The Maine Times - Maine Perspectives

Dealing with Wyman 4

It won't be long before the new generation of combined cycle, natural gas-fueled generating plants will put Wyman Station in mothballs. When it goes, and it will, sooner than we expect, it will join Maine Yankee as sacrifices on the altar of industrial progress. The new investors in electricity generation have jumped on the natural gas bandwagon; FPL's reluctance to spend even $50 million to clean up Wyman 4 is the best evidence of the plant's lack of long-term utility.
In the meantime, however, Wyman operates within a federal loophole big enough to spew pollution all over the Northeast. Because it was built prior to passage of the federal Clean Air Act in 1977, it does not have to meet the efficiency standards of modern plants. We in Maine rarely experience the sweltering summer days and frigid winter nights that cause huge spikes in energy use. Wyman is fired up, then, to help less fortunate New Englanders cope with severe weather. But we must live with Wyman's pollution.
The owners of Wyman - FPL Energy of Florida - want to keep operating the plant with dirty No. 6 oil as a fuel and the lucrative though sporadic"spot market" as its focus. They have a plan to minimize pollution that involves making minor adjustments at Wyman and buying pollution "credits" by investing in air quality improvements at distant plants upwind from Maine. The Board of Environmental Protection is poised to rule on FPL's request this fall. Trouble is, the BEP tentatively, and unexpectedly, agreed to make Wyman's owners spend their pollution-reducing money in Maine. And the political establishment, from Gov. Angus King on down, is trying desperately to overturn that recommendation.
We urge the BEP to stand firm, for four reasons.
· Maine has been and should be again a leader in the effort to clean up the Northeast's dirty air. By applying the standards enforced on all new plants for nearly a quarter-century on Maine's one grandfathered facility, we provide both a model and a goad for the Midwest plants we seek to clean up.
· It may be true that more than 90 percent of the ozone in Maine's summer air arrives from out-of-state. But that doesn't absolve us of responsibility for cleaning up our act.
· We need a regional solution to air pollution, for sure. As we forge a new policy with our neighbors, we should look to inspiring models, like Vermont, which has already banned emissions trading.
· And, as a recent Harvard study clearly shows, the local impacts of air pollution - within a radius of 30 miles from a plant like Wyman, where more than a third of Mainers live- are serious, even dangerous. On the priority list of clean-up targets, local sources are always first.
It is incomprehensible that a governor who made his fortune in energy conservation and built his reputation as a preserver of land should be leading the charge on behalf of Wyman Station. Let us hope that clearer heads prevail.

- JD

A lesson from HoltraChem

If there has been an environmental bogeyman as imposing as Wyman over recent years it has been the HoltraChem plant in Orrington. HoltraChem produces caustic soda and chlorine at its plant on the banks of the Penobscot River using a process dependent on toxic mercury. Spills from the plant have created the heaviest concentrations of mercury found anywhere in the U.S.
HoltraChem announced last week that it will cease operations on Sept.15, though it will clean up the property to meet state standards.
It is noteworthy that the reasons for the shutdown have little to do with the recent state-ordered reduction in pollution. Company president Steve Guidry said high electricity costs (HoltraChem uses $10 million to $12 million worth each year), high transportation costs and historic low prices for its products are bigger reasons than the $6 million spent on plant improvements since 1998.
Had HoltraChem changed to the cleaner, cheaper and non-mercury manufacturing process favored by its competitors, it might have saved money in the short run and would certainly have aided the area's environment far into the future.
In that sense, there is an eerie parallel with Wyman Station. The marketplace is leaving Wyman behind even as its emissions grow. If the marketplace will soon close it down, the time to reduce its environmental impact is now.

