtime member of the Club’s Corporate Board Committee.]

Barshefsky’s focus was on the accelerated pace of global growth and the tenfold increase in global companies over the last 50 years, with large developed nations and poor, small ones “playing in the same sandbox.” Twelve rounds of trade talks have brought down many barriers to access, and all are feeling the pressures of intense competition. But, as I watch the candidates, I keep seeing posturing and cliches from the candidates, not a clear-eyed facing up to the today’s global economic realities.

China has become increasingly muscular. Japan now trades more with China than with the United States. So, too, do the other Asian nations and even Brazil. China, which has amassed $3 trillion in foreign exchange reserves and is aggressive in natural resource acquisition around the world, is virtually setting the global agenda.

At the same time, the economies of the United States, Europe and Japan have declined, are less able to withstand financial shocks, and are burdened with high unemployment, slow growth and the need for austerity measures. Just look to what’s happening with the Euro and Eurozone countries. There’s also a slow movement afoot to move away from the dollar to a basketful of currencies in international trade. The change may not happen in our lifetime, but it’s unsettlingly to those who assert American exceptionalism .

Barshevsky criticized leaders here and abroad who are limited by a win-lose mentality, and, troubled by domestic political strains, tend to blame China.

“It’s not too late to get our act together, to reassert our pre-eminence” she said. The answer, she later explained, lies not in a Romney-like bullying approach to China but in strengthening ourselves on the home front, ending the paralysis in Washington, grappling with our deficit and investing in things like education, to make ourselves stronger and reinforce our ability to compete.

Please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below.

CategoryUncategorized | Comment2 Comments »

January 15th, 2012

‘Checking the Property’

by PaulM

With Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. being remembered tomorrow in a special way across the nation, I went back to a prose poem written after a family visit to Washington, D.C., in the early summer of 2004, another presidential election year. We were months away from seeing Barack Obama make news with a speech at the Democratic Party’s convention in Boston, and the extraordinary memorial for Dr. King was yet to be installed on the National Mall. — PM

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Checking the Property

My nine-year-old son says, “I’m going to read the ‘Gettysburg Address’”—on the other side is the lesser-known second inaugural speech. What’s the Lincoln shorthand? Freed the slaves; saved the union. People crowd the marble steps at dusk. A sign asks for silence. When he sees my wife lining up a snapshot, a guy in a straw cowboy hat offers to take a picture of my brother’s family, my wife, son, and me in the glow of the civic temple. Climbing the steps, I caught sight of the figure set behind the columns, and then lost him because of the steep ascent, only to come upon the sculpture again near the top, where visitors gaze at the huge seated president, whose massive square-toed boot juts out, looking as if it could kick Jeff Davis’ football the length of the Reflecting Pool and onto the white spike of the Washington Monument, which, in the after-supper hour reflects sun along its narrow western face, a mighty glo-stik on the national common, a staunch obelisk, a big white numeral standing for the first president, who set the constitutional republic in motion, the stone blocks a different shade on the top half, marking a stop in work and resumption, the monument telling its own story, one in which protesters rolled cut stones into the drink, foreshadowing later protests and rallies and comings together, like the 1963 March on Washington that brought Martin Luther King to these same steps to declare his dream of a nation at last free for all, the same steps where Joan Baez and Bob Dylan sang for justice and where Dylan returned to sing for Bill Clinton’s booming inaugural, the same steps movie-land Vietnam vet Forrest Gump spoke from and from which he spotted his life-long love and source of ache splashing toward him, the same pool in which the spaceship crashed in the Planet of the Apes remake, this electric stretch of public land without timber or copper, a wide open space in which to make a verb of America—to recall and celebrate and to do democratic research and development in this red clay-lined lab, bordered and crowded with evidence of the ongoing experiment, and bearing key formulas and equations inscribed in stone.

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—Paul Marion (c) 2004

 

CategoryCulture, Election 2012, History, Lowell, Poetry | CommentNo Comments »

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January 15th, 2012

See How “The Gardner Grows” and the Lowell Connection

by Marie

 James Whistler “Nocturne, Blue and Silver: Battersea Reach” – Whistler’s emphasis on sensation and atmosphere over detailed description has been compared by some to the philosophy underpinning Gardner’s whole museum. “I see the entire museum as a correlative to these shadowy tone poems,’’ wrote the poet and critic Wayne Koestenbaum of Whistler’s nocturnes.**

Don’t miss the Special Issue “The Gardner Grows” in today’s Boston Globe.  Isabella Stewart Gardner  – the cultured, unconventional, collector, icon and “Queen of Fenway Court” – would undoubtedly have loved to rule over the expansive and revitalized Isabella Stewart Museum. Famed for its history, collection, its founder and of course the “robbery,” the Museum is about to enter a new and exciting phase – allowing more of its collection to be shown, inviting a broader commitment to its musical heritage and nodding to the real artistry of garden and landscape architecture. Longtime supporters and admirers of the Gardner must tip their hats to Museum Director Anne Hawley for her creativity, foresight, commitement and tenacity and excellent stewardship. Anne Hawley is known to local cultural activists for her years of oversight over the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities (now known as the Mass Cultural Council) where she with the support of Senate President William Bulger brought cultural funding to its height.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner museum reopens on Thurday January 19, 2012.

