CapeCodToday Blog Chowder

Christmas in February--a look back at Occupy Santa in Woods Hole

Video of Occupy Santa event in Woods Hole in early December

Video by Jon Goldman

The holidays may have passed, but filmmaker Jon Goldman of Woods Hole provides us with one finally look at Santa. Well, sixty Santas actually, at the Occupy Santa event staged in Woods Hole at the beginning of December.

On that clear day, sixty "occupiers" in bright red, blow-up Santa suits took to the streets of the quaint seaside village in search of year-round jobs. 

Jon Goldman, the creator of the video, was also the organizer of the event. He also created the documentary Oil in the Family.

See Paul Rifkin's coverage of the event here.

Regular, orderly, violent & original

Reading recommendations [Politicus #1,097]

by David A. Mittell, Jr.

“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work,” wrote Gustave Flaubert. I believe that -- which may explain why my suits can charitably be called retro. But I do read books in the morning, making every rising sun a revision of certitudes. Once a year I like to recommend the best books encountered the year before. From 2011, there are six:

I. “Count Them One By One, Black Mississippians Fighting for the Right to Vote,” by Gordon A. Martin, Jr., retired Justice of the Massachusetts Trial Court. As a young lawyer in 1962 and 1963, Judge Martin went to Mississippi to work with the legendary John Doar of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, investigating the denial of voting registration to black citizens.

The book is superbly written and the personal chronicle beautifully told. Judge Martin, a lifelong Democrat, is eminently fair to principled Republicans like Mr. Doar, and he holds the Kennedy Administration accountable for failures such as the 1961 lifetime appointment of the unenlightened William Harold Cox to the federal bench. His account should be a textbook for future generations on the history of the Civil Rights Movement.

II. “A Key into the Languages of America,” by Roger Williams. Published in London in 1643 by the founder of Rhode Island, the text has been republished by Applewood Books of New Bedford, and is available seasonally at Plimoth Plantation. Williams writes in a spirit of great respect for the Narragansett, with whom he lived. He probably provides a more accurate picture of the Algonquian way of life than we usually get from modern historians and partial blood-descendants.

From New England to Quebec, Algonquian dialects were mutually intelligible. Williams notes that the half-naked Narragansett honored their word and the marriage bed: “When Indians heare that some there are/To thousand Whoredoms fall:/ They ask if such do go in Cloathes,/And whether God they know?” Williams means sexual abuse by priests in Europe. But he also understands that human judgment is individual, not racial: The Algonquians lived in fear of the Mohawk beyond the Hudson, who were said to fatten their prisoners of war, then eat them alive.

III. “The Gilded Age,” by Mark Twain & Charles Dudley Warner. Three of my best of 2011 are classics read or re-read on account of a student 49 years my junior – a blessing I commend to the Council on Aging. If Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn don't convince us that Mark Twain is a great writer, his lesser-known works do. “Massachusetts,” he notes in passing in 1873, “is in the state of Boston.” The book concerns what we would call the One Percent, and the foolish schemes of the other 99 percent desperate to join them. Unlike modern Occupiers, Twain protests with lancing wit and humor.

IV. “Fifty-nine in '84. Old Hoss Radbourn, Barehanded Baseball & The Greatest Season a Pitcher Ever Had,” by Edward Achorn. These are the Providence Browns – big league baseball before the Modern Era; and the sore-armed refugee from a slaughter house, who in 1884 won 59 games, inspired by his love for an enigmatic, probably syphilitic boarding-house madam.

Ed Achorn, a Providence Journal editor, is a prodigious researcher and a good story-teller. The broader history of Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, New York and Providence comes through in countless lost-and-found anecdotes. As good books must be, it is a labor of the author's love.

V. “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” by William Shakespeare. My fourth reading since 1959. At 16, I thought the witches were stupid. I didn't believe in such things, so there was no point. In more recent readings I understand that dramatically the witches create the mood of evil. More deeply, they highlight ambiguity in what controls human events. Shakespeare exposes but does not explain the mystery of how ordinary people can, with seemingly small suggestion, commit mass murder. The mystery is ours to contemplate forever. It is Shakespeare at his greatest.

VI. “Victory,” by Joseph Conrad. For English-speaking readers, the Polish/Ukrainian Josef Korzeniowski is a miracle – Tolstoy or Dostoevsky writing exquisite English prose. “Victory” is innocence and evil brilliantly juxtaposed. Sexual love in its purest form between paramount opposites, in the presence of paramount evil.

