Boston Cod

NewPage A Case In Point: U.S. Paper Industry On The Ropes As Industry Slides

The mating sound of dinosaurs

By Greg O'Brien

NewPage reported that its profit dropped 62 percent in the first quarter of 2010.

All eyes in the paper industry, with consequences from Cape Cod to California and around the world, will be focused once again on NewPage Corp early next month as the embattled company releases its second quarter earnings report.  NewPage in many ways is emblematic of segments of corporate America today, a case study in progress.

The earnings report announcement comes in the wake of the resignations last month of top company executives: NewPage President and Chief Executive Officer E. Thomas Curley, Board Chairman Mark Suwyn and Vice President of Human Resources Michael Edicola. Curley had been CEO for only a few months, the fifth CEO at the Ohio-based company in four years in an industry plagued with severe losses and rigorous competition from the electronic media. The company is a unit of NewPage Group Inc., which is owned by the private investment firm Cerberus Capital Management LP.  Curiously enough, in ancient Greek and Roman mythology, Cerberus is a multi-headed hound that guards the gates of Hades.

Earlier this year, the company reported that its profit dropped 62 percent in the first quarter of 2010, in spite of an increase in sales and an increase in market share in coated paper sales volume, and NewPage year-end debt in ’09 was up $697 million over the previous year, according to reports. The company had planned an IPO, but in May withdrew an initial public offering plan that was underwritten by Goldman Sachs.

Former CEO Curley has been replaced in the interim by Robert Nardelli, CEO of Cerberus Operating & Advisory Co. and former chairman of Chrysler LLC and Home Depot Inc; Nardelli was named director and non-executive chairman. Nardelli has the distinction of being named in a CNBC survey as one of the “Worst American CEOs of All Time.” Ranking Nardelli 17th  on the list, CNBC wrote on its website that “Nardelli was fired from Home Depot after losing market share, alienating executives, downplaying customer service, and refusing to cut his fat pay package. He was then hired by the private equity group Cerberus, which put him in charge of its struggling Chrysler unit (and overseeing its Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing). There he took billions in government aid, only to face an ultimatum: Merge or face certain liquidation.” CNBC noted that “Nardelli’s Home Depot exit package of $210 million was regarded as one of the largest ever.”

It would appear that Nardelli has the same challenge before him yet again—both on internal and external business fronts and in public relations sectors. Stereotypical of today’s corporate culture, Nardelli’s tenure at Chrysler was highlighted by the private jet he took to Washington, D.C. to plead for a government bailout. Not surprisingly, NewPage bonds” fell the most in almost six weeks” after Nardelli took over, Bloomberg Businessweek reported. Now there is industry speculation that the company will be sold as a whole or Balkanized, broken into smaller divisions and sold off separately, before the end of the year.

The Miamisberg-Ohio-based NewPage owns paper mills in Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Nova Scotia, Canada with yearly capacity to produce 4.4 million tons of paper. The company has about 7,500 employees. And for a firm that posted a $175 million net loss the first quarter of 2010, a 62 percent drop in spite of an overall sales gain of 13 percent, a company that—observers say—faces potential sale or possible dissolution of some manner by the end of the year, NewPage indeed takes care of the help, but only in executive suites and the boardroom. Even recent management castoffs exit with a smile.  The math is stunning.

In sharp contrast to earning statements, it was reported late last month that several NewPage corporate executives are expected to receive millions of dollars in bonuses on the heels of poor company performance and mill closures, assuming they stay with the company through the end of 2012 and meet certain performance criteria, according to company financial reports filed last month with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, NewPage said it will give outgoing executive Curley, CEO for just four months, $1.1 million in severance pay—equal to twice his base pay, as part of his contract, as well as a $165,000 pro-rated performance bonus. Suwyn will receive a $2 million severance payout. And Michael Edicola, vice president of human resources who also recently resigned, will receive $650,000 for severance and a $243,000 prorated performance bonus. Two weeks ago, yet another NewPage senior management official resigned— Mike Marziale, senior vice president of marketing, strategy and general management. Marziale will receive more than $1.4 million in payments from NewPage, according to a newspaper report and documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Great country, America! When do the rest of us get to become citizens.

NewPage's long-term incentive plan, adopted in January, provides key executives with cash bonuses, based on performance and/or length of service, as incentives for staying with the company, according to SEC documents filed earlier this year. Such nosebleed executive bonuses must be debilitating to hundreds of workers unemployed or temporarily laid off as a result of recent downtime and mill closures. 

On related fronts, there is a serious threat to U.S. printing jobs from what appears to be   unfair and anti-competitive paper industry tactics, assisted by generous tax loopholes and subsidies, that are restricting industry and distorting the market to raise prices as high as possible. While some paper company executives are getting rich, the American printing industry is on the brink. Overall demand for paper is down due to market conditions and competition from electronic publishing. More than 73,000 printer and graphic communications jobs have been lost since mid-2008, with thousands more expected, according to reports. In today’s economy, a rise in paper costs—a printer’s biggest expense—is ruinous.