Read and view the full special edition here at boston.com.

**Note: This work of the Lowell-born artist is considered one of the ten best paintings in the Gardner collection. (see these 10 best on pages 42-43 of the special issue.)

CategoryCulture, Current Events, History, Lowell | CommentNo Comments »

January 15th, 2012

In the Merrimack Valley: Dangerous Drive Route 114

by Marie

There is an article in today’s Eagle Tribune on what the headline writer calls “accident alley” - Route 114 in North Andover. It is a busy road carrying all manner of traffic – at all times of the day and night. The area is layered with commerce, eateries, office parks, business, service and medical destinations. It houses the extensive campus of Merrimack College. It marks a crossroads of convergence and access from city to town to suburb and the rural – from local and side roads, parking lots and driveways to highways and by-ways. So many of us in the Valley access that area regularly – including me as it’s where three of my docs practice – that I thought a reminder of the importance of driving carefully was worth calling attention to the article.

The lessons on driving safely, paying attention, following the rules of the road, noting the particular hazards of a roadway, being courteous, having patience, avoiding the distractions of phone calls and texting and wearing your seatbelt hold true whether driving on Route 114, Route 495, Andover Street or on the Hunts Falls Bridge.

Read the Alex Bloom article “Accident alley: Rte. 114 turns from rural to deadly” here at eagletribune.com.

CategoryGreater Lowell | CommentNo Comments »

January 15th, 2012

Lowell’s Proto-Blogger Charles G. Sampas, 1954

by PaulM

My brother Richard often stops by my home to drop off an interesting item he has found along the way in his travels, often a photocopy of a news article or a brochure that is not to be missed. Yesterday, he unfolded a large piece of paper that turned out to be page 19 from The Lowell Sun of June 16, 1954, that he had copied on a machine where blueprints are reproduced. The newspaper had surfaced in his apartment while he was looking for something else.

Two items fill the page: a large Father’s Day sale ad (“Dad is King!”) for Enterprise Stores at 117 Merrimack St., offering, among other clothing, sport shirts for $1.99, chino pants for $2.98, and men’s boxer and brief swim trunks for $1.99. The store hours include Monday and Thursday until 9 p.m. To the left of the ad is a wide column the length of the page with the daily “Sampascoopies” column by Charles G. Sampas. The subheadlines of the day are “Wednesday’s Little Notebook, Faces in Lowell Places, Some Songs Remembered, Life in the Lowellland, Serenades in the Twilight” to give readers a hint about the day’s topics. June 16, 1954, is one day among the thousands that Charles G. Sampas wrote for the people of his city.

What’s interesting in this column that appeared randomly in my kitchen this week is that it is full of observations and comments that resonate today. For example:

“The new Lowell Tech buildings have certainly given LTI that university touch . . .”

“Someday, the Hunt’s Falls bridge will be ready—and it would certainly speed up traffic more. The traffic problem has been a prime one—and it is rapidly being solved. Lowell is way ahead of other cities in this—way, way ahead.”

“Strange, all these years, I’ve had the collected works of most famous authors—and only five volumes of Dickens’s Works.”

Of all the columns to materialize, in this one Sampas reflects on his own legacy: “I have this distinction in Lowell fame: I have written more about Lowell history than anybody else in my time. I am not talking, of course, of the quality of the content—what I am grateful for is this: My small writings, in their very small way, have served to ‘pep up’ interest in Lowell history—and I am sure there will be plenty of young people who will do a lot of research in Lowell history in the future. And that makes me very happy.” (This is such a prophetic statement made 24 years before Lowell would be named a National Park and added to the official list of great American places like the Grand Canyon, Concord, the Statue of Liberty, the Everglades, and Gettysburg Battlefield.)

Charles Sampas wrote about 1,000 words for this column. I’ll return to it another day with more excerpts from his rambling, encyclopedic mind and boundless intellectual curiosity. For example, “The great pleasure it was, the other night, chatting with my old friend, Jimmie Durante. We discussed his TV show and his au courant plans, and Jimmie looks younger than ever. And still the greatest comedian in the war—no question about that.”

CategoryCulture, History, Lowell | Comment5 Comments »

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