Somewhere in Dutch East India, a middle-aged Swedish expatriate is thrown together with an ostensibly helpless English girl, whom he saves from certain rape, and whose love and paramount strength saves him. When murdering marauders follow the pair to the Swede's isolated island, one hopes for a happy ending.

Whatever its ending, men and women find love in differences they once would not have accepted. All true love comes to that. Korzeniowski/Conrad, the novelist, and a seaman unto middle age, seems to have much in common with Shakespeare, bard of Stratford.

David A. Mittell, Jr. is a Boston-based political columnist.

365 Days of yoga poses from Kind Yoga # 31 with Zac

Link: http://youtu.be/Vq01Lw12GCI

Heres a really cool neck stretch if you have tension in neck and shoulder area. We're at Pan Davignon with Zac and some live jazz playing ... I love cape cod..talent, art, music everywhere - in the off season it takes a little searching for, but here it is, in hyannis.

http://youtu.be/Vq01Lw12GCI

What attracts attracts 271 sex offenders to this area

Is Cape Cod becoming a sex offender haven?

The red dots on this map each represents where a registered sex offender live in the Mid-Cape area.

187 on Cape Cod, 84 more in in towns just over the bridge

By Walter Brooks

Like a patient about to die of in the final stages of a dread disease, the Mid Cape towns of Hyannis, Dennis and Yarmouth are covered with a red rash of registered sex offenders, 95 living in those three town alone.

We know that local 12-Step groups of every stripe often suggest that there is a logical reason why Cape Cod has a higher than average percentage of alcoholics, drug addicts and other hopefuls now in recovery.

We wondered if this also might explain the seemingly large numbers of sex offenders who have located here as well.

It is documented that when people feel they have a serious problem like alcohol abuse, they seek the place where they previously were happy and free of alcohol and other drugs, and that place is often the vacation area of their youth. That's probably why every Cape town except three are on the list for the 75 towns with the highest number of liquor licenses.

This is one reason there are more scheduled A.A. meetings here per capita than in any other area of which we know. Cape Cod TODAY even has a regularly updated A.A. blog called K.I.S.S. (for Keep It Simple, Stupid).

There is no comparison between the human problems above with the evils of sexual abuse because all the former can be arrested by anyone willing to admit they have a problem, and then be prepared to do whatever it takes to stop.

Sex offenders, on the other hand, seldom if ever stop their predatory and heinous actions, and we wondered whether the unusually high number of sex offenders per capita living on Cape Cod moved here for similar reasons. (Editor's Note: We were wrong about this See this Letter to the Editor.)

Michael J. Hill. SORB photo.

Throw in the just-off Cape towns of Wareham and Plymouth where there are 28 more, and there are 163 registered sex offenders from Plymouth to Provincetown.

What's it mean for Cape Cod?

This prurient interest in sex offenders was prompted by a story in the Berkshire Eagle this week which reported that a Level 3 sex offender named Michael J. Hill, 37, was arrested and charged by police on Cape Cod with two counts of indecent assault and battery on a child under 14.

Hill is facing eight charges, including aggravated rape, kidnapping, assault with a dangerous weapon and threat to commit murder.

At his trial in Pittsfield which began Monday,  the alleged victim testified that she was held against her will and sexually assaulted over the course of about 20 days in late-January and February 2010.

Hill, a Level 3 sex offender which is a designation for those considered by the state to be at the highest risk for re-offending, has sexual assault convictions going back to 1989.

Cape has the same percentage of sex offenders as Boston

Over 75 % of our sex offenders
live in  the five towns of
Bourne, Dennis, Hyannis,
Wareham and Yarmouth.There are 216,902 people living on Cape Cod and 617,594 in Boston.

That means bucolic Cape Cod has about the same percentage of sex offenders as that big city.

I guess bucolic ain't what it used to be.

I'll bet most of you, like myself, assumed the sex offenders living here would mostly be in Hyannis and Wareham.

But tiny Dennis is #5 on the list with 16 sex offenders in that 2-mile wide town and Yarmouth and Bourne are at the top of the list ahead of Hyannis and Wareham.

Our alarm was discovering how many sex offenders have settled here, and our relief came when we discovered how easy it is to see WHO they are  and WHERE they live.

