Cigarettes @ Co-op a Human Rights Issue?

Here's a recent post, from someone called "Mosaic Thump," from the smoking cessation blog of the Hanover Consumer Cooperative Society, on whose board I serve. Pursuant to a policy the board adopted last year, the Co-op has stopped selling tobacco products and will ban the use of tobacco at its facilities as of January 1, 2010.

Mosaic Thump's post bore the title "Human Rights Advocate" and the title was hyperlinked to the web site of a major tobacco company.

"Smoking is bad for you. I have smoked, i know many smokers and quite a few non-smokers too. It has taken lives in my family, it has crippled the lives of people I’ve loved. Why tobacco hasn’t been criminalized is beyond my apprehension… BUT IT HASN’T BEEN.

It is still your right as a citizen of the United States over the age of 18 to consume tobacco products. Until the day it becomes illegal to smoke a cigarette outside in a designated area, an employer should have no right to tell it’s employees that they can’t smoke on a break or on unpaid time.

I believe that the board members/doctors/(selective) co-op members that came up with this plan have probably never worked at a low wage job in their adult lives and therefore could not possibly understand the emotional, social and financial hardships that many smokers face. How could it be their decision what working class employees what to do with their bodies concerning a completely legal and non-mind-altering substance?

Doesn’t sound like the policy of a growing progressive co-operative to me.
-Mosaic Thump

Here's my reply:

I am one of those "board members/doctors/(selective co-op members," referenced by the anonymous blogger "Mosaic Thump" above, who played a role in coming up with the Co-op's tobacco policy. I thought, therefore, that it might be helpful if I weighed in with a response.

Thanks entirely to my good luck, I have indeed had to endure few emotional, social and financial hardships. My forbears, particularly my grandparents, rose to those challenges so that I didn't have to.

But I think it is important in this context to distinguish the challenges faced by people who work in relatively low-wage jobs from the challenges confronted by people who are addicted to tobacco. Not every working class person smokes cigarettes and not every cigarette smoker earns an hourly wage.

I admit to some tempation to be paternalistic and patronizing. It seems to me that working class folks, and everyone else, are well-served by social policies that are designed to help free them from oppression and exploitation by tobacco companies. Cigarettes were invented by those companies with reckless indifference to their then-suspected and since-proven deadly effects, but with the certainty that cigarettes would enslave their users via addiction and thus always have lots of customers. But, I concede, in the end it is up to cigarette users, whatever their niche in the economy, to decide for themselves whether they agree with my perspective on what is, as M. Thump points out, a perfectly legal product.

Thus the Co-op does not purport to tell its employees, its members or its non-member customers whether they can or cannot use tobacco. The tobacco policy does not prohibit employees from smoking in their free time, whether during the work day or otherwise. It simply makes clear that the Co-op will not participate in tobacco-related commerce nor, in the interest of making the Co-op's facilities pleasant and health-promoting for all, permit the use of tobacco at the Co-op's facilities. The policy is no more reasonable or unreasoanble, and no more or less restrictive of personal freedoms, that a policy of not allowing alcohol use -- or bare feet -- at the Co-op.

Above I alluded to the good fortune bequeathed to me by my ancestors. Unfortunately I did not return the favor to my daughter, who suffers from a chronic illness (cystic fibrosis). CF kills its patients, slowly over time, by inflicting permanent damage to their lungs. (A picture of my daughter, during her two-week hospital stay last fall, appears at the top of this post.) It seems to me, from knowing my daughter and well as other people who struggle with this disease, that if God blessed you with a perfectly healthy pair of lungs you should resist the efforts of the tobacco companies to make you defile them. That's not the basis of the Co-op's tobacco policy, but it does explain my passion about this issue -- and my strong belief that the Co-op's tobacco policy advances, rather than conflicts with, the Cooperative Principles.

To avoid difficulties later I feel obliged to stress that the above sentiments are mine and mine alone. I am not authorized to speak on behalf of the Co-op or its Board of Directors.

LDN to Norwich: Drop Dead

Today’s editorial in the Local Daily Newspaper (LDN) is best understood as a formal declaration that it is simply not up to the task of covering public affairs in Norwich. Since Norwich is a small town – just 3,500 people, more or less – in the heart of the LDN’s circulation area, one is left wondering about the future of journalism in our community. And, of course, readers scratch their heads about the Norwich news – the real news, not the ginned up stuff one gets from mining the town list serve – that goes unreported.