- JD

Departing from her usual measured repertoire of domestic tricks, Martha Stewart recently demonstrated how to commit an act of road rage in your own driveway. Limousine driver Richard Anderson took a carload of eight women sightseeing late Friday night, Aug. 11. After midnight, he took a wrong turn. They all ended up held hostage on Stewart's estate in Seal Harbor when she blocked their exit with her SUV and refused to move it.
At first Stewart intended to press charges of vehicular trespassing, but a statement from the Susan Magrino Agency in New York says Stewart plans no further action. It continues, "like any homeowner" Stewart has issues of "privacy and personal safety when in the sanctity of her own home."
It's disingenuous of Stewart to use the phrase "like any homeowner," which she is not: She is the very wealthy and savvy empress of a realm that started as a modest catering enterprise and then exploded in a shower of books, TV shows, magazines and domestic products. She has staff to handle annoyances like this and, if she had used them in the first place, maybe she wouldn't have had to call in her public relations agency.
Stewart's decision to instigate a confrontation put her privacy and personal safety more at risk, not less, plus your average homeowner doesn't do Doberman imitations by herself in the middle of the night. If I saw a strange car in my driveway after midnight, I would first wait to see if it was going to turn around and go away. If it didn't, and if I didn't feel threatened, I would ask the driver if he needed help.
If I did feel threatened, I would call the county sheriff. The last thing I'd do would be to leap into my 13-year old VW Golf and trap the strange vehicle in my own driveway. I wouldn't make three phone calls to the police in 20 minutes, either, as Stewart did. Actually, what I would really do would be to wake up my husband and then go back to sleep.
I wonder if Anderson plans to press charges against Stewart and, if not, why not? Attempts to contact Anderson directly were unanswered.
It's interesting that Stewart had previously demonstrated how to commit road rage in your neighbor's driveway. On May 21, 1997, also at night, in East Hampton on Long Island, Stewart pulled into the estate of Harry Macklowe, a neighbor with whom she was having a well-documented feud. According to his deposition, 23-year old Matthew Munnich said Stewart confronted him. She believed wrongly that he and his "[naughty word] illegal aliens" were responsible for a new fence that apparently offended the empress.
Then Stewart used her SUV to pin Munnich. When he cried out that the vehicle was crushing him, he said, "she looked right at me and kept backing." He was able to extricate himself when the side mirror folded forward: "I was just lucky the mirror collapsed." The rest of his statement, with all the naughty words filled in, and the subsequent D.A. press release, are available at www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/stewart.html.
Although Munnich took legal action against Stewart, it's difficult for a 23-year-old to sue a multi-millionaire, especially when she counter-sues for libel. It's a matter of public record that the case was settled out-of-court and everyone's under a gag order. What do you think the chances are that money changed hands? I hope it was a substantial amount.
James McGreevy was the Mount Desert police officer who responded to Stewart's call to her estate in Seal Harbor. He said, "Stewart pulled out from another spot to block the release of the limousine." He also said there's usually a chain across the driveway that wasn't up. By the time he arrived, Stewart had left the scene and an unidentified male had taken her place.
Anderson explained to McGreevy that he was there by accident. "That's what he told me, that it was an honest mistake," McGreevy said. "He just got turned around."
Here's another departure from the average homeowner scenario. If I were to use my pathetic little VW to unlawfully detain someone on my property, I could anticipate substantial legal consequences. McGreevy confirmed that such an act can constitute a criminal offense, and I don't think I'm the only person who's wondering how Stewart can terrorize innocents, even on her own property, and get away with it.
I admit, Martha Stewart's commercial persona doesn't appeal to me. I think her tone of voice is monotonous and patronizing. I think her attitude promotes a level of materialism that diminishes women. Still, the stories I tracked down about her behavior in this region draw contradictory portraits: a take-out restaurant worker on Campobello Island told me Stewart was private and kept to herself when she ordered food there. A Belfast-area businesswoman said, "She was quite aggressive. She's unpleasant." At another organization, an employee described Stewart and her staff as very polite. Which is the real Martha Stewart? I guess that depends on her motives and her mood.
Certainly we all can do foolish things when we lose our tempers or feel threatened. Certainly we're all capable of outrageous behavior that we later regret. Most of us have the grace to say afterwards, "Man, was that stupid." Martha Stewart may have quite a business, but it doesn't sound to me as if she has much of a life.

