Humpty Dumpty Falls as Globalization Marches On

The fairy tale that has unfolded for 55 summers in the shadow of Mount Washington is over. StoryLand, the Glen, N.H. tourist attraction that Bob and Ruth Morrell built as a thriving family business, is now just another piece of a foreign portfolio.

Fabulously low-tech and notably devoid of mass media icons – no Disney characters here – StoryLand has always been fundamentally frozen in the year of its founding. Bob and Ruth Morrell started the place in 1954 with Humpty Dumpty, the Old Woman in the Shoe, the Three Little Pigs, Heidi's Grandfather, and the Red Schoolhouse. They are all still there.

Now, however, Humpty Dumpty is at least distantly related to Ontex Hygienic Disposables, the U.K’s Gala online casinos, and the Berlin-based publisher of a book entitled Nuclear Energy: Principles, Practices and Prospects. All are related to Candover Investments plc, the British takeover firm that in 2007 bought out an international chain of amusement parks, based in Madrid and called Parques Reunidos.

Meanwhile, like so many family businesses, StoryLand ran out of family. Bob and Ruth passed away in the 1990s and their son and successor, Stoney Morrell, died in 2006. Thus, according to the StoryLand web site, Stoney’s sister Nancy “guided the park into a storybook marriage into the Kennywood Entertainment Company family of theme parks in 2007.”

The Pittsburgh-based Kennywood theme park chain must have seemed like a logical choice because its two founding families had been in charge for a whole century. But, just as Kennywood was closing on its purchase of StoryLand, it was also selling out to Parques Reunidos, which had just been taken over by Candover. Though not strictly speaking a fairy tale, the familiar cartoon drawing of a big fish swallowing a somewhat smaller fish which is busy eating a medium-sized fish which in turn is gulping down a small fish seems particularly applicable here.

It is not to trash the Morrell family to suggest that the StoryLand story should have been different.

The economic advantages of local ownership, to any given local community, are beyond dispute. A distant owner, whether it is in Pittsburgh or Pamplona, will strive to extract wealth. Local owners do otherwise, not just to line their own pockets (with funds likely to be reinvested in the community) but, data suggests, to the direct benefit of their employees and their neighbors with whom they do business. For details, see Michael Shuman’s book The Small-Mart Revolution.

Yet the Morrell family is blameless because, in essence, it had no alternatives. Rather than focusing on providing lavish subsidies, in exchange for no promises, to faraway firms that might come to northern New England, it is time to develop innovative financing and entity-creation schemes so that we can invest our energies and our resources in our neighbors. Imagine a worker-owned, or a community-owned, StoryLand! Imagine if it were some kind of cooperative!

By all appearances, at least from the visiting politicians pictured in the history section of the StoryLand web site, Bob and Ruth Morrill were old-fashioned New England Republicans. Their ingrained conservatism has its embodiment in what would, in other contexts, be deemed a theme park. At StoryLand, the glitz is missing and the licensed characters, be they SpongeBob or Ariel the Mermaid, are nowhere to be found. “Throwback,” an oft-used term in relation to StoryLand, doesn’t quite capture the essence of the place, which is grounded in a kind of simplicity and humility – an understanding that, while StoryLand is a nice place to take the kids, it is not the real reason to travel to a place as remarkable as the White Mountains.

Contrast that with Disney World, plunked in the midst of a barren nowhereville. The faux victorian Main Street USA is designed to capture the feel of a real place so that people who live in fake places (the real real places having long since been bulldozed) can wallow in the yearning to escape their banal and charmless everyday surroundings. Even worse is the pretend ruins of a southeast Asian palace, where tigers prowl amid artfully distressed structures – a patronizing and sanitizing celebration of third world poverty and decrepitude.

The point here is that the cooperative principles stand in stark contrast to that kind of exploitative approach to travel and tourism – as did the Morrell Family. If only they could have found each other before it was too late.

Shame on you Key West, and NYT, and Geico, and Anheuser-Busch

From the November 17, 2008 New York Times, dateline Key West, one of my favorite spots:

The rescue boats put in Sunday at dawn. The radio was calling for six-foot seas.