On the surface, the editorial dredges up a familiar trope – the idea that public bodies are unfaithful to the spirit if not the letter of their states’ open-meeting “sunshine” laws. What the editorial omits – indeed, what never seems to enter into the discussion – is that open meetings are only half of these sunshine statutes. They also contain provisions requiring government instrumentalities, including municipalities, to make their records open to public inspection.

My fifteen years as a government employee allow me to state, unequivocally, that this is where the news is. When I was general counsel of the New Hampshire Public Utilities Commission, I sat atop a pile of newsworthy documents the size of Mount Washington. But you had to know what to request, which required the kind of laborious digging and thinking associated with fabled investigative journalists like I.F. Stone and Seymour Hirsch.

Or . . . you can sit in the back of selectboard and school board meetings, scribbling down what gets said, and fuming about how anything that is interesting manages to get said behind closed doors. That’s what it seems to have come down to at the LDN.

The editorial complains that “clarity” is lacking in Norwich because the selectboard has held 13 executive sessions since January. Well, I’ve never even been to a selectboard meeting, and it’s clear to me what’s going on: The group of human beings consisting of the five selectboard members and the one town manager are having trouble working together and, it appears, are embarked upon an earnest effort to straighten it all out.

How would a newspaper find this out? Well, during my nine years as a fulltime journalist (1981 to 1990), I chiefly pursued two things: (1) a steady stream of written requests to inspect and copy documents, and (2) more importantly, a network of sources who could tell me where to look and share substantive information with me, both on the record and off the record.

Of course to have sources I also had to have credibility – I had to demonstrate that if people talked to me, I would be trustworthy and not take cheap shots. I was a callow fellow back then and sometimes I made mistakes in this regard. But usually I didn’t, and as a result I could report the news and not waste my time covering meetings.

In contrast, the LDN proves, time and again, that public officials in Norwich have nothing to gain by talking to the paper. An excellent example appears right in today’s editorial.

What an obnoxious shot they lob, straight into the face of Selectboard Chairperson Sarah Nunan. Reached earlier this month on the phone, she told Susan Boutwell of the LDN that “multiple personnel issues” were the reason for the executive sessions, adding: “I’m not sure there’s just one.”

“Well,” the editors huffed in response, “if the chairwoman isn’t sure, then you can be sure we aren’t either.”

The point Sarah Nunan was making is perfectly obvious, it would seem, to everyone but the LDN’s editors. She was seeking to undermine the assumption that it all comes down to difficulties between the selectboard as a body and Town Manager Pete Webster. “I’m not sure” is a well-worn rhetorical device, meaning: “I do not agree that . . .”

Well gosh. Whether Sarah Nunan ever shares anything with the LDN on background is between her and them. But if I were her, after such treatment I’d hang up the next time the paper calls. Which is why the LDN is reduced to whining about its inability to get good quotes and information at public meetings.

As it must, the LDN concedes that the selectboard is within its rights to discuss personnel issues – the “appointment or employment or evaluation of a public officer or employee,” in the statute’s parlance – behind closed doors. But the LDN argues that selectboards should not use this perfectly legal reason for an executive session as an “excuse” to meet privately.

This argument does not withstand skeptical scrutiny.

In 15 years of government service, I was never subjected to having my personnel status or job performance discussed by my supervisors in public and I have never seen anyone else subjected to that kind of treatment either. Norwich was fortunate to land a veteran municipal administrator like Pete Webster; how long do you suppose he’d be willing to serve as a town manager, and what public purpose could conceivably be served, if his every personality quirk and professional habit were hashed out with the world watching and the LDN scribbling?

My respectful assertion is that, beyond knowing the terms of his employment, the public has no interest in the town manager’s personnel issues. He, of course, is free to disclose them – a reality newspapers seldom mention when pontificating about open meetings – and if he chooses not to do that, well then maybe he too is skeptical about how the LDN is likely to treat him. Ultimately, it is the results Pete Webster achieves, and the substantive decisions he makes, that are of concern to the public. The selectboard is accountable to the public for the work of the town manager. The electorate can express its judgment about that in the next ensuing municipal election. It’s that simple.