For corporate executives, the best defense is often a good offense: deflect and point fingers around the world, wrapping oneself in the American flag. NewPage and other American paper companies today are pressuring the International Trade Commission (ITC) and the Department of Commerce to investigate whether countries like China and Indonesia have engaged in illegal “dumping” of coated paper suitable for multi-colored catalogues, books, magazines, labels, graphics, greeting cards and other products requiring high-quality print graphics. Backed by U.S. labor unions, NewPage and others are seeking tariffs of up to 100 percent on coated paper from China and Indonesia. Given corporate strategies of shutting down North American mills and taking paper off the market, this would have catastrophic impacts on the printing industry and other related industries, now struggling with the worst economy since the Depression.

Some revealing statistics: NewPage shut down six mills in 2008. It closed its paper mill in Niagara, Wisconsin, the only major source of employment in a city of 1,800. The mill provided 319 jobs, with workers averaging $60,000-a-year. According to local officials, the plant had two potential buyers, but NewPage let the mill sit idle. Wrote newspaper columnist Ed Lowe at the time, “The hardship of the mill closure here parallels that of Kimberly (Wis.), where 600 well-paying paper mill jobs were scuttled as part of the evolving business plan of NewPage…Both mill closures devastated their communities…Some lifelong residents of Niagara worry that their city’s future ended with the production at the mill.”

In Kimberly, NewPage refused to sell to two buyers and declined the support of the Governor to keep the plant open. “This is a case of a corporation taking a productive, profitable plant and closing it, and refusing to sell it to anyone else,” Andy Nirchl, president of the United Steel Workers local, said at the time.

Other similar examples:

• In March 2010, NewPage bought out Domtar’s coated-groundwood (CGW) business,
• In May, NewPage reportedly reached an agreement with Kruger to ensure that company doesn't restart its soon-to-be-idled coated-paper operation at its Quebec mill.
• NewPage does not appear to have the resources to invest in itself or the industry. In Maine, one of the most important paper producing states, the president of its pulp and paper association says they “haven’t seen any new coated free sheet paper mills in decades.”
• Notes Verle Sutton, Chicago-based editor of Reel Time Report, a unit of industry data provider Forestweb Inc. in Los Angeles, “NewPage’s prices are higher than its competitors. If NewPage was more reasonable about price increases, they wouldn’t have driven out demand and they wouldn’t have had to diminish capacity like they have.”

Nationally and internationally, there is clearly a double standard at play in the paper industry. Fair trade laws, governed by agencies like the ITC are written to guarantee a level playing field on which all companies and industries can compete on equal terms, without unfair help from governments and other sources. Ironically, U.S. paper firms that are accusing China and Indonesia of gaining unfair subsidies are actually the ones benefiting most from the largesse of market-distorting government subsidies. Analysts report that U.S. paper makers as an industry received a collective $9 billion in “black liquor” tax subsidies last year. Observed U.S. Sen. Jeff Bingham, the Democrat from New Mexico, “Congress never intended that this tax credit would be used in this way to avoid payment of taxes. Added U.S. Sen. John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat, “Bad economic times are no excuse to cheat, and that’s the only word for what these companies are doing.”

The Obama Administration is clearly in a political squeeze—support the U.S paper industry and its constituent-rich unions, or risk losing thousands more jobs in the printing industry.  In supporting the paper industry and its unions, President Obama will contribute to a disruption of paper supplies, a reduction in the number of available paper supplier options, and the elimination of U.S. printer jobs because some publishers will simply ship business to less costly printers in Canada or Mexico or cutback on printing products. Dr. Thomas Prusa, Ph.D., a professor of economics at Rutgers University, is referenced on the website saveprinterjobs.com as noting that “market-distorting protective actions, such as tariffs, destroy 10 to 20 times as many jobs as they create, most often because the jobs move outside the U.S. Once those jobs are lost, they don’t return. In printing, jobs would move to Canada and Mexico and hundreds of printers would have to close their doors.”

There is plainly no legal or factual basis to suggest that Chinese and Indonesian paper producers are harming domestic production of coated paper: there has been no significant increase in imports, sales are at normal levels and domestic companies are not losing business. Domestic shipments of coated paper are down only because overall demand is down in this economy, not as a result of alleged unfair practices of the Chinese and Indonesian producers and importers. But U.S. paper companies are asking the federal government to keep the Chinese and Indonesian coated paper competitors out of the U.S. market through high tariffs.

A tariff on imported coated paper from China and Indonesia would hurt the U.S printing industry in the following ways: paper supplies would be disrupted; deliveries would be delayed; paper supplier options would be reduced; higher costs will force publishers to seek cheaper printing options in Mexico and Canada or eliminate printing products; thousands more U.S. printer jobs would be lost and the competitiveness of the U.S. printing business would be at risk.

In recent developments:

• The U.S. Department of Commerce, which typically favors domestic industries in these disputes, has insured two preliminary decisions that recommended extremely high tariffs.
• The preliminary tariffs are so high and out of line with international standards that Indonesian and Chinese government are expected to ask the World Trade Organization to intervene in the case this summer.
• The case will be settled in late October or early November by the U.S. International Trade Commission, which must determine if U.S. industries have been materially harmed by the imports in question.

Any way you cut the cards in the paper industry deck, real money indicates that U.S. paper companies, backed by special interests, are the aggressors, not the victims of market distortion.
Greg O'Brien, a freelance writer, is former editor, publisher and president of Cape Cod Publishing Company and The Cape Codder Printery, and was a founding managing director of Community Newspaper Company, formerly headquartered in Boston.

