Most of the media coverage this week seems to be glossing over the significant detail that the U.S. investment in Iraq, in terms of personnel and dollars, will continue.  Instead of uniformed troops from the military, we’ll have 15,000-16,000 people there in the form of other government employees and private contractors.  We’ll be spending almost $4 billion there in 2012.  These numbers are lower than what we’ve been investing, but they are not small numbers, and they still represent a significant commitment on the part of U.S. taxpayers, let alone on the part of the soldiers still on the ground.  We can’t afford to start thinking or talking as though our involvement in Iraq is through.

It also seems appropriate that when we talk about the human life lost in the course of the U.S. presence in Iraq, we avoid artificial exclusions based on nationality.  The story and cost of war is incomplete if you only recognize the count of killed and wounded on one “side” of any conflict.  As we consider this particular milestone, let us reflect on the totality of what has been sacrificed, taken or destroyed along the way.

Even if Eddington’s role as Executive Director of the organization isn’t as dramatic as you’d find in a legal thriller, the need for reduced rate or free legal services in our area has never been greater, and the prospects for funding sources to meet those needs are changing rapidly.

In the past, pro bono legal services in Indiana (including the District 9 office that serves Wayne County) were funded largely through the Interest on Lawyer Trust Accounts (IOLTA)  program run by the Indiana Supreme Court and the Indiana Bar Foundation.  Basically, lawyers around the state would pool together their deposits from paying clients in a shared bank account that would accumulate interest, and that interest income would be used to cover expenses for pro bono work.  You may have heard that the global economy hasn’t been doing so well in the last few years, and when your bank account interest rate is approximately zero, it’s hard to earn much money on it.  Pro bono offices around the state found out recently that IOLTA funding would cease at the end of 2011, leaving them to revert to the State’s plan for filling in pro bono service coverage: one part time person trying to handle all of the cases across many counties.

“We can do better,” Eddington told me.  The Whitewater Valley Pro Bono Commission, a 501(c)3 non-profit, has decided to try to meet the legal needs of low-income community members in Wayne County through the support of donations and the time and efforts of their legal team and board.  If you’re at 125% of the Federal Poverty Level ($13,612 gross yearly income for a single person), the Commissions’s services will likely be at no cost to you.  If you’re at 200% of that level, your out of pocket expenses are capped at a reasonable amount.  The process starts with a fairly simple application form available at their 712 E Main Street location in Richmond.

The Commission is having a luncheon tomorrow, Thursday December 15th, to share more information about their work and to raise some funds.  They also recently received a grant from the Wayne County Foundation to help keep operations going as they seek out longer term sources of income.  You can contact them at (765) 935-5053 for more information.

I would certainly rather live in a world where access to legal advice that might make a significant difference in someone’s ability to live a happier life (or, more pressingly, keep their home or fight abuse) doesn’t depend on their own personal wealth.  While the court system provides public defenders for someone caught up in a criminal case, there’s no such protection in civil cases, but the stakes can sometimes be just as high. The reality is that people do find themselves in situations beyond their personal control, and sometimes good legal counsel does make all the difference.

I hope we can explore sustainable, long-term solutions for meeting these community needs that don’t depend on fundraising.  But for now, I’m grateful that the Whitewater Valley Pro Bono group is working to meet this need in our community today, and I hope they continue to receive support along the way.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I’m on the board of the Wayne County Foundation which recently awarded a grant to the Commission, and I’m part of an LLC that rents out the office space the Commission uses.)

The New York Times

According to The New York Times website, home delivery of their Sunday edition is available where I live in Richmond, Indiana.  Earlier this year I tried to take them up on that, buying a subscription online and eagerly awaiting that first Sunday morning when I would get to indulge in a paper-reading experience long enough to get me through at least one cup of coffee.

But that first Sunday, the paper didn’t show up.  ”Oh, yeah, that’s probably just some issue getting you in the circulation system,” the phone rep said when I called.  ”We’ll get it to you next week.”

Week two, no paper.  ”Sorry about that, don’t know what happened there.  Hold on while I call the distribution center.”  They concluded it was just another circulation issue, and assured me it had been straightened out for sure this time.