The best Congress money can buy is at it again. In a spasm of smug, self-righteous zeal, the majority House and Senate Republicans voted, in June and July, respectively, to reward the people they truly represent by ending the century-old federal estate tax paid by the wealthiest Americans. The president has promised a veto, but in typical Clinton fashion has also offered to sign the repeal legislation if the GOP will accept prescription-drug coverage for the elderly under Medicare. So, at this point, the ultimate fate of the estate levy remains problematical.
The national estate or inheritance tax, which Republicans persist in calling the "death tax" on the cynical advice of their pollsters, has been in existence continually since 1916 and periodically since 1862. As America's only effective wealth tax, it has stood as a beacon of fiscal fairness for decades, having survived countless changes of administration and power shifts in Congress. But now, say the sons of Gingrich, it has to go: GOP Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott has labeled it "un-American" and declared it "a monster that must be eliminated."
The monster was not always viewed as such by American politicians, including many Republicans. None other than President Abraham Lincoln signed the nation's first inheritance tax, a graduated levy on recipients of personal bequests, during the Civil War. President William McKinley, another Republican, signed the first true federal estate tax in 1898. (Estate taxes, the American way of taxing inheritances, are levied on the total value of an estate at the time of death, prior to the transfer of property; pure inheritance taxes, favored by most other Western countries, are levied on individual recipients of an estate after transfer takes place.)
The movement for a permanent U.S. estate tax, which gained momentum during the Progressive era of the early 1900s - the 1862 and 1898 laws were temporary - also involved prominent Republicans, most notably President Theodore Roosevelt. From his earliest days in politics, T.R. campaigned against those he called the "malefactors of great wealth," the robber barons and their wastrel heirs, whose massive fortunes, compiled by dubious means, were used for such unproductive, essentially valueless purposes as stock-market speculation and conspicuous consumption. Given that flawed stewardship, he thought it was eminently right for the nation to "fix the terms upon which the great fortunes are inherited."
Beginning with his second term as president and continuing through the remainder of his political career, Roosevelt championed inheritance taxes as the best means of channeling vast, unearned wealth toward socially useful ends. Here's T.R., hero of Republican presidential aspirant John McCain (who, incidentally, voted for this year's estate-tax repeal), in 1911: "I believe in a heavily graded inheritance tax, avowedly aimed at the very big fortunes, and I believe that ... this can only come effectively through the National Government." Teddy didn't advocate imposing such a tax on small bequests, but, he said, "I would apply it progressively and with such heaviness to big inheritances as to completely block the transmission of enormous fortunes to the young Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Astors and Morgans." Today, that list would undoubtedly include the young Gateses, Forbeses, Perots and Buffets.
Regrettably, the Republican party underwent a Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation with Teddy's passing, losing its last vestiges of progressivism. It was left to Woodrow Wilson and the Democrats to implement a permanent estate tax in 1916. Thereafter, the inheritance levy was slowly ratcheted up, with the graduated rate on the largest bequests (initially set at 10 percent) eventually reaching 70 to 80 percent in the late 1930s and early 1940s under T.R.'s nephew Franklin.
FDR's reign marked the high-water mark for estate taxation in the United States. Over the past generation, starting with the Reagan years, exemptions (which have always been included in the law to protect small bequests) have risen sharply, and top rates have fallen drastically as well. Considered in a historical context, the estate tax that agitates Trent Lott and the other GOP members of the present rich man's Congress is not really onerous at all.
Take top rates, for instance. From 77 percent in 1941, they have fallen to 55 percent (on estates over $3 million), a drop of one-third. And that declines further to 39 percent after credits for state inheritance taxes are taken into account. Individual exemptions, meanwhile, have risen from $60,000 during World War II to $675,000 today, and under revisions passed in 1997, that will increase to $1 million (doubled for family businesses) in 2006. Let's make it plain: Under current law, no estate valued at less than a million dollars - and no family farm or enterprise worth twice that much - will shortly pay any federal transfer taxes at all.
The upshot is that only the property of a tiny minority of deceased Americans (between 1 and 2 percent) is annually liable for estate taxes, and even then, only a portion of this property ever becomes subject to actual taxation. Present legislation allows complete tax avoidance through the creation of trust funds and the expedient of non-taxable gifts (up to $10,000 per recipient per year) prior to death. On top of these loopholes, there is the granddaddy loophole of them all - the capital-gains tax evasion. Notwithstanding Republican whining about estate levies constituting "double taxation," a huge proportion of appreciated wealth in the form of investments is transferred tax-free from one generation to the next as unrealized capital gains, which are not taxed unless and until the stock is sold. If such assets are simply accumulated and passed on, the holder pays no capital-gains tax in life and no estate tax in death.
Despite these shelters, considerable money is still collected, and the proposed estate-tax phase-out would, if enacted, cost the federal government $105 billion in revenues over ten years and an estimated $50 billion a year after complete abolition in 2010. That shortfall would have to be made up somehow, either by higher income or payroll taxes on average Americans, or by cuts in essential programs like Social Security and Medicare.
Why, then, did nine senators and sixty-five representatives of the Democratic party, the self-proclaimed "party of the people," join Republican majorities in voting for estate-tax repeal? The Senate vote offers a clue. Two of the nine Democratic apostates, Murray of Washington and Feinstein of California, represent states newly laden with billionaires and millionaires from the trendy "new economy." A third, Torricelli of New Jersey, the business-friendly chairman of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, has a well-documented record of trading in high-tech stocks and courting high-tech money men. A fourth, Robb of Virginia, is one of the Senate's wealthiest members, with $9 million in assets to be protected.
The possible motives of the remaining members of the infamous Democratic nine (Breaux, Cleland, Landrieu, Lincoln, and Wyden) can only be speculated upon, but the confluence of money and public policy in the estate-tax vote should raise red flags in abundance. Republican ties to big money constitute a given. What is disturbing are the inroads the new-economy moguls have made in influencing the traditional party of working Americans. With corporations like Microsoft working overtime to dole out political contributions - $1.2 million this year from the software giant to the Democrats alone - the move to repeal the rich man's tax may only be the beginning.

Wayne O'Leary is a research associate in history at the University of Maine. He lives in Orono.