Also on today’s menu:
Unaffordable Housing Plagues Granite State
Ruggles Mine To Reopen In 2024
Needed: Social Movements By Ordinary People
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) have been linked to higher cancer rates, especially among firefighters, and to contamination of drinking water. The chemicals have been used for decades in fire protection equipment and types of Class B firefighting foam, the most common of which is aqueous film-forming foam (AFFF), identified as a leading cause of PFAS contamination in drinking water.
When the state Legislature prohibited firefighting foams containing PFAS in 2019, it directed the Department of Environmental Services to form a takeback program. Meanwhile, the foam has been stored at local fire departments, military installations, airports, and other facilities. Now New Hampshire has contracted with Ohio-based Revive Environmental, with its new “PFAS Annihilator” technology, to remove and dispose of an estimated 10,000 gallons of AFFF through a takeback program with municipal fire departments.
Revive Environmental commercially deployed its PFAS Annihilator in April. The technology uses high temperature and pressure to break down PFAS molecules into safe byproducts, the company said, effectively destroying PFAS in contaminated wastewater, landfill leachate, and AFFF.
Unaffordable Housing Plagues Granite State
The latest Residential Rental Cost Survey Report from New Hampshire Housing shows the vacancy rate for rental units remains near a historic low, with less than one percent of units open. The latest monthly report from the New Hampshire Association of Realtors found that median sales prices for homes reached record highs in June: $495,000 for single-family homes and $400,000 for townhouse-condo properties.
Only about 7% of two-bedroom units statewide are considered “affordable” for those earning the statewide median income of $51,000, and the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment is a more than $1,700 a month, according to New Hampshire Housing. Renters would need to earn about $70,000 a year to afford such high rent. In Grafton County, there has been an 82% increase in rent for a two-bedroom apartment.
Those costs make it hard for businesses to recruit employees, and difficult for people to keep a roof over their heads.
Ruggles Mine To Reopen In 2024
Ruggles Mine, part of a 235-acre parcel of land atop Isinglass Mountain in Grafton, is the oldest in the country, opened by Boston businessman Sam Ruggles in 1803. The mine, which sits on a deposit of an igneous rock known as pegmatite, which includes a variety of minerals, including mica, operated commercially for a century and a half before Geraldine and Arvid Wahlstrom purchased it in 1961. They transformed it into a tourist attraction.
(I recall my brother visiting the mine years ago and commenting, “It’s just a big hole in the ground.”)
The Wahlstrom family attempted to sell the mine to the State of New Hampshire, but the sale fell through and, instead, they sold it in 2019 to Exciglow, a production company formed by two men based in New York City. They have held it ever since, but it has been mostly closed.
Now Joseph Bodge and Eric LaRoche have purchased Exciglow and the mine in a foreclosure auction, with plans to reopen it next year. Bodge is the owner of an Epping ice cream stand, but reportedly has been involved with other mines. LaRoche reportedly has “expertise in minerals.”
Needed: Social Movements By Ordinary People
Tom Frank has observed, “[E]very single battle in the culture wars has been presented to us over the years as a kind of substitute class war, as an uprising of ordinary people with their humble values, against the highbrow elite.” He sees a need for another popular uprising to correct the present political climate where neither Republicans nor Democrats are representing ordinary Americans.
In an interview with Seymour Hersh, Tom observed, “I am amazed that Donald Trump is still standing as a politician after all the injuries he has inflicted on himself and the world. My suspicion is that the public doesn’t care more because they have learned to mistrust the news media and because the media’s constant beating of the January 6 drum sounds a lot like their constant beating of the Russiagate drum before that. It’s the problem of crying wolf, and then what do you do when the actual wolf shows up?”
The Democrats, who used to represent working-class Americans, have abandoned them in favor of white-collar, college-educated citizens, in his view, allowing them to tap into the kind of wealth that Republicans have enjoyed. “The Democrats are now frequently competitive with the Republicans in terms of fundraising, sometimes outraising and outspending the GOP, which is new and intoxicating for them,” Tom said.
“The Republicans, meanwhile, are also comfortable with their position, with their endless moral grievances about modern American culture and society. They haven’t lost all their big money funders, despite Trump’s antics, and in 2016 they learned how to win a presidential race in a country where plenty of political thinkers thought they, the GOP, would soon be extinct due to demographic change.”
To correct the current situation, he said, “All our great historical moments of progressive reform have been due to huge social movements, movements that enlisted ordinary people by the millions, not just the professionals in DC. I’m thinking of the farmers’ movement in the 1890s, the labor movement in the 1930s, and the civil rights movement and then the antiwar movement in the 1960s. Social movements succeed. They build and they change the intellectual climate and then, when the crisis comes, they make possible things like agrarian reform or the New Deal or the Civil Rights acts of the 1960s. We need that kind of mass mobilization today.”
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