You simply go to this site, www.familywatchdog.us, type in the town name, and when the page appears, click on the "List" at top for the name and address of each offender.

• Yarmouth: 45 offenders
• Hyannis: 35 offenders
• Dennis:  25 offenders
• Bourne: 23 offenders
• Wareham: 21 offenders
• Plymouth: 17 offenders
• Harwich: 15 offenders
• Kingston: 13 offenders
• Plympton: 13 offender
• Falmouth: 13 offenders
• Duxbury: 11 offenders
• Mashpee: 10 offenders
• Carver: 9 offenders
• Brewster: 8 offenders
• Sandwich: 8 offenders
• Chatham: 2 offenders
• Provincetown: 2 offenders
• Eastham: 1 offender
• Orleans: 1 offender
• Truro: 1 offender
• Wellfleet: 1 offender

Sex offender information is also available on most every local police department's website as well.

Planetary Romance!

Dimensia and The Pointing Robot aka Mister Ohms canoodle amongst the Asteroids.
Handframed-and-matted 16x20,  Prismapencil-on-tracingpaper!

Cape Cod Five files to change structure

Sorry, no IPO here! Just a tool for long-term strategy and local focus

By Teresa Martin

Cape Cod Five Cents Savings Bank has filed paperwork to reorganize into a mutual holding company, according to published legal notices.

 In some places, this move opens the door to a capital-raising initial public offering (IPO) by the organization or even eventual acquisition of the bank -- but the Cape Cod Five structured its filing to prevent both those scenarios.

"We set up a structure that is very common for mutual banks, but we did in a way that is a little unique in that we have just one share, owned by the holding company," said Dorothy A. Savarese, president and CEO of The Cape Cod Five Cents Savings Bank.

Filings on record

Click here to see a larger version of the notice as it appeared in the local daily today.According to Federal Reserve Bank records, The Cape Cod Five Mutual Company of Harwich Port on January 27 2012 sought to become a mutual bank holding company by acquiring 100% of the voting shares of the current Cape Cod Five.

Additional legal notices describe this as a multi-stage transaction that begins by creating a new mutual savings bank. This new bank then reorganizes into a mutual holding company with a subsidiary banking institution in stock form.  Lastly, the current Cape Cod Five Cents Saving Bank merges into the newly formed stock savings bank and continues operating under the Cape Cod Five name.

One term, many uses

Banks adopt this type of structure for multiple reasons. For many, a stock structure enables the bank to raise capital from the markets. This means the bank can tap into funds for corporate investment, growth, or other business purposes.

In other cases, the conversion has served as the prelude for a sale to a larger bank.

Savarese says that the Cape Cod Five has no interest in either of these scenarios and, in contrast to these approaches, used the restructuring as a tool to prevent them.

"We did it for flexibility." - Dorothy Savarese, CC5 President & CEO

"We did it for flexibility," she said.

The 157-year old organization plans to use the holding company structure to ensure the bank remains tied to the community and held by its members. She also said it could serve as a possible future platform for developing or buying new businesses, keeping each as a separate and distinct entity.

Umbrella

She describes the restructuring as being a bit like an umbrella.  From the seagull eye above, the bank remains a mutual organization. But from within, different kinds of operations can co-exist without having to roll into one company.

"As we go down the road and develop different products and services, this give us more opportunity to be flexible and take advantage of opportunities in the market place," explained Savarese.

Billion raised since the 70s

According to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a "mutual" company is a company that is owned by its members instead by public or private shareholders.  Mutual savings banks first appeared in the early 1800; the structure was supposed to encourage the emerging middle class to put its cash in banks.

Deregulation in the 1970s started the wave of mutual to stock conversion. Since then, thousand of banks used deregulation to free up cash - according to Barron's more than $40 billion has been raised in this process.

During the 1990s, competition intensified and banks of all sizes came under increasing pressure to raise money, expand operations, and have financial tools for incenting employees. Many banks elected a mutual-to-stock conversion as means to this end.

For example, last week, in Wellesley MA, Wellesley Bank completed a similar conversion, but instead of issuing one stock to the mutual company, it created a community and public offering with millions of shares.

Its stock (WEBK) began trading January 26 on the Nasdaq Capital Market. During its subscription and community offering phase, 2,249,674 shares of common stock were sold in the subscription and community offering at $10.00 per share - raising $22.4 million. As of midday January 31 shares were trading at $12.03.