Cold Front; Icy Conditions Prevail

What Hell Looks Like When It Freezes Over In Massachusetts!

Scott Brown: 52%

Martha Coakley: 47%

To the Nation:

In Massachusetts, we've given you the Pilgrims, the Great Awakening Revival of the early 1700s, the American Revolution and now this: the greatest individual political upset of our lifetime.

It all began here, and the revolution continues.

We've restored the balance of power. Now, is there anything else we can do for you today?

Go Brown! Keep on truckin'!

Codfish

Coakley Fiddles While Massachusetts Burns

Time is money, particularly when it’s the public’s money. And so why is Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley wasting time?
 

Coakley launched an investigation a year ago into whether the state’s largest health insurance company and its biggest healthcare provider may have illegally colluded to hike the price of health insurance statewide, over the last nine years, noted a Boston Globe report on January 23, 2009.
 
Still no public word. Why the delay, Christy Mihos, Massachusetts Republican gubernatorial candidate, is asking?
 
Attorney General Coakley last year  “sent formal demands for information to Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts and Partners HealthCare…calling for a detailed account of their contract negotiations,” the Globe reported, citing several sources.
 
Since 2000, the Globe stated, “Blue Cross has boosted the rate it pays for medical care by Partners doctors and hospitals by 75 percent, dramatically more than the increases given to most other Massachusetts hospitals. Blue Cross now pays $2 billion a year to Partners, parent company of Massachusetts General and Brigham and Women's hospitals.”
 
Coakley's announced investigation last year came just weeks after the Globe Spotlight Team reported that “the leaders of Partners and Blue Cross made a private agreement in 2000 under which Blue Cross would give Partners a significant increase in payments as long as Partners obtained similarly big pay increases from Blue Cross's competitors. The deal—never written down because Partners lawyers feared that the agreement was legally risky—required Blue Cross and its competitors to raise insurance premiums to pay Partners, ushering in a decade of rapidly escalating healthcare costs.”
 
Partners and Blue Cross officials have insisted they have done nothing wrong. But State Inspector General Gregory W. Sullivan had called the attorney general's probe "historically significant."
 
Significant, it now appears, for its lack of timely results.
 
“Even the Big Dig is small potatoes to the cost increases that our HMOs have put upon their customers over the past ten years,” said Mihos.   “Double Digit increases each and every year for ten straight years, and these firms are all non-profit or not for profit.”
 
“The base salaries of their Chief Executive Officers rose at over 20 percent each year,” Christy adds.  “Last Year the Boston Globe summed up the conspiracy between the large HMOs and Partners Healthcare to raise prices. It’s all there on the record. If this were a tobacco firm, or a lender, Attorney General Coakley would be all over this. This rip-off is right under her nose. It’s easy to understand why we have the highest healthcare costs in the nation!”

Lenahan O'Connell: An Irishman For All Seasons

By Greg O'Brien

From the Boston Irish Reporter

If the map of Ireland could assume a face, it would be the mug of John T. Lenahan O'Connell, patriarch of a most prominent Boston Irish Catholic family with ties to the Cape that has boasted among its ranks of an extended kin a score of attorneys and jurists, three U.S. Congressmen, esteemed entrepreneurs and notable physicians. "Lenahan" to all, O'Connell at 95-who still practices law four days a week at the family's celebrated 108-year-old Milk Street law firm, O'Connell & O'Connell-holds court over a clan with historic roots to County Cork, County Mayo and the Irish War of Independence.

As Democrat and independent-minded as Thomas Jefferson, the O'Connells over the years have crossed political swords with such political icons as James Michael Curley, John "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, Martin "The Mahatma" Lomasney, one of Boston's toughest ward bosses, and the crafty politico "Billy" Galvin. "On national and international scenes, the family had encounters with presidents and prime ministers, generals and admirals, prosecutors and criminals, Irish rebels and Nazi leaders," as noted in the published family history written by O'Connell, The O'Connell Family of Massachusetts. "Justly so, the history of the O'Connell family...serves as a microcosm of the Irish people, who, denied their basic rights and liberties for centuries, chose exile and undertook perilous ocean passages to come to America. Those exiles who survived, prevailed, and carved out their niche in the United States serve as a continuous living testament to the determination of the Irish people to endure and succeed."

And so welcome to the O'Connell family and its prelate, Lenahan O'Connell.

On the lip of St. Patrick's Day, O'Connell-a close associate of Boston mayors and dignitaries of the day, and who attended Sunday School in Brookline for a spell with John F. Kennedy-stretches out in a comfortable living room sofa chair in his Jamaica Plain home where he has lived since 1952. He is consuming yet another book, one of about five a month he reads, Irish/Charles G. Halpine In Civil War America. All business and all Boston, he inquires of a visitor in a tone that could cut through concrete, "You from around here?"

Satisfied, at least, that an interloper from the United Kingdom hasn't gained access, O'Connell opens up with a roar. "No one has any perspective any more," says O'Connell, raised during the Great Depression. "People generally are not interested in saving, serving, or until recently, living within their means. They expect the government to step in and do everything to bail us out. We've lost something in our culture; the old values are gone. There's a hole and it needs filling. And no stimulus package will patch that."

