Impropriety

Once upon a time, people who held elected office used to strive to avoid the appearance of impropriety. Back in those halcyon days, we were concerned with corruption and ethics. There were big public investigations. There were legal charges and fines. People went to prison.

Wherever there is any kind of power there is the possibility of corruption. During the Grant administration, the Whiskey Ring scandal was exposed in 1875. Whiskey distillers were bribing government officials who, in turn, helped the distillers evade federal taxes on their product. Millions of dollars in federal taxes were diverted. Orville Babcock, private secretary to President Grant was indicted as a member of the ring, which contributed (along with other scandals) to his administration being seen as emblematic of corruption.

The Teapot Dome scandal also involved bribery, and took place between 1921-1922, during the Harding administration. The US Navy converted from using coal to fuel oil. President Taft designated several oil producing areas as Naval Oil Reserves. In 1921, President Harding issued an executive order that turned control of the Teapot Dome Oil Field in Wyoming and the Elk Hills and Buena Vista Oil Fields in California from the Dept. of the Navy to the Dept. of the Interior. This was implemented in 1922 at the request of Interior Secretary Albert Fall. Later in the year, Fall leased oil production rights at Teapot Dome to Mammoth Oil, a subsidy of Sinclair Oil. He leased the Elk Hills reserve to Pan American Petroleum and Transport Company. There was no competitive bidding in either case. Fall became a wealthy man, after receiving gifts from the executives in both companies that would today be worth $5.42 million. The sudden improvement in his standard of living brought about his downfall. The leases themselves were not illegal. The secret deals and the bribery were.

There was an investigation. Other oil companies were miffed about the no bid licenses that had been granted, and Senator Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin led an investigation by the Senate Committee on Public Lands. Fall had done a good job of covering his tracks, but Edward Doheny of Pan American Petroleum had given Fall a no-interest loan of $100,000. Once that loan (bribe) was discovered, Fall was finished. He was found guilty of accepting bribes. Edward Doheny was acquitted of paying bribes to Fall.

Corporations will always find ways to bribe public officials into aiding their pursuit of lining their pockets. Coal, oil, and uranium aren’t the only natural resources that are being mined by the unscrupulous. Right in our own back yard, the largest food and beverage company in the world is mining water, and seeking to expand their extraction operations in Fryeburg, Maine. Local elected officials have failed – and failed mightily - to avoid the appearance of impropriety.

Nestlé’s lack of ethics became national news in the 1970’s when we learned that they were aggressively marketing baby formula to third world mothers. They handed out literature, had women dressed as nurses to discuss the benefits of formula, gave out baby bottles, and free samples. After the mother’s own milk dried up, they were forced to purchase formula, and often had nothing but contaminated water to mix it with. Many diluted the formula to stretch it out, because they were so poor. They weren’t told that diluting the formula, especially with contaminated water, could lead to malnutrition and the death of their infants. 

The ensuing scandal and Nestle boycott brought about the creation of the International Code of Marketing Breast Milk Substitutes in 1981. The code states that baby food companies may not promote their products in hospitals or shops. They may not give free samples to mothers or give gifts to health workers or mothers. They may not give misleading information, and must explain the cost of using the formula. 

Nestle is still under scrutiny. The boycott was called off for a few years, but it is back in place, because, naturally, they’ve found ways around the code. The opportunity to make money from some of the poorest people on the planet was too alluring. Nestle exploits, creates misfortune, and then profits from that misfortune.

In Michigan, where Flint residents were poisoned by their tap water, Nestle is working to increase the pumping of spring water in Osceola Township. They pay nothing for the water they pump there. Nothing. In Fryeburg they pay next to nothing, and that isn’t enough. They always want more. Nestle always finds unscrupulous elected officials to help sell their town down the river – a river they’ll suck dry, just as they sucked the original Poland Spring dry.

Dear Fryeburg: there’s always a quid pro, as Fightin’ Bob LaFollette found when he investigated Albert Fall. Find it. And oust those who would sell your town.

Published as an op-ed in the October 13, 2016 edition of the Conway Daily Sun newspaper 

Score One for the Good Guys in Fryeburg

Poland Spring/Nestle trucks filling up at the pumping station in Fryeburg, ME.  Nestle pays $10 for that truckload of water. They sell it for $50,000. 

The fight for Fryeburg's water has been going on for many years now. The acrimony has caused deep and permanent rifts among townspeople. Nestle has bullied, intimidated, and harassed the folks who oppose the theft of their water. 

This just happened:

The entire board of the Fryeburg Water District resigned. This is excellent news for those who actually care about the water. The former board seemed interested only in making sure that there would be no citizen oversight of the water, and kissing up to Nestle. An election will be held in September to replace all of the trustees. Time to get some good folks on the board, who understand the need to protect the water - water that should belong to the town. 