Not at the Five

"We have no need for additional capital; we are very well capitalized." - Dorothy Savarese, CC5 President & CEO Savarese stressed that the Five's intent is completely different.

She pointed out that instead of creating a stock entity with multiple shares, her bank took the rather unusual step of creating one lone share of stock. The mutual holding company owns that single share, creating the effect of a mutual bank that cannot be sold or traded.

"We have no need for additional capital; we are very well capitalized," she pointed out. "And we are really trying to make it very difficult for anybody in the future to change use from being a mutual organization."

"We have the same commitment to the community, to providing community banking services as always. We wanted the additional flexibility to grow and expand to meet future customer and community needs."

As intriguing as that statement sounds, the bank doesn't have any concrete plans for new launches. In fact, Savarese took pains to point out that many banks made this change decades ago and nothing changed. It's just good to plan ahead for what might come, she said.

"This is a thorough regulatory process," said noted. "You don't want to wait until there's something you want to do tomorrow to put it into place.

Time table

Now that the Cape Cod Five has filed for conversion, the application moves into the review cycle. On Feb 14, the state board of banking has a scheduled public hearing on the request in Boston.

In addition, the Board of Bank Incorporation and the Division of Banks will take written comments on the Cape Cod Five's filing through February 24.

Teresa Martin is a well-known Cape Cod technology and business leader who served as  C.E.O. of the Cape Cod Technology Council and was a founder and officer of the OpenCape Corporation, which is dedicated to fixing the Cape's dropped cell calls and upload issues. Read Teresa's tech blog, Cape Eyes on CapeCodToday.com here.

Get Some Meow Into Your Life

Pet Of The Week

Fred is a super sweet boy, He is about 5 years old. He was brought to the adoption center because he was found outside without a home. He is a mellow guy who loves to lay around in the sun. He would do well with children and he might do well with other cats. He would prefer not to live with dogs.

Thanks,
Lauren Twombly
MSPCA Centerville
1577 Falmouth Road
Centerville, MA 02632-2944
(508) 775-0940

League of Women Voters to host "Don't Just Stand There...Run" Forum in Harwich

Group to repeat successful political campaign "how-to" on February 15

The League of Women Voters of the Cape Cod area announced that they will once again host their "Don't Just Stand There...Run" training forum for citizens considering a run for political office.

The forum will be held on Wednesday, February 15 at 7 p.m. at the Harwich Community Center, 100 Oak Street in Harwich.

The knowledgeable panel of presenters includes:

• Sarah Peake, State Representative, 4th Barnstable District
• Linda Hutchenrider, Barnstable Town Clerk
• David Schropfer, Eastham Moderator and former Selectman
• Mary LeClaire, former County Commissioner
• Sean Gonsalves, Columnist, Cape Cod Times

Presenters will answer questions from the audience and offer insight into what makes a campaign successful.

To learn more about the League of Women Voters of the Cape Cod area, visit their website here.

Falklands Ho! on WGBH

Link: http://hitandrunhistory.com

Turn it UP.

Join Cape Cod's interpid Gumshoe Historians on WGBH in a few short weeks as we head deep into the Southern Atlantic for our third installment. The adventure of a lifetime continues. Hit and Run History: The Columbia Expedition follows the first American voyage 'round the world down to the Falklands, 300 miles east of the tip of South America.

In planes, trains, automobiles and boats, our crew ranges across the islands, tracking the shipboard violence and treacherous weather that sent a 19-year old sailor cowering in a cave amongst the penguins and ruins 7,000 miles from home.

Thanks to LAN Airlines, Ocean State Job Lot, Turismo Chile and the Hotel Orly for helping make this series possible.

A Sleeping Giant Awakes

We Americans are rousing ourselves from what has been too long a nap to join those who have taken to the streets to spread the Arab Spring across the globe. Occupiers have targeted the criminality, corruption, and greed of the top 1% that has resulted in the impoverishment of the rest of us.

What Should Occupy’s Primary Concern Be?

But the propaganda campaign that is now taking place to frighten us into supporting a war on Iran must be our top priority.