One way to fill the gap, he says, is through reading. "It's sad, people don't read anymore," he adds, noting that he has a personal library of about 1,000 books. "Reading teaches one about the history of our own existence-who we are, where we are and how we got there."

The nonagenarian, one of two surviving sons of 12 children, looks to his late parents for perspective-his mother Marisita Lenahan O'Connell, the daughter of John T. Lenahan IV, who was a distinguished attorney and congressman from Pennsylvania; and his Harvard-educated father, Joseph F. O'Connell, founder of the family law firm and a two-term Congressman who lost to Curley. Both were prodigious readers, who inspired their children in writing and oratory.

O'Connell, named for his Lenahan grandfather, recalls in a book he wrote about the law firm on its 100th anniversary that his father constantly insisted that his children "always write the words down." The senior O'Connell believed that the spoken word is all too soon forgotten, "no matter how powerful and eloquent."

"You must always write them down to keep them from being lost and to ensure they will be preserved for future generations," the father urged his nine sons and three daughters-Joseph F. Jr., Lenahan, Frederick P, Finbarr, Marisita, Kevin, Brendan, Meta, Lelia, Conleth, Diarmuid, and Aidan. O'Connell's surviving brother Diarmuid lives in Cohasset.

The elder O'Connell, the cornerstone of Lenahan's life and whose reflection is always in sharp focus within him, also taught his children about passion. "To succeed in life, you must have enthusiasm," he told them. "Next, energy, then a thorough training in some business or profession. I strongly believe in training. Life is not altogether chance, and the best training attainable is none too good...I don't believe in chance. A man largely makes his own chances. The opportunities are always there. The thing to do is grasp them."

His father's grounding transcends generations to hardworking farmers who tilled the soil in County Cork and his mother's grounding traces back to County Mayo. Education and intellectual enlightenment became the plowshare here. His mother was raised in a privileged and highly educated Wilkes-Barre, Pa. family. His father, the oldest of seven children of Irish immigrants, James and Elizabeth O'Connell, grew up in Dorchester, attended Boston College where he graduated in 1893, founded and was captain of the school's first football team there, graduated from law school in 1896 and a year later opened his own firm for general law practice-a year that President William McKinley negotiated the annexation of Hawaii and Boston opened the nation's first subway. The firm's first office was in Fields Corner. Irish in those days need not apply for rents downtown. The doors eventually opened on Milk Street.

Lenahan's political and professional instincts were learned at his father's knee. The senior O'Connell, self-reliant like his son, never mixed well with the political and business elite, both Brahman and Irish-from Curley to "Honey Fitz," although he walked the same paths, his more directed, theirs more serpentine.

"My father was never one of them," he writes of his dad. "He was never accepted by them. He wasn't looking for a job or to getting into an election every year. They understood that he was basically a lawyer and idealist and really didn't want anything from the machine. No matter, they ganged up on him at every chance...It was the old bit about, ‘don't get mad, get even."

While his father loyally and assiduously supported the Democratic party at the local, state and national level, even remarking once that "the salvation of the nation depends upon proper use of political power by those of the Democratic faith," the party establishment never appreciated the effort. "He'd break his back for them, but they treated him very badly," O'Connell says.

But his father never got mad; he was one of the most successful lawyers in the country and won election to Congress from the 10th District for two terms in 1907, the first Boston College graduate to be elected to the House of Representatives. In his initial primary, he defeated Democratic State Senator Edward Logan (for whom Logan International Airport was named), but in 1910, he lost to Curley, a Galway man, who ran a smear campaign in Galway-dominated South Boston that promoted O'Connell "as a nice man who couldn't win." A baseball player of note, who once had a tryout with John McGraw's New York Giants, O'Connell persevered in politics until the late innings, running unsuccessfully for mayor of Boston and for the U.S. Senate. He then grew his law practice, and continued his involvement in Irish causes.

Nice guys don't always finish last. At a White House reception, O'Connell met his wife-to-be Marisita, just months from the end of his second term. After a dance with her, President Theodore Roosevelt took him aside and urged him, "O'Connell, if you let that lovely young lady get away, you'll regret it for the rest of your life!"

No regrets for either, and for a dozen sibilings. Lenahan was raised in Brookline for a year, then Brighton near Cleveland Circle where the family attended St. Ignatius of Loyola parish, and contributed generously to the church. More of a scholar and a thinker than an athlete (a brief tenure in football as a center), Lenahan attended Boston Latin, English High and Boston College-living at home, packing potatoes when he was younger at the local A&P, then working summers in his dad's law firm. After graduating from BC in 1934, he attended Harvard Law for a year, then was asked to leave. "They didn't want me back," he says, noting he fell two grade points short. "I wanted to drop out and go into business, but dad insisted otherwise."

O'Connell then attended Boston University School of Law, graduating in 1938 and joining his father's firm. In 1942, he married Priscilla Halloran of Boston. The couple met at her father's Summer Street fish market and restaurant, called Litchfield's. The couple had three sons: Lenahan Louis, who teaches sociology at the University of Kentucky; Donn, who works in Boston in real estate; and Brendan Halloran, who is active in the Right-To-Live Movement and principal host of the television show, "Life Matters." He lives with his father in Jamaica Plain, surrounded by other family members. His wife died in 1995.