“A lot of people say, ‘Yeah, I like it rough,’ ” said the racing promoter, John Carbonell. “But I raced myself for 10 years, and you say: ‘Good Lord, what am I doing out here? Get me back. I’ll go to church every Sunday.’ ” . . .

55 teams qualified to enter the Super Boat International World Championship here. Their sport, once dominated by tycoons who raced far out to sea beyond view, was refashioned in the 1990s to draw spectators and advertisers. Courses were designed to run laps passing 100 feet from the shore.

The modern racing vessels were named for their sponsors, Cintron and Lucas Oil and the like. The smallest measured 25 feet with a single 525-horsepower engine; the largest 50 feet with twin engines capable of accelerating from a standstill to 190 m.p.h. in three-quarters of a mile. They had no brakes. They burned a gallon of ultrahigh-octane fuel per engine per minute. They were piloted by teams of two, a driver to steer and a throttle man to accelerate.
“It’s all a guy can do to hold on to the steering wheel at that speed,” Carbonell said. . . .

At the world championship, which began Nov. 2 in the Florida Keys, . . . [f]ew stood a chance against the new turbine boats, capable of speeds exceeding 200 m.p.h. but prone to immolation.
“If they make a mistake at that speed,” said Reggie Fountain, a retired racer, “they’re dead.”
Of the turbines, the most dominant was Miss Geico, sponsored by the insurance company. The Geico team traveled on a fleet of semis with a ground crew, a helicopter, inflatable mascots, a merchandise shop, golf carts, motorcycles and tents. The driver and the throttle man, Marc Granet and Scott Begovich, in their early 40s, had been plucked from the pleasure-boat racing circuit in Florida. . . .

With the money Geico was spending, Granet and Begovich were expected to win. Their greatest rival was Mike Seebold, 49, from Frontenac, Mo. His team was sponsored by Anheuser-Busch. Seebold drove a 50-foot Mercury named Bud Light with dual 1,200-horsepower petroleum engines. He had to rely on a steady hand to keep pace with the turbines.

His strategy had worked at the 2007 world championship. The Geico boat broke down in all three races, as Seebold won.

“We went home with our heads hung, and they went home the king,” Granet said, “and we’ve had to live with that all year.”

But through the summer 2008 season, the Miss Geico turbine had beaten the Bud Light petroleum engine in most races. For Seebold, the pressure was manifest. In July, the directors of Anheuser-Busch accepted a $52 billion offer for the company from InBev, a Belgian-based brewing concern. The new owners indicated they did not plan to continue the racing sponsorship. Seebold’s team needed to win a new patron. . . .

In the first two days of racing, Bud Light and Miss Geico each took a checkered flag. With the final race approaching, the stage was set for a showdown. . . .

Offshore buoys set a course of 83 miles — 12 2/3 laps around three turns. The first turn, known as the Wall, marked the treacherous passage between choppy and smooth waters.
“It’s probably the most violent race I’ve ever raced in,” said Bob Vesper, the driver for Team Warpaint from Hammonton, N.J. “It’s like a washing machine.”

In the harbor, cranes lifted the vessels into the water. Atop Miss Geico, Granet cracked the seals of glow sticks attached to the hatch to provide a guiding light to rescue divers. Wearing an F-16 pilot’s helmet, he dropped past a St. Christopher medallion into a seat molded to the contours of his frame. Begovich slid down to his left, facing 14 gauges and four override buttons.

In the sky, helicopter pilots scanned the waters for endangered turtles and manatees. Along the shore, girls covered their ears. The boats roared into the straits, roiling the clear turquoise waters with rooster tail plumes. In staggered starts, Seebold led the petroleum boats with Bud Light, counting on a fire among the approaching turbines.

But no fire came. Granet led the turbines with Miss Geico. Through six laps, he passed the petroleum boats one by one, steadily advancing on Seebold. Coming out of the second turn, he closed the distance to about 300 yards. At the harbor turn, he overtook Seebold.

When the race was done, Seebold knew his beer company sponsorship was gone for good.
“For it to be over just like this, it’s a little hard to swallow,” he said in a hotel parking lot after the awards ceremony. “Life goes on. You’ve just got to find something American in this American country, which is hard to find.”

