MPBN, Village Soup, other Maine media shrug and turn aside as Baldacci affirms his pro-torture position re Mainer inmates

It is a terrible dare, to stand up against the System when in Maine state prison. Unlike other states in New england and Elsewhere, Maine prison officials cling to an archaic labyrinthine hodgepodge of human rights-violating prison punishment practices and policies. Taking issue with inhumane conditions or treatment opens inmates to sure retribution, exacted in excruciating detail But for MPBN and other media. that's not a story

Already, with the hunger strike of a collective group of inmates being held in sensory deprivation cells of officially ended, Deputy Corrections Commissioner Denise Lord gloats that 'no changes will be made' in our state's sick policy of putting inmates into punishment cells for months of prolonged sensory deprivation. Inmates at Maine state prison carried out a similar hunger strike in 2006

So does Maine media look into why these eight Mainers dared to put their necks on the line?

Of course not! (with a few tiny exceptions). Take Herald Gazette/Village Soup reporter Shlomit Auciello. Please!
Primed to the gills with info about the raisons d'etre for the Maine state prison's present and past hunger strikes, about Maine's history of retribution against those inmates daring to lawfully rock the boat about the devastating effect that prolonged sensory deprivation has on the minds and hearts of those being held in such circumstances, primed with all this info what does Shlomit Auciello do?

Why, she builds her story around the exhalations of the Great Bloviator: Associate Corrections Commissioner for Public Relations Denise Lord. Right from the start:

"According to DOC Associate Commissioner Denise Lord...."

Lord is good at her job. Like one of Saddam's officials, or a guantanamo public affairs officer he can extoll the positive side of torture: it is "an incentive to inmates " Auciello dutifully reports this party line.

"They have access to reading materials and magazines," Lord observed, leaving out the well known observation that anyone held in sensory deprivation units quickly becomes disoriented and unable to read as the days and weeks pass.

Most disgraceful perhaps. Auciello tries to sugarcoat the disgusting fact that at any given moment, the state of Maine continually puts men and women in and out of sensory deprivation tanks for widely varying lengths of time. Letting Lord get away with spinning it polyannaishly as "fewer than 2.5 percent of the prison's 2,200 inmates!" as though sensory deprivation was not a practice that can only be described as intentional infliction of torture, carried out in the name of the People of Maine.

But that wasnt the story Lord wanted, and Auciello like the rest of the callow media went right along with the associate commish.

So, policies that so conflict with international human rights treaties that global sanctions against te Baldacci Administration ought to be imposed? Not an issue.

Inmate-rights organizations are pumping up the volume, taking Baldacci to task
beyond the beachhead that the hunger strikers have established in their brief campaign. They are doubtless learning the punitive consequences of their courage, which we should not allow to have happened in vain.

Let's convince the Governor that Maine needs to join other New England states (and the rest of the civilized world) and remove the stain to our honor of our adhering to an archaic labyrinth of human rights-violating prison punishment practices and policies.

From sensory deprivation in long term punishment isolation cells, to forced exile to distant states, deputy commissioners and wardens pick and choose from a palette of cruelty to suit their moods.

Let's put an end to this

Downeast Mag - part 2 of Jeff Clark pimps for MDOT re Sears Island .

Last week's entry noted the bizarre juxtaposition of "veteran journalist" Jeff Clark, with an article about Sears Island bearing his byline that is so saccharine, so one-sided, so distant from the truth, so determinedly ignorant of the impacts such a port would have on Penobscot Bay's fishery and tourism industries, that one could only assume that when Jeff  found out he was getting the boot from Downeast Magazine, he decided that in harsh economic times the best employer would be Uncle Baldacci.

Hence the hymn-like quality of Clark's  paean to the Great Governor. For in centuries past, the Lords of Power would indeed occasionally reward such inspired syncophancy with a meaningless but well paying slot in the royal administration.  

Why not me? must have occured to the unemployed scribbler. Surely a veteran with chops like me can pen an ode to the governor that will lift me out of this squalid scramble for column inches that the new Downeast demands I enter into.

But to do that, the old Clark, the one who formerly  "...did the tough stories"  as one admirer said, who formerly "captured issues' complexities in a way that readers could understand, but without condescension..."  

had to vanish.

NeoJeff went casting about for something to pangyricize about. His eye must have fallen upon a Maine Coast Heritage Trust media release praising itself for snatching away 600 acres of Sears  Island from the public and condemning the rest, including the bay's more important groundfish nursery to degradation and outright destruction.