A graduate of the Massachusetts Military Academy where he received a lieutenant's commission, O'Connell was called to active duty in 1942. He then studied at the army's Judge Advocate School at the University of Michigan, and served as an artillery officer with the 79th and 86th Divisions. Detailed to the Judge Advocate General Division, he served in New Guinea, the Philippines and Occupied Japan after the bomb had been dropped, and later served in the army reserve as a lieutenant colonel.

Like his father, active in public and community service, O'Connell was a state assistant attorney general from 1948 to 1952, was appointed in 1962 by Boston Mayor John F. Collins as a trustee of the Boston Public Library, serving on its board for ten years, overseeing the library's historic expansion as president. O'Connell also has been a trustee of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and has been active in the American Ireland Fund, the Eire Society of Boston, the American Irish Historical Society, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, and the Charitable Irish Society.

At the end of a long interview, O'Connell, still stretched out in his sofa chair, shows no signs of fatigue. Asked about retirement, he snaps, "What would I do with myself?"

Until recently, he walked a mile and a half, four days a week to take a subway to work from Forest Hills to work closely with his nephew in the practice, Joseph F. O'Connell, III. What keeps Lenahan going? Sounding like his father, he on cue, "Passion, energy and the will to learn." Dum calidum sentis farcinem mande bidentis, as they would say at BC.

There is no doubt that John T. Lenahan O'Connell, weeks from his 96th birthday, will keep on learning as far as his remarkable intellect will take him, and there is equal promise that those close to him in the process will learn far more from him.

(Greg O'Brien is editor and president of Stony Brook Group, a publishing and political/communications consulting company based in Brewster. The author/editor of several books, he is a contributor to numerous regional and national publications.)

Eulogy to Virginia Brown O?Brien: A life of Giving

(Note: Virginia Brown O’Brien, the mother of ten children and grandmother to 21,was buried Thursday in North Eastham on Outer Cape Cod—barely four months after her husband of 60 years, Francis Xavier O'Brien passed away after a long, painful illness. A selfless caregiver in every way, Virginia died after an assault of advanced Alzheimer's that she had kept at bay while caring for her husband, letting go in complete exhaustion only near the end of his life. A eulogy delivered by her son, Greg, on May 29. 2008 at Our Lady of the Cape Catholic Church in Brewster is posted here in honor of Virginia, and for extended family and friends, from Cape Cod to California, and others, to know of her bountiful love, faith and devotion. Her life in all ways underscores the devotion of the Greatest Generation of women in recent memory ever to serve their families.) 

By Greg O’Brien

We have to stop meeting like this!

God doesn’t give you more than you can handle, it is said.

But I think the Lord has us O’Briens mixed up with someone else.

Two lives. Two deaths. Two funerals. Four months.

Rips one apart at the seams. My parents were individuals of great timing. Dad died on my brother Tim’s birthday. Mom today is buried on my sister Lauren’s.

Today I, too, want to talk briefly about the superglue that has held us all together. It is an appropriate word indeed.

Two days before my Mom’s death, I sat with her at the nursing home. She had pneumonia and an oxygen tube in her nose. She was scared. I told her not to worry, that we’d all stick by her side.

She turned to me in her advanced Alzheimer’s state, looked me in the eye, and said, “Like glue!”

Virginia Brown O’Brien defined motherhood, and in an age today when worldly accomplishment is all too often the mark of achievement, her selfless devotion to her late husband, Francis Xavier O’Brien, and her ten children are testimony to a higher standard.

A woman of considerable artistic talent and achievement as a schoolteacher, she forever put her family first—whether it was a sacrifice of her time, her resources or her considerable emotion. She was dutiful beyond all measure, and in an era when we honor the Greatest Generation, as we should, Virginia O’Brien stands out among the Greatest Generation of women of her day—mothers who helped shape and define their spouses and children in diverse ways, both in what they were in life and are today in our memories.

Surviving O’Brien family members—her children and a score of grandchildren—will live in her shadow, a wide swath of grace that comforts extended family households from Cape Cod to California.

My mother, Virginia, was forever Irish, as stunning as the fields of Tipperary, and an artist in every way—was the bond of the O’Brien household—the self-sacrificing link, as my sister Maureen describes, that stitched us all together and made us whole. She gave her life to give us life. The caregiver. To my father—a devotion in her “golden years” that would sap the energy of a titan and test the patience of an angel. To her children—a Christ-like complete surrender that sought nothing in return. She gave us the strength to ask for more, never asking of herself. She was a Rock, as my brother Andy calls her. Always in the moment, as Paul would say.

Barely five feet tall and a hundred pounds, Mom could bowl us over—knock us right off our feet—with the largesse of her great intellect, wisdom and ceaseless love. Good love and tough love. Always justified and in abundant measure. For she could burn your corneas with a cold stare when you were wrong, one that penetrated deep into the soul. There were times around her that I felt like Saul on the road to Damascus. But redemption is a wonderful thing. You have to give it to get it, and my mother had infinite capacity to forgive.

Mom, “Ginny,” as my dad and friends called her, was a woman of great faith—in parochial terms a Catholic and a Christian by every test of scripture. And she would often talk freely about her faith, and the peace of knowing that her spirit would always live on. She prayed in dutiful spirit for us everyday. I believe up until the moment she died.