The current campaign is a carbon copy of the build-up prior to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. Many will recall the accounts of defectors who attested to Hussein’s nuclear program, of the charge that he had tried to buy yellow cake from Niger, of the purchase of aluminum tubes, of his deceiving the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspection teams, of the distortions of IAEA’s reports, and the lack of any media substantiation of these charges.

In February 2003, former secretary of state Colin Powell described the Iraqi WMD programs in his speech to the United Nations, hoping to persuade that body to back — to legitimize — an invasion of Iraq. The effort failed.

Later, in a September 9, 2005 interview by a New York Times reporter, Powell said that it had been “painful” for him to discover that the evidence for the weapons programs did not exist and to know that the speech would be “a permanent blot on his record.”

The war devastated Iraq, killing tens of thousands of civilians, contaminating areas from use of weapons containing depleted uranium that have resulted in hundreds of birth deformities, destroying water, sewage, and power systems, and forcing the country to its knees. All to gain control over Iraq’s liquid gold.

With a different constitution in hand, Iraqis elected a new government in December 2005. Since that time officials have signed contracts with hundreds of foreign corporations for maintaining, improving, and developing production of its oil. With the exception of Exxon-Mobil, no US corporation received such a contract.

This has allowed American CEOs to pretend that the US did not invade Iraq to obtain its oil. Let’s make no mistake, they have made out in a big way. It was reported in a NYTimes article (6/16/11) entitled “In Rebuilding Iraq’s Oil Industry, U.S. Subcontractors Hold Sway,” that four US-based firms, including Halliburton, have received lucrative subcontracts because of their advanced drilling technology.

Now our government, backed by the same corporate-owned media, is playing on our fears again, using the same charge that another country is acquiring WMDs and intends to use them against us — or Israel. Take your pick.

Little thought is being given by those taken in by this war-mongering as to what would befall Iran if it did actually develop a bomb and became the SECOND country in the world to use it. Isn’t it more plausible that IF Iran is developing a nuclear weapon it intends to use it as a nuclear deterrent in the same manner that prevented either of the two super powers from launching a first strike during the Cold War?

Of course, the US backed by Big Oil cannot state that it wants to wage war on another country for its oil any more than it could before the Iraq War.

In getting control of another people’s natural resource, we have already been there, done that when it comes to Iran. In 1953, the democratically-elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadech, nationalized Iran’s only oil firm, the British owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. He offered the company an agreement that gave it very favorable terms.

Nevertheless, CIA operatives at the instigation of the British initiated a campaign that brought Mossadegh down, re-empowered the Shah, the King of Kings, and set up the SAVAK, his hated security police. This lasted until a harbinger of the Arab Spring drove him from his Peacock Throne in December 1979.

William Blum writes in his book, Killing Hope: “One year after the coup, the Iranian government completed a contract with an international consortium of oil companies. Amongst Iran’s new foreign partners, the British lost the exclusive rights they had enjoyed previously, being reduced now to 40 per cent. Another 40 per cent now went to American oil firms, the remainder to other countries. The British, however, received an extremely generous compensation for their former property.”

The two western powers succeeded in making a point: any country that stands in the way of imperialist ambitions will pay a high price. That lesson still holds.

In looking at the map of the Middle East, we see that Iran lies between Iraq and Afghanistan, two countries that the US has already laid waste. To Iran’s northeast are several small countries, former republics of the now defunct Soviet Union. On its southeast corner, lies Pakistan, which we are now bombing. Further on, to the west of Iraq, lies Israel, a country that secretly developed a nuclear bomb, giving Iran reason enough to want its own. We can now add Libya’s resources. The Saudis have long since thrown in with us. Iran is the last piece in the designs of the West to obtain hegemony over the oil in the Middle East.

Implications for Climate Change

Not only would a war against Iran risk a Third World War, it would also negatively impact the climate change crisis, placing our survival on this planet in doubt. In a world that runs on enormously-profitable fossil fuels, corporate heads and the governments that they control have no motivation for addressing the climate change crisis (as well as the depletion of the finite resources of the earth) by agreeing to reverse the warming of the earth’s atmosphere.

The people of the world are in a protracted struggle over who will control the Earth’s resources. Mother Earth is now showing us the results of a hundred years of rapacious use of her bounty by the profiteers. We have failed to be stewards of her bounty, carefully using only what we need so that future generations will have their share. We are now perilously close to the tipping point, the point at which reversing the crisis will be a very steep climb, indeed.