Week three, no paper, and the phone rep was equally apologetic, but had no additional routes to pursue.  ”Let me make sure I understand,” I said, “you theoretically offer home delivery in my area, but in my case, there’s nothing you can do to make that actually happen?”  The best she could do was offer to put a manager on the phone, but then when she tried to do that, she said all the managers were busy at the moment, and so one would have to call me back.

I cancelled my ethereal subscription and abandoned all hope of that particular luxury for now. But it seems worth noting that with newspapers fretting day in and day out about attracting and retaining readers, the least that one like the New York Times could do is coordinate their circulation operations to put a paper in the hands of people ready and willing to pay for it. If that part of the business model is falling apart, I think that puts them somewhere between “not likely to prosper” and “doomed.”

I don’t take any pleasure in making that assessment.  Apart from still longing for a leisurely Sunday morning paper-in-hand experience, I long for a time when the hard work that goes into high quality journalism is again appreciated and valued enough that papers like The New York Times and even my local Palladium-Item can again be a centerpiece of public discussion.

It was fascinating to watch the film Page One, which documents a few days in the life of The New York Times and its staff as they talk to sources, discuss angles on stories, bid goodbye to laid off co-workers and consider the future of their industry.

The film is part love letter to what The Times has been, part behind-the-scenes chronicling of how the paper is made, and part rumination on the possibilities for what will become of the newspaper in the age of the Internet.  It’s narrated by NYT reporter David Carr, who is fiercely protective of the paper’s reputation and role in society, and Page One doesn’t apologize for portraying The New York Times in an overall favorable light.   The few times when its fumbles and failures (Judith Miller’s Iraq WMD reporting, the Jason Blair scandal, etc.) come up, they’re quickly swept into the bigger picture of how all the good it does outweighs those unfortunate course corrections.  But even with that bias, it’s a great  look at the roller-coaster ride of producing a modern print newspaper.

The Palladium-Item

In April of 2010 I took the time to post here about why I was canceling my print subscription to The Palladium-Item, Richmond’s daily newspaper, and so it’s only fair that I take some time to note that I re-subscribed early this year and have continued my subscription since.  A few things happened to prompt that:

The first was that I was running for local political office for much of 2011, and it felt important to see the print edition of the paper as everyone else would see it – the prominence and layout of news articles, the placement of photographs, the political ads (mine included) sprinkled throughout.  This was quite useful, and a number of times it meant that I could see how the political coverage was coming together in ways the online version of the paper didn’t necessarily show.  (As I’ve said elsewhere, I also think the Palladium-Item did an outstanding job covering this election, devoting significant amounts of their already strained resources to provide voters with unprecedented levels of information about candidates…that alone feels worth having supported.)

Second, Kelly noted one day that when she only reads the paper online, there’s much less of a sense of knowing what’s going on in the community.  This is ironic given that there’s probably more information about community events and happenings online than there ever can be in the print edition, but I agreed with her that the experience of serendipitously encountering an upcoming play, fundraiser or art show is much more intact while turning the pages of the paper than it is when browsing a website.  You have to do a lot of clicking and scrolling to find the same information online, and there’s still some value in the editorial and even pay-for-visibility processes that go into raising something to visual prominence within a finite amount of space.

(I should note, too, that there are times when some content from the print edition of the paper can’t be found online at all.  I saw this firsthand a few weeks ago when they were able to publish in printed column form my observations on the closing of Really Cool Foods, but because of some licensing issues, it couldn’t be redistributed online.  But the print edition readership is attentive – I had a lot of people coming up to me for days afterward to mention the column.)

Third, one of my reasons given for canceling my subscription last year was the relative chaos and toxicity of the public conversations happening on the paper’s website comment sections, and they’ve since addressed that to a large degree.  Just this fall, the paper switched to using Facebook for story comments, which requires commenters to use their real name (as governed by Facebook) while still leaving the option for anonymous users to share their views elsewhere on the website.  Yes, there are plenty of privacy concerns that come with depending on Facebook for this function, but in this case I think the benefits outweigh those concerns.