One of three siblings, all now deceased; Mom was the end of the line. She was born and raised in privilege on Manhattan’s West Side, in the shadows of the Museum of Natural History where she played hopscotch on the sidewalk and where milk was delivered in a horsed-drawn carriage. Her father, George, was successful in Manhattan in real estate and insurance. He owned several Brownstones, and during the Great Depression forgave the rent defaults of his tenants, to the point it greatly diminished his resources. Her mother Loretta, was a kind and caring mother, and a loving grandmother to us.

Mom was educated in a French convent school and excelled at the College of New Rochelle, then worked briefly at Bankers Trust in New York City before marrying a young, handsome Navy Lieutenant. The rest is family history. All in Rye, New York. For almost 20 years, she taught second grade at the parochial Most Holy Trinity in nearby Mamaroneck and St. Gregory the Great in Harrison, before retiring to the Cape with my Dad many years ago.

But all this hardly tells the story. It is as impossible to capture the spirit of this woman, as it is to command the wind, or order the tides. Mom’s spirit is with us today. You can feel it.  It is in this church. It is in the homes of her children. It is on the beach at Coast Guard and Nauset Light in Eastham where she loved to bodysurf. Her spirit is in our hearts. Forever. And nothing can take that from us.

When Alzheimer’s made its numbing assault in the last year, Mom was captivated by yellow trucks and cars as we drove her around. “See that yellow car,” she would say. “Look, there’s another one. I can’t believe this!” We, too, began seeing them. My brother Tim and I now drive yellow cars. Yellow is the color of angels.

Say what you want, think what you must, but I believe the Lord sent his angels to cover Mom in her final days after she had poured her spirit out on our father. On the day, not long ago, when my brother Tim and I took Mom to Epoch nursing home in Brewster, perhaps the hardest day of our lives, I noticed as we pulled out onto Route 6 in Eastham that there were two yellow cars in front of us. And two yellow cars behind us. I called my wife on the cellphone to tell her about it. As we drove along Route 6 and one yellow car peeled off, another took its place. It happened several times, all the way to Brewster. “There’s another one! I can’t believe it!” Mom said.

What we can all believe about Mom today is that she is a peace—with Dad, her sons Martin and Gerard, her parents, and with her God. Perhaps all surrounded by yellow cars.

In her final moments, we told her it was Ok to go. We gave her our blessing. We told her we’d stick together. She took us at our word. She lived in the moment.

Rest in peace, Mom. You deserve it.

A final brief postscript: Mom knew how I hated flying because the airlines always lost one of my bags. We’d talk about it all the time. When I flew back from North Carolina yesterday after attending my daughter Colleen’s graduation from Elon, sure enough one of my bags was missing at Green Airport in Providence. After a computer check, US Airways determined that the bag, under another name, had been sent to Akron, Ohio. Someone at the counter had put the wrong sticker on it. The airline checked the passenger name on the misplaced sticker: It was Brown. My mother’s maiden name.

Even in death, Mom. You’re still the boss; you’re calling the shots. You knew I liked a good ending to a story, and you gave me one. Now wipe that smile off your face, and please find my bag!

From Cape Cod To San Juan Capistrano: There's Nothing Super About Superdelegates

By Greg O’Brien, Codfish Press

And you thought your vote counted. Hey, wake up and smell the superdelegates!

By any current measure of Democratic politics, the 2008 Democratic presidential nominee could be chosen by party insiders—about 20 percent of the delegates to the party’s national convention in Denver this August who can vote as they see fit. That’s 796 privileged “superdelegates” out of 2,025 needed to win—mostly a bunch of middle-aged white guys who comprise the party’s congressional members, governors, mayors of large cities and towns and state party leaders. Hanging chads have nothing on these boyos. So much for the Democratic process and the party of inclusion that adopted the superdelegate rule 1982 to shore up the power of party leaders during the freewheeling primary and caucus season, and to prevent the nomination of an unelectable rube from outside the mainstream. Loosely translated: give us your tired, your poor, your hungry and disenfranchised, but don’t expect them to run our party. No way!

And don't be misled by front page New York Times headlines that the lunch pail masses have spoken: “Obama’s Support Grows Broader: A Surge Past Clinton.”

Braying Hilary Clinton—a superdelegate herself with an Associated Press delegate projection of 1,262—is hoping the superdelegate structure will break her freefall of 11 primary loses to Barack Obama, who has a slight AP delegate projection lead with 1,351 delegates. Quoting Clinton’s communications director Howard Wolfson, the Boston Globe reported that “Clinton will not concede the race to Obama if he wins a greater number of pledged delegates by the end of the primary season, and will count on the 796 elected officials and party bigwigs to put her over the top, if necessary.”

Said Wolfson, “I want to be clear that neither campaign is in a position to win this nomination without the support of the votes of the superdelegates.” Clinton now has a projected 241-to-181 edge over Obama in declared superdelegates.

Not to be outdone when it comes to manipulating party politics, Republicans have a patrician system of their own with 463 unbound delegates, all elite elected officials and party leaders in a primary system that requires 1,191 delegates to secure a presidential nomination—irrelevant with John McCain’s AP projected 957 delegates to Mike Huckabee’s weedy 254, which gives the former Arkansas governor about as much chance of winning the White House as Gomer Pyle had of going to Harvard. Shazam!