Information about the battle to save the Fryeburg Water District:

August 30, 2012  - starts halfway down the page. 

September 4, 2012

September 20, 2012

Serendipity

The Oxford Dictionary defines serendipity as the occurrence and the development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way. Other descriptions include: a happy accident, pleasant surprise, or fortunate mistake. Serendipity is the act of finding of something good or useful while not looking for it. The Urban Dictionary defines it as, “A very good coincidence, often leading to something really awesome.”

The term serendipity comes from “The Three Princes of Serendip” by Horace Walpole.  It’s a fairy tale that takes place in the country of Serendippo, where the sons of the king were heroes who “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.” Serendipity has been voted one of the ten hardest English words to translate. It is a word that is nearly impossible to say without smiling. It is a word that feels good in one’s mouth.

It was one of David Emerson’s favorite words. He saw serendipity everywhere, happening all around him, all the time.

David and I met at the Conway Library, and bonded over a discussion of the sorts of cards Hallmark doesn’t make, but ought to. They don’t seem to make cards for unusual family situations – or for unusual families. Over the years we laughed often about the differences in our childhoods. He was surprised (and a little horrified) to learn that my family didn’t raise chickens. Of course he grew up on a farm, and I grew up in middle class suburbia, which was not chicken friendly in the sixties and seventies. Neither one of us turned out the way we were supposed to. I was supposed to marry a doctor and David was supposed to become a Baptist preacher. Oops.

David loved chickens, an enthusiasm I never shared. I came to embrace some of his interests, but not the chickens or any of his birds. Some who are reading this will remember David’s giant turkey Jerome, who loved to ride with him in the car. Jerome didn’t love me.  He had a parrot named Darwin who talked incessantly to him, but never said a word if I was in the house. Fortunately he had plenty of bird-obsessed friends, so it didn’t matter that I didn’t share his enthusiasm. He often went on chicken related adventures that resulted in some excellent stories, like the night a guy in a Wal-Mart parking lot taught him how to artificially inseminate a chicken with a plastic spoon. Those were the kinds of things that happened to David with some regularity, and the kinds of stories he most loved to tell.

My family belonged to a small ski club in N. Conway when I was a child, something that David relentlessly mocked me for, in the way that only a native can. (Or would.) We came up on ski trips in the winter and work weekends in the summer, where the men would work on the club building, have barbecues, and then we’d all swim in the Saco. It was always my parents’ dream to move to North Conway, and in 1974 they did, not long after my daughter was born. They went to live in the mountains, and I stayed in the city in Massachusetts. In the late seventies my father went to work at the Reporter, the old weekly newspaper. For a couple of years he gave me a gift subscription. The papers would arrive every week, and I would read them with great curiosity. What I saw in those papers bore no resemblance to life as I was experiencing it. I was a young mother living in a city, reading about rural, northern, small towns. It was like visiting a foreign country.

The Reporter had weekly columns from town correspondents, a tradition that is carried on to this day by the Conway Daily Sun. The content was a bit more formal back then, with updates on the social lives of various town members who received callers all very formally written: “Mrs. Alexander G. Bell received Mrs. Model T. Ford and Mrs. Oscar Myer for tea on Wednesday afternoon.” These weeklies were an important source of news and carefully couched gossip for the community. It’s sad to see them disappearing or being taken over by conglomerates that churn out sanitized blandness as a means of selling advertising.

In the Reporter, my favorites were the columns from Stow, Maine, written by the late Gwen Tarbell. Stow sounded like the strangest place in the universe to a young city dweller. Gwen Tarbell lived on a farm, and that was what she wrote about. One year she wrote about getting a bunch of new chicks in the spring, and naming them all Doris – or something like that. They all got the same name. Her stories of the farm, the comings and goings of her family, and the doings in Stow, Maine were all told with warmth and good humor.

I’d never been to Stow. I had no frame of reference – and this was long before Google. It was a strange, almost exotic place for me, and I was fascinated. One of the regular characters in Gwen’s stories from Stow was a young man who lived up the street. His name was David Emerson.

Serendipity.

There was no way to know as I was reading those stories that twenty five years later I would marry that young man.

Serendipity.

I’m sorry that I never got to meet Gwen and tell her that story, but she was long gone by the time David and I figured it all out. I like to think she would have gotten a kick out of it. We certainly did.

“History is an intricate web of timing, people, circumstances, and serendipity.”  Don Rittner

David Emerson: March 27, 1949 – August 30, 2009 

© sbruce 2013    Bi-weekly column for the August 23 edition of the Conway Daily Sun newspaper.