Lastly, over the year I’ve just come to have a new appreciation for the role a daily newspaper plays in the life of the community, and the role that the Palladium-Item plays in the life of Richmond and Wayne County.  In the past I think I’ve blamed some of the lack of debate or civic engagement in our community on the paper’s own choices – what to cover, how to cover it, etc.  There’s no doubt that those choices make a difference, but I’ve also come to see that the choice not to be engaged in public life is unfortunately one that many members of this community make for themselves on a regular basis, and no amount of great reporting or special features are going to change that alone.

Further, if I imagine a day when the Pal-Item announces that it is closing its doors, I can only see Really Bad Things that stem from that when it comes to our community’s ability to address the challenges in front of it.  In the past I might have thought that citizen journalists or some of the other less formalized news-gathering efforts in town would step in, but my recent experience is that Richmond doesn’t nearly have the critical mass of people and platforms in place to really make that work.  So even with limited financial and personnel resources, even with an over-dependence on advertising, even with editorial or coverage choices I might disagree with, a functioning daily Palladium-Item is a much better thing for Richmond than no paper at all.

My concerns and suggestions from past critiques still stand; I still hope the paper (and the industry as a whole) is able to move toward a model that blends print and online editions more seamlessly, that allows me to pay money to see fewer advertisements, and that continues to provide unique value through a focus on in-depth local reporting and commentary.  I’m even looking for ways to personally contribute directly to that focus – more on that later.

But for now, I’ll continue supporting the existence of the Palladium-Item with my subscription dollars and appreciating it as a unique link to the place I live.

What’s your current relationship with your local paper?  And can you drop your copy of the Sunday Times off at my house when you’re done with it today?

The Indiana Economic Development Corp. offered Really Cool Foods up to $3.05 million in performance-based tax credits, up to $165,000 in training grants and will provide Cambridge City officials with a $200,000 grant to assist in off-site infrastructure improvements needed for the project. Wayne County officials offered the company 50 acres of land, $165,000 in grants and a 10-year property tax abatement.

The facility opened in October of 2008 with 250 of the projected 1,000 jobs to start, and over the last few years the company has had numerous challenges reaching initially estimated milestones of investment and jobs created.

Today, the company told workers who showed up for their morning shift that the facility was closing, and in a press release sent after 9 AM, announced the company is shutting down.

A couple of initial thoughts and questions about this unfortunate announcement:

First, if the reports are true, what a crummy way to treat your employees.  Even if there had been layoffs in recent years and even if the economy is bad, short of natural disaster I don’t think there’s ever a good reason to have an entire workforce find out about the end of the company when they show up for work that day.  (Not to mention the timing of right when the weather turns really cold, right before the holidays, etc.) Yes, it’s harder and maybe even risky to share the news in advance, but I think employees deserve the respect of being a part of that conversation well before the rest of the world knows.

Second, I’m sure there might be a lot of finger pointing going on around this announcement, but it really is important to investigate why a company so well received in our area and so generously supported by taxpayer dollars has to close after only three years in operation.  Yes, the economy is bad, but it was bad three years ago too.  Is this a case of bad planning, excessive optimism and hype, poor management, problems with the location…what caused this, and how can we stop it from happening again (especially on the taxpayer dime)?

Governor Mitch Daniels welcomes Really Cool Foods to Indiana

Speaking of the taxpayer-funded incentives, the local Economic Development Corporation likes to talk about the role of clawback terms in their offers to businesses wanting to locate here.  Does such a clause allowing us to recoup these subsidizations exist in this case, and are they “on it” when it comes to being a registered creditor for any sale of assets or bankruptcy proceedings?  What percent of lost revenue and outright grants does Wayne County and the state of Indiana stand to get back?  What will we do differently next time in vetting a potential recipient?

Lastly, Really Cool Foods has often been cited in our region as a success story of the conventional model of economic development, using taxpayer dollars to sell the area to large employers in hopes of landing significant long-term investment in the community.  More and more, the evidence points to this as an outdated and unsustainable model, and when the success stories turn into nightmares, we have to pay attention to that.  I personally hope we turn toward job creation at a more human scale, but whatever we do, we need a model that’s sustainable when you look at the big picture – global economic trends, fuel costs, climate change, etc. – and not just what makes for a good headline over one, three or five years.