Of late, there have been repeated calls from the middle of the political spectrum and some from the left and right to eliminate superdelgates and unbound delegates, permitting presidential nominations to more precisely reflect the popular vote. A primary ballot in Roxbury or the Bronx ought to count as much as a vote cast in abounding Westchester, Fairfield and Middlesex counties without added weight from party leaders in the heat of a convention fight.

Our Founding Fathers certainly didn’t have superdelegates in mind when they fashioned the republic. The thought of such would have revolted them.

Bush Taking Aim On A Spy Satellite: Shoot To Kill!

By Greg O'Brien, Codfish Press

Tom Clancy couldn’t make this stuff up; even Buck Rogers would be hard pressed to deliver on it: take out a spherical toxic fuel tank–about 36 inches wide in a failing 5,000-pound spy satellite the size of a school bus hurtling toward earth about 150 miles up–with a single shot from a Standard Missile 3 that was initially designed to intercept a ballistic projectile in flight, not a spacecraft. And if you miss, 1,000 pounds of deadly hydrazine, a lethal fuel used to maneuver the errant satellite launched in December, 2006, will be spread out over “an area the size of two football fields, and anyone caught in it could suffer lung damage and possibly die, warns Graham Candler, a University of Minnesota aerospace engineering professor, in a USA Today report.

You won’t have to wait for the DVD. The Pentagon, in spite of international protests and second-guessing in the homeland, plans to fire the intercept this week from a navy cruiser in the North Pacific. Sounding like roughneck Harry Stamper (the indefatigable Bruce Willis), who “never, never missed a depth that I have aimed for, and by God, I am not going to miss this one,” President Bush gave the order Thursday.

“This is all about trying to reduce danger to human beings,” asserted James Jeffrey, deputy national security advisor. 

Well, not exactly, say critics, borrowing a line from the movie Independence Day when it was determined the government had lied about an alien presence at Area 51 in Roswell, New Mexico. Detractors and some foreign governments insist the U.S. is just showing off—an excuse to test an emergent anti-satellite weapon, rather than saving innocent lives or shielding classified information, a show of American muscle that could set back disarmament talks the U.S. seems to be resisting. “Similar spacecraft re-enter the atmosphere regularly and break up into pieces,” reports the Associated Press, quoting Ivan Oelrich, vice president for strategic security programs at the Federation of American Scientists.

Perhaps Bush is trying to prove he’s a better shot than Dick Cheney. Be that as it may, there is enough intrigue in this plot over the demise of spy satellite US 193 to spin off sequels in the way of more space junk. While most of the debris, if lightening strikes its mark, is expected to burn up in the atmosphere, some is sure to add to the collateral damage floating in space–estimated at more than a million bits of wreckage with more than 10,000 assorted pieces of junk of all sizes in low orbit whizzing around at average speeds up about 22,000 miles-an-hour. Fast-forward to the next generation of communication and spy satellites and the earth begins to resemble an asteroid belt.

So next time you gaze up at the sky on a starry night, realize you’re looking into the landfill and shooting gallery of the future. Aim straight, George, and you’ll win a stuffed doll.

Iowa Caucuses: High Winds And Bluster Predicted For The MidWest

Have your shovels ready. We're getting a good blow tonight!

By Greg O'Brien, Codfish Press

The fact that a single digit turnout in a rural Midwest state to elect delegates to a county convention designates the pole position in a presidential race is proof positive that the campaign for the nation's highest office is far more about spin than substance.I'm Greg O'Brien and I approved this message. While the media waits today, as political storm clouds gather over Iowa, to coronate the next Republican and Democratic presidential frontrunners, derailing the candidacies of not-ready-for-prime-time players and boosting the campaigns of second place finishers, the vote will likely have more to do with political grit than ideas or a statewide consensus. But by the time the cameras rolls and headlines roar at the finish line, an attention-deficit American public will assume the winners embody the best of field. Perception, as the late Tip O'Neill would say, is reality, and reality-real or imagined-has wings to the Granite State.

Depending on what polls you read and how one discerns the methodology, both the Republican and Democrat contests are as tight this morning as a Des Moines cab ride to the airport on Friday. Conventional political wisdom has Democrats Sen. Barack Obama, Sen. Hillary Clinton and John Edwards all close to the margin of error, and Republicans Mitt Romney and upstart Mike Huckabee in a snowball fight, with Romney hurling ice balls and a ducking Huckabee citing scripture about turning the other cheek. "If a man gains the whole world and loses his soul, what does it profit him," the former Arkansas governor and Baptist preacher told reporters, a passage from a politician on the lip of a defining caucus that appears to come more from a political playbook than the Good Book.

In spite of one of the most completive fields since the first Iowa caucuses in 1972, today's turnout is expected to be underwhelming; fewer than six percent of the state's eligible voters turned out in 2004 to gather in livings rooms and school gyms to select delegates to county conventions-"the next step," as Reuters puts it, "in a drawn-out process that ends in the spring with selection of state delegates to the national nominating conventions next summer." On the surface, at least, this is about as meaningful as planting corn in February, and yet the candidates with the biggest snow shovels, largest fleet of vans, most sophisticated phone banking and best get-out-the-vote stratagems will somehow be (mis)perceived nationwide as the ones with the winning strategies for extricating ourselves from Iraq, stabilizing a volatile economy that is foreclosing on home mortgages at an distressing pace, and protecting the homeland from further terrorist aggressions now in the planning stages. "In the history of these caucuses, no candidate who has ever finished worse than third among the candidates has even gone on to win the nomination," David Yepsen, veteran political consultant for The Des Moines Register, told ABC news.