The rest is history - at least a flawed, cracked, mirror image of history, which conveniently leaves out every thing that would counter Downeast's Maine-as-funhouse carnival spin. Shall we count the ways?

* The headline: "How Sears Island was Saved".  Even Clark at his grovliest wouldn't have stooped THAT low, so we shall assume a copyeditor spat it out in a moment of cynicism that caught the publisher's eye. Saved indeed.

* "For decades the largest undeveloped island on the U.S. eastern seaboard has been a source of controversy."   Ah Jeff.... T'was not the island that was a source of controversy, it was the various industrial schemes that tried to squat upon her wild face.  Wassumkeag - pronounced like "blossom keg" - was not controversial to the people of Searsport and the surrounding region at all.  Why should it be? It was absentee-owned land that allowed for light recreation. People married there. Had their ashes strewn there. Fished, hunted and hiked there.

Occasionally Big Money showed up and tried to industrialize it, but conservationists always rallied round the people of Searsport and the island, and the threat was thrown back.  That was, until Angus King's doomed industrial sprawl attempt on the island's life left Wasumkeag sorely wounded and parts of the bay's ecosystem in disarray.   

* "As one of the last remaining sites suitable for a deepwater port in Maine, business and government officials have long seen it as the key component of an industrial revival in the Penobscot Bay region."

The Penobscot Bay region keeps wondering just why it is that the "revival" schemes these do-gooder wannabes in Augusta keep hatching have everything to do with enriching big absentee industries, and little or nothing to do with enriching the extant thriving decentralized industries that have driven Penobscot Bay's economies for centuries.

Have in fact, everything to do with destroying several of the keystones of those economies that Downeast usually fawns over: the commercial fishing industry - though this is something Jeff Clark has but dimly heard of, for the volumes writ about the irreplaceability of the habitats that must be dredged away for this "key" port,  is freely available - on the internet, at the agencies headquarters,  indeed from the archives of quisling Maine Sierra Club - the federal and state memos and reports, the EIS, the SEIS, the maps, all of it is available.

The shining sands of Sears Island's nomenclature are as much those rich sandy shoals off her western shore, gleaming with phot0plankton phosphorescent in the summer night.

But Clark feigns ignorance of such detail; the vision he would spread across Downeast's pages must (and does) sing the praises of Wise John, so loudly that he must be hoping that the proposed darkening of Wasumkeag's shining sands is  well nigh invisible under the radiance of Baldacci's gleaming visionary pate.

Time presses. We'll return to our discussion soon, but what Jeff Clark has done is  held up the two bloody halves of the baby that Governor John has split apart  and declared them to be tasteful and even, as in his article's coup de gras - one must make sure the nursery side of the island has ceased its annoying cries, - declared that what was best for big industry was best for Maine

To Be Continued

Former Downeast Mag writer pimps Baldacci/Damon port plan

Downeast Magazine recently laid off seven writers from its staff. The ghost of one of them, Jeff Clark, lingers on, and has exuded a strange poisonous final downeast article, "How Sears Island was Saved" appeared in the May 2009 issue.

A slapback against getting the Downeast boot, Clark's article (editorial? or...consider the publication: puff piece) is a lengthy paean to MDOT (and to Governor Baldacci and his understudy-who-would-be-governor Senator Dennis Damon,) as they gaily bent state law, mocked the Maine Constitution and trampled over hundreds of small businesses over the last three years in an effort to rush installation of a supersize container port onto 940 acre Sears Island - including dredging away the nursery shoals at the headwaters of Maine's most lobster-rich bay,) Clarks missive-by-any-name stands head and shoulders above the rest of the Sears Island fantasies spun by other dogs on other laps.

A marvel of, no, what must be a purposely grotesque parody of Downeast's shameless chamber of commerce huggerism, Clark manages through dint of great labor to carefully get every fact wrong, and to reach precisely the wrong conclusion.

This may seem puzzling in the light of pronouncements by his admirers, such as a recent one calling him "a reporter with real news sense and serious writing chops" , Indeed Jeff was considered the Voice of Downeast Maine

Ah but that was the old Jeff Clark. The new Jeff Clark, cast adrift from his Downeast mooring, would much rather, it appears, find a public affairs slot in a Damon administration. Government public relations - the only media field that grows as the economy contracts.