My heart goes out to everyone involved with Really Cool Foods – especially the workers and their families but even the people who worked hard to bring them here in the first place and the management who had to wrestle with a foundering enterprise along the way.

But one way to honor their pain and misfortune is to make sure it’s not repeated in the future, and that we find ways to be better stewards of the people and resources in our region.

The article does a good job of summarizing the challenges of blight as amplified by rough economic times: property owners who might already struggle with maintenance and upkeep are even more at risk of letting a given structure or piece of land fall into disrepair when finances get tight and layoffs and foreclosures are looming.  With such a high percentage of Richmond’s residences being rentals, there’s possibility for further disconnect between the state of the property and the owner’s involvement in it.

My impression from the article and from the conversations I’ve had with city leaders is that Richmond is generally doing what it can to respond to the impact of decaying properties.  But it can be discouraging to know that the process of getting a blighted property owner’s attention is often drawn out over a long time and a lot of paperwork, not to mention expenditure of taxpayer dollars: wait for the property to be reported as blighted, flag it, mow it or repair it and bill the property owner, wait for the bill to go unpaid, place a lein on the property, and THEN there MIGHT be a financial incentive for some action.  This routine may bear the customary government trademarks of caution and glacial due process, but it doesn’t recognize very well the shorter-term impacts (financial and social) of a property falling into disrepair, and the ripple effect it can have on other areas nearby.

That particular concern is probably better taken up by neighborhoods and communities of neighbors than by municipal government, though.  When a given area has a strong sense of community or neighborhood identity, perhaps through the work of an active neighborhood association, it’s harder for any one property or resident to get left behind.  When people know their neighbors and understand what personal and financial constraints are at work, there may be more opportunities to lend a hand and stop a bad situation from getting worse in a way that more deeply impacts the whole neighborhood.  When we have vibrant and accessible public spaces, including a healthy downtown and surrounding arts and cultural districts, we have more opportunities to pool together our shared investment in the health of the city.

Of course, blight is a symptom of some other troubling trends as much as it is a cause.  Richmond can check off many of Wikipedia’s list of sources of urban decay:

It may feature deindustrialization, depopulation or changing population, economic restructuring, abandoned buildings, high local unemployment, fragmented families, political disenfranchisement, crime, and a desolate, inhospitable city landscape…Urban decay has no single cause; it results from combinations of inter-related socio-economic conditions—including the city’s urban planning decisions, the poverty of the local populace, the construction of freeway roads and rail road lines that bypass the area, depopulation by suburbanization of peripheral lands, real estate neighborhood redlining, and xenophobic immigration restrictions.

As much as we should be working to address blight in Richmond, we need to also develop a holistic view of these underlying causes, and develop a long-term approach that not only focuses on revitalizing Richmond’s residential areas, but also on building a vibrant and self-reliant city as a whole.

The site has a simple display of those headlines that’s automatically updated as they’re made available throughout the day, and you can click on them to go read the original content on the source site – that’s about it. There’s a mobile-friendly version at http://m.47374.info/ and you can also easily see some recent local tweets from Twitter.  The site’s still officially in beta but I’ve gotten some great feedback from test users so far.

I created 47374.info because I was tired of looking in a lot of different places to see what’s making news in my community, or wondering if I’d missed something that was only announced on the very transient Twitter.  Some news sources have lots of content but make getting to it hard or leave certain key things out.  Other sources have a few juicy nuggets of relevant content once in a while but don’t make updates available via RSS feeds, so you never quite know how often to check back.

So with the magic of WordPress plus some custom Perl scripts, I’ve restored some sanity to my news-reading time.  For the first time in a long time, I’ve set a website (instead of a blank page) as the default “Home” page that opens when I launch my browser.  Over the last few weeks, it’s meant I’m more aware of community news, and I spend less time per day getting there.

Thanks to all of the local news/headline/event publishers that work to keep our community informed!

If you try out 47374.info and have feedback, drop me a line.