The fact that a single digit turnout in a rural Midwest state to elect delegates to a county convention designates the pole position in a presidential race is proof positive that the campaign for the nation's highest office is far more about spin than substance. Have your shovels ready. We're getting a good blow tonight!

Reflections On The Holidays

The Evil Within

Ever since Cain whacked his brother, Abel, as detailed in the Book of Genesis, the presence of evil in the world has been debated. Does evil exist and, if God created everything, did the Almighty create evil? To some, the answer is as shapeless as the count of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Years ago, a young student was challenged by his university professor to prove the existence of evil. The student, we are told, responded, “Evil does not exist, sir, or at least it does not exist unto itself. Evil is simply the absence of God.”   

The student’s name was Albert Einstein, and he later remarked that “the world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.”

As we embrace Christmas and Hanukkah and other forms of holiday celebrations, the prickly subject of good versus evil is upon us yet again — a universal conflict that is a common thread of human nature, expounded throughout the scriptures and in literary works from Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In traditional terms, this eternal clash is embodied in the conflict between God and Satan, the ultimate good and evil in Judeo-Christian belief, a clash that ultimately ends in the triumph of what is pure over what is wicked.

But what about today? In the wake of mass murders, rapes, bombings and other horrific terrorist acts, or simply the genetic codes and milieus that make each of us good or evil, as Time magazine pondered last week, how do we discern evil and what do we do about it?

 “If the entire human species were a single individual, that person would long ago have been declared mad,” Jeffrey Kluger writes eloquently in Time. “The insanity would not lie in the anger and darkness of the human mind—though it can be a black and raging place indeed. And it certainly wouldn’t lie in the transcendent goodness of the mind … The madness would lie instead in the fact that both of those qualities, the savage and the splendid, ?can exist in one creature, one person, often in an instant.”

In an instant, we all have capacity for good or evil that runs the gamut from cheating on an exam, to cheating on a spouse, to corrupting or harming a life.

Some suggest science may hold the answer to turning from evil; others advise that it is a matter of the heart for most of us — something to consider at this hallowed time of year. So, how do we define evil in our own lives? To paraphrase the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart when asked to decipher pornography: We should know it when we see it.

The question, as Einstein would ask, is what were we going to do about it?

Winning Is Everything!

By Greg O'Brien, Codfish Press

As the New England Patriots redefine greatness on their own terms, the subject of winning has crept into the national psyche with all the understatement of a down and deep Tom Brady-to-Randy Moss exchange.  "We are trying to kill teams," Brady declared last week on a WEEI radio interview. "We're trying to blow them out if we can."

Not so fast, says Washington Redskins linebacker Randall Godfrey; the Patriots "need to show some respect for the game." Whines MSNBC contributor Steve Silverman, "The Patriots have gone against unspoken NFL etiquette." Their sin: winning at all costs when playing against millionaires who rank among the best athletes in the world.

"If winning isn't everything, why do they keep score?" coach Vince Lombardi once asked."If winning isn't everything, why do they keep score?" coach Vince Lombardi once asked.

Silverman is unimpressed. "The Patriots are playing with a special edge not seen in the NFL since George Halas's 1940 Bears eviscerated the Washington Redskins 73-0 in the NFL championship game," he writes. The Patriots, he insists, "are becoming less popular around the league than a Red Sox fan in the middle of Times Square."

And your point, as my 19-year-old son, Conor, would say?

There is nothing wrong with winning in such competitive forums. It is difficult to imagine beating up on grown men the size of trucks. The lesson for the ages here is excellence, not winning for the sake of pounding the snot out of someone. And when all the hype settles on critics' arguments to the contrary, the Patriots are making a statement about life: pursue excellence. Pursue it until it hurts.

This is not a new concept, and should not be lost on the younger generation-from those in Pop Warner, to Little Leaguers, to AAU basketball and soccer, to high school seniors competing for the college of their choice. The pursuit of excellence and the will to win are the cornerstones of any existence-simply trying your best wherever your best takes you.

Observed Lombardi, "Winning is not a sometime thing, it's an all time thing. You don't win once in a while, you don't do things right once in a while, you do them right all the time. Winning is habit. Unfortunately, so is losing."

So what's wrong with "going for it" on fourth down with a big lead in the fourth quarter?

 "What did you want us to do?" laments Patriots coach Bill Belichick. "Kick field goals?"

Field goals in life are often a substitute for calculated risks. Next time someone says winning isn't everything, cite Winston Churchill on the subject: "As long as we have faith in our own cause and an unconquerable will to win, victory will not be denied us."

Certainly nothing wrong, as Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, with winning "as if you were used to it."

On fourth and short, Bill Belichick and the Patriots, showing great faith in their own cause and "an unconquerable will to win," have redefined greatness in a way that all of us, in every aspect of our lives, should buck up and take note.