Editorial comment: It is time for major daily newspapers, and big corporations that seek to build goodwill through sponsorships of sporting events, to revise their concept of what "something American" is, or ought to be.

As retired Army Colonel Andrew J. Bacevich (a Vietnam vet who lost his son in the Iraq war) has observed in his recent book, The Limits of Power, "[w]hether the issue at hand is oil, credit, or the availability of cheap consumer goods, we expect the world to accommodate the American way of life. The resulting sense of entitlement has great implications for freign policy. Simply put, as the American appetite for freedom has grown, so too has our penchant for empire. . . . Here is the central paradox of our time: While the defense of American freedom seems to demand that U.S. troops fight in places like Iraq or Afghanistan, the exercise of that freedom at home undermines the nation's capacity to fight. A grand bazaar provides an inadequate basis upon which to erect a vast empire."

Indeed! Especially when the idle, thrill-seeking rich in that vast empire are burning a gallon of gas a minute!

Saving Civilization -- it's not about frisbees, or flatulence, or weed whackers

More than a year ago – on April 2, 2007, to be exact – the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a stinging rebuke to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for refusing even to consider invoking its authority under the Clean Air Act to address the most pressing environmental problem of this or any other era – global climate change. “EPA has offered no reasoned explanation for its refusal to decide whether greenhouse gases cause or contribute to climate change,” wrote Justice John Paul Stevens, concluding that EPA had acted in an “arbitrary” and “capricious” manner.

Now that every state from Delaware to Maine – ten in all – has moved forward with the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) by conducting an initial auction of carbon emissions allowances under the new RGGI cap-and-trade program, it is worth taking stock of how the federal agency tasked with protecting the air has progressed since the Court’s decision.

The answer is a scary one.

EPA recently issued hundreds of pages of legal analysis describing how it could use its authority under the Clean Air Act to address global warming. But an accompanying statement from EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson made clear his distaste for the prospect. He called the Clean Air Act “an outdated law” that is “ill-suited for the task of regulating global greenhouse gases.” He concluded that EPA action “would inevitably result in a very complicated, time-consuming and, likely, convoluted set of regulations.”

To be fair to Johnson, his comments can be interpreted as a challenge to Congress to make explicitly clear that the Clean Air Act, which dates from 1970, requires a decisive response to an environmental issue that was not on the nation’s radar screen 38 years ago. But we should expect more from regulators, at every level of government, than that.

Yes, bureaucrats like Johnson should defer to and respect the legislative bodies that created their agencies. But they should also remember the reason legislatures invent regulatory bodies rather than simply making every decision themselves. Many of the toughest public policy problems we confront, global warming prominent among them, require scientific and technical expertise that sensible legislators know they lack.

Moreover, the hot-button vicissitudes of the partisan political world are ill-suited to solving problems like climate change. As an example, consider the written comments filed with EPA by CNP Action, affiliated with the conservative Council for National Policy.

If EPA used its Clean Air Act authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, wrote Shaun Waymire of CNP Action, it would impose “undue hardship upon Americans already struggling with high gas prices, by forcing them to either replace their current lawnmowers, weed whackers, power generators, etc. or find a way to make them meet government emissions requirements. . . . I cringe at the thought of a federal agency dictating to the American people how to use their everyday property.” (At least he didn’t complain, as Justice Antonin Scalia did in his dissent to Justice Stevens, that “everything airborne, from Frisbees to flatulence,” is now subject to EPA regulation.)

Like the EPA administrator, CNP Action is also talking to Congress – at a highly charged time when political discourse has degenerated into arguments about lipstick on pigs. In these circumstances, it is the moral duty of regulators, by virtue of their professional and technical expertise, to make clear that addressing climate change is not about taking away people’s weed whackers but is, in fact, about grim realities like uncontrolled CO2 emissions from coal-burning electric plants.

It has been ten years since a petition from environmental groups forced EPA to begin considering the possibility of regulating greenhouse gasses under the Clean Air Act. What the EPA did in June was simply announce that it was renewing the process, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2007 decision, by seeking public comment through some time in November, after the election. Whoever wins, it is time for some regulatory courage.