This morning when I spoke with Tom, the owner of Tom’s New York Deli here in Richmond, he talked of troubling health issues and financial factors in his decision, but he seemed as energetic and excited as ever.  He opened the restaurant in December of 1991 and it’s been a fixture on Main Street in the downtown business district ever since.  Professionals, passers-through, families and sports teams alike frequent the establishment, which is known for its great sandwiches, corny jokes and extensive collection of local and national memorabilia.

But as he looks toward the next phase of his own life, instead of trying to sell the small restaurant to the highest bidder, or close it down altogether, he’s ready to give it away to the person who would bring the best vision for its future.

It’s all a part of Tom’s desire to see the small business culture in the downtown area thrive in the face of a new economic reality.  If he can find someone with a little bit of money and a lot of energy, he’d rather see them spend that money on making the Deli even better, instead of financing the sale in the first place.  And in the meantime, the Deli will keep operating as usual.

Are you interested in owning and running a quirky little deli in a small town in the Midwest?  Tom’s taking applications, but he’s not just looking for an impressive resume; he’ll be looking for the person with the best plan and passion to build on what he’s already started.

Contact:
Tom Amyx, Tom’s New York Deli
820 East Main Street
Richmond, IN 47374
(765) 962-4441
tfamyx@gmail.com

Wikileaks has brought to light a powerful and confusing kind of inner conflict for anyone who considers themselves a patriot, or at least a person who cares about the actions of the federal government taken on our behalf.

On one hand, various versions of The American Dream have always reinforced the idea that where there’s corruption, injustice or other malfeasance, and especially when it’s taking place within the government, it should be exposed and made right.  Who among us wouldn’t enjoy just a little bit having the “smoking gun” piece of paper to hold in the face of someone in power who claimed one thing was true when we knew something else to be the case?  I think there’s a basic instinct in those who are engaged in civic life to want to see that kind of justice (though I won’t try to pretend that for many, it’s anything other than rubbernecking).

On the other hand, I would bet that many people understand that if you accept that part of the U.S. government’s role is to engage the world on sensitive matters of diplomacy, trade, military conflict, political governance and human rights advocacy, then there is a role for secret-keeping in the affairs of state.  We all hold certain matters in confidence, and hopefully most of the time we do it because it we think it’s the right thing to do.  In an ideal world, a government acting on my behalf would only keep secrets from me when it’s the right thing to do for the greater good, and I would trust my government to do so.  The idea that someone might come along and make those secrets public without permission would offend my sensibilities as an affront to the necessary machinations of governance.  But obviously, this ideal scenario is far from reality, and history has shown that trusting governments to limit their own secret-keeping to “just the right secrets” doesn’t work.

So, what’s a patriot to do?

Well, if you’re someone like Sarah Palin or Joe Lieberman, you go straight to the most black and white interpretation of the situation as possible: Wikileaks is a terrorist organization, and so its funding should be cut off and its leader should be hunted, shot and killed.  Or you downplay it as unimportant to even think about, as White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs did: “Look, our foreign policy and our country is stronger than one guy with one website . . . and we should never be afraid of one guy who plopped down $35 and bought a Web address.”  (Psst, Mr Gibbs: I can get you domains for under $15 now, $35 is so late-90′s pricing!)

But sometimes, real engagement with civic affairs and other important things requires holding multiple complex and sometimes conflicting ideas in your head, and then really grappling with them.  Sometimes it means not doing the most politically expedient thing or the most strategically safe thing, and instead waiting to do the right thing.

I’m looking at you, Amazon.com and PayPal.  The next time anyone tries to argue that corporations aren’t amassing too much power in our culture and says “surely the government will keep all of that in check,” we can point to the decision made by these companies to cut off Wikileaks` service under pressure from U.S. lawmakers as a perfect illustration of how the government is happy for corporations to amass that power as long as they know that with a phone call from a Senator, they’ll do what they’re told.  It would be one thing if there had been some due process through which Wikileaks had been found to be committing a crime under U.S. law, but the U.S. government itself admits that it’s still trying to figure out if there are any charges to be brought, and yet these companies were happy to make a unilateral decision (as is their right under their “Terms of Use”) that no due process was necessary.  They were probably relieved to avoid the responsibility of taking some nuanced, complicated position on the matter.