A versatile scribbler, he would be as much at home flacking the Department of Corrections as he would the Governor's office. While DOC's Asst Commissioner for PR Denise Lord would not willingly give up her slot spinning happy faces onto reports of institutional mayhem at the state prison, it may be that Dan Cashman at the Governor's office has tired of spinning his Nibs' doings and little machinations.

There, Clark's obsequiousness to the aforementioned politicos trying to force a container port and railyard onto Sears Island would pay off. Notably the way this "reporter with real news sense and serious writing chops" tried to conceal the fact that it was Governor Baldacci himself who almost sneaked a Liquid Natural Gas port and plant onto Sears Island during his first term;
saddest and worst, that Jeff Clark couldn't trouble himself to contact or even once directly mention any of the opponents of the island splitting plan; and in a hundred other ways, played fast and loose with the facts in that inimitable hazy opium dream style that this suddenly former Downeast Magazine writer Jeff Clark perfected.

To be continued.

Soup spills into fish documentary

Ah, Souperwoman. How DO you do it? The videographer arrives from Frisco, the producer from Portsmouth, and the local guy connecting them with Knox County fishermen squires them to Lobsterman Art Johnson for a satisfying go-round in his backyeard amid his still-homeported trap gear. Then to the fish pier, where connector-man checks in with the Western Sea, Plan B, Double Eagle and other boats, all alive with spring-cleaning. He motions them on down to the end: Captain Fill of the ' Sea is willing to talk. They amble down, quick words along the way with the Live Lobster folk and the bait people.

We are all there at end of the fishpier, finally and the good Captain has allotted some time from his busy schedule, sitting relaxed on dock, while his crew works around him, grinning in anticipation of being video'd for national news distribution. The producer begins her low key language dance, working out the psycholinguistics for a good interview.

WHEN IN POPS A VILLAGE SOUP REPORTER

...stepping into the documentary space between the interviewer and her camera shooter, and Capt Fill. "Wait!" she announces, and the camera lowers, pulls back "Me first."

Danny Fill raises an eyebrow at the producer. She shrugs. The reporter demands the Captain's name, inquires as to his business (he tips his head toward the Western Sea, the steel herring seiner rising and falling in the Gulf of Maine swell behind him.) Meanwhile the interviewer, videographer trade glances with the local producer. He clears his throat. The Soupie stops (she is snapping photos of Capt Fill now) and then, recollecting that there ARE other people here, steps back, and Meg the producer restarts to her colloquoy with Danny Fill.
tend to modify the observed, a privilege that is reserved to the documentarians and their subject.

Or should be. Souperwoman stays inside the frame, for all the world as if this were a press conference.

Eventually the interview is over, and as the captain returns to working on his boat, we shift to a lobster smacker, back from transporting lobsters from island fishermen to the mainland. He is interested but declines, politely but firmly, to be interviewed. He does agree to talk off camera and Meg quizzes him about healthcare. The Village Soup reporter again inserts herself into the frame with her own questions and photography. The local producer moves up the pier, considering the next interviewees. They head to the North End Shipyard, where the wooden masts of half a dozen windjammers rake the sky.

Captain Brenda Thomas of the schooner Isaac Evans is nowhere to be found, but the Souper proves useful and finds him the boat's phone #. He calls and reaches her husband, who listens to the proposition of being interviewed. Shortly he walks up through the shipyard. An interview with he, (much Soup insertion, of course). Finally Captain Walker shows, agrees to be interviewed, too, and take camera crew aboard her schooner, clambering across another to reach the Isaac Evans. Only a bit of Soup this time, as the quarters aboard are rather tight for captain and documentary crew AND soup reporter.

Things come to an end. The footage is shot, the words are all in the can. A quick stop to get a release signature from Lobsterman Artie Johnson Local Producer, the the documentary crew a share a round at the Black Bull, and all go their seperate ways. Meg got what she came for. Consumers Union will have its health care story. Village Soup will have its story "the making of a documentary".

And when it duly is published, the local producer reads it and sighs. He's not in the "making of" story at all. A casual reader would think the Souper Reporter had done it all on her ownsome.
He jots her a quick email subject lined with a "Thanks for the coverage of the health care video crew" to fan her ego, but with this message in the body: "...And a hearty middle finger for leaving me entirely out of it."

Childish, but one must observe the proprieties.