Just so we’re clear on the distilled series of events:

1. Government covers up embarrassing secrets
2. Someone exposes embarrassing secrets
3. Government tries to take down that someone, at least by silencing them, if not killing them

It’s pretty standard fare for a Mel Gibson/Russell Crowe/Keifer Sutherland flick, but are we ready to accept that it’s our reality?

After thoughtful contemplation, you may arrive at the conclusion that Wikileaks should not be releasing these documents, and that’s fine.  But please ask yourself what process you think should be followed to (A) convince everyone that this is the case, and (B) take appropriate action as a result?

In other words, what if Wikileaks were releasing secrets that you thought absolutely needed to be made public?  Would you want to know that it could be stopped by a few phone calls from powerful legislators or a few covert missions from black-ops military units?

Finally, let’s talk about the most important part of the whole thing:  why couldn’t they name themselves something other than “Wikileaks”?  As far as I can tell, they don’t make any prominent use of wiki technology (like, say, Wikipedia does), so it just serves to confuse people who still have no idea what a wiki is or why one might be useful.  Maybe Wikileaks uses a wiki for their internal processing and organizing of documents, but that would be like introducing myself as “Toothbrush Man” just because I brushed my teeth this morning.

What is the world coming to?

Having served on the CRC board in the past and having volunteered as a trained mediator, I came to greatly appreciate the idea that members of a community can resolve our interpersonal conflicts in ways that promote non-violence, justice, reconciliation and a deepening of connection, without resorting to the sometimes scarring machinations of the legal system. The CRC existed to facilitate those experiences, through its mediation program, educational work with local youth, and its rich history of related efforts in the Richmond area and beyond.

As a mediator, I had the honor of witnessing some magical moments between family members or co-workers where the conversation transitioned from accusation and battling to understanding, compassion and hope for moving forward. As a board member, I had the honor of working with a driven and passionate group of volunteers and staff who believed in what the CRC was about and what it could do for the community.

While the principles and practices of mediating conflict are certainly still available to anyone who wants to pursue them, it’s sad to see that a place like the CRC can’t sustain itself right now.  My hope, of course, is that this is an ending that will lead to other beginnings down the road.

Many people have given life and breath to CRC’s mission over the years, and I’m so thankful for their work.  I’m especially thankful for the careful and surely painful work that the current board members have taken on in reaching the conclusion to lay the CRC down.  I hope that Richmond can find some way to honor what CRC did and stood for in the ways that we carry forward.

Unfortunately, most of the responses (and the ones favored by the Obama administration) are focused on paying insanely large amounts of money to private contractors to create and deploy complex technological solutions in hopes of addressing the threat.

What advocates of this approach fail to appreciate is that (A) most of the actual threat comes from uneducated human operators of the technology in question, and (B) deploying homogeneous, technologically complex solutions often makes us more vulnerable, not less.

Once you get past the flashy headlines and attention-grabbing introductory stories in these articles, meant to scare us into believing how real the threat is (basically, bloodthirsty hacker terrorists are trying to kill us all), each of them seems to come back to one of two recurring themes behind these threats.   Either a human being messed something up, or a piece of technology wasn’t secure enough and is now being exploited.

For the first case, it’s usually things like “so and so unknowingly downloaded a virus onto their USB flash drive and then plugged into a secure government network – things exploded!” or “an e-mail user clicked on a phishing scam link and had their password stolen.”  For the second case, it’s usually “Windows machines are insecure, and so they get taken over and absorbed into botnets, which can then wreak havoc through denial of service attacks” or “a security hole is found in a product made by a brand that everyone was supposed to trust, and so it’s running EVERYWHERE and OMG we’re all going to die.”

But in throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at cyberwarfare defense we will most likely see only minimal resources devoted to end-user education and training to defend against social engineering, poor personal security practices, and the related actual vulnerabilities.  The funding will also not include programs to hold hardware and software vendors more accountable for selling more secure products and services to end users.  Instead, it will go toward funding secret surveillance and the further shifting control of the Internet into military hands.

With this approach, in the end we’ll be back to where we are right now.  End-users will continue the insecure personal practices that lead to security breaches, and the continued homogenization of hardware and software will amplify the potential impact of every security hole discovered.   This is not helpful.