If only to counteract the LDN’s strategy of building circulation by fomenting dissention and discord in Norwich, allow me to conclude with a public call for forbearance when it comes to our selectboard, our town manager, and their laudable efforts to forge an effective working relationship among the six of them. Their success is not inevitable, but people with less dedication and goodwill would have given up well before 13 executive sessions had elapsed.

I know nothing about what has been discussed during those 13 confabs. But the five selectboard members are also my colleagues on the Norwich Board of Civil Authority and thus I can testify that each of them is an honorable person who is striving to do the right thing and bring her or his convictions to bear effectively on the selectboard’s work. My contacts with Pete Webster have been more limited, but they have been consistently pleasant and thoughtful. I have every reason to think he is also earnestly dedicated to serving Norwich with honor and skill.

Please forgive me if I seem to be belaboring this subject. But many years of experience have taught me that journalism improves when people talk back to the journalists. The internet empowers citizens to do just that, however much the newspaper industry whimpers about how the internet is putting them out of business.

Ten Reasons the Hanover Consumer Cooperative Society Doesn't Need Term Limits for Board Members

1. We already have term limits -- they're called elections.

2. We already have term limits -- it's called death. Nobody can serve forever, even if elected.

3. There's no clamor for the opportunity to serve on the Co-op's Board -- the Nominating Committee has to scrounge around for qualified candidates -- so nobody is being denied the opportunity to serve because incumbents refuse to make way for them.

4. Incumbents are not entrenched. Earlier this year, the Co-op's members turned an incumbent Board member out of office.

5. Term limits are arbitrary -- why should a person who has served, for example, nine years on the Board be regarded as legitimate but not a person who makes it to ten?

6. The Co-op is a complicated organization, cautious about change to the point of being downright resistant to it at times, and thus it takes a very long time for any individual Board member to get anything accomplished.

7. Perhaps the best opportunity to make a difference as a Board member at our Co-op is to get involved in the cooperative movement at the regional, national and even global levels. But you can't just burst upon those stages -- it takes a long time to become known, trusted and respected.

8. Longterm staff members sometimes find it convenient to ignore or dismiss as irrelevant the views of Board members, regarding Board members as "transient." The Co-op's elected leaders gain credibility and stature if key employees can't just assume they can wait us out.

9. Maine. In that state, the reign of an entrenched House Speaker in the 1970s, 80s and 90s (he had the job for 20 long years) led voters there to impose eight-year term limits on all state legislators. This had the effect of transferring power and influence to the executive branch and, more significantly, lobbyists, the later finding it easy and convenient to manipulate relatively inexperienced lawmakers. The public policy of Maine has palpably suffered as a result.

10. Fundamentally, term limits are profoundly undemocratic. The members of the Co-op should be allowed to elect whomever they want to the Board, without having to comply with arbitrary limitations on that right imposed by their bylaws-amending predecessors.

Jim Kenyon on Talbot's vs. Kohl's vs. Wal-Mart

To the Local Daily Newspaper:

I am sick and tired of being sick and tired of your coverage of public affairs in the Town of Norwich.

I grudingly concede it is within your rights to mine the town list-serve that Valley Net administers for news and quotes, however well-calculated that practice is to chill open and lively discussion in that forum. I admit that if I ran a daily newspaper that must struggle to survive in an industry that is on the brink of technology-induced oblivion, I too might resort to this free source of ready news as an alternative to the expensive, old-fashioned gumshoe kind of reporting.

But after reading today's Jim Kenyon column about the missing welcome sign, I can only assume the Local Daily Newspaper (LDN) has settled on a strategy of wilfully ignoring what ought to be obvious: A list-serve like the one Mr. Kenyon quotes at length offers too small and self-selected a sample of personal sentiments to be anything like representative of actual public opinion in a municipality of 3,500 people. More importantly, if your assumption is that Norwich is comprised largely of folks with too much time on their hands, what better way to make this hypothesis self-fulfilling than to seek evidence on a town list-serve -- since such a forum by definition attracts people with the time and energy to pound recreationally on their keyboards?

Moreover, even assuming one can rightly draw any inferences about the town in general from the list-serve posts, Mr. Kenyon actually ignores the evidence and perpetuates his own Ahab-like obsession about his home town by concluding that "image is everything in Norwich." I've read the same posts he has, and offer the following evidence-based, alternative conclusion: List-serve participants in Norwich, regardless of their feelings about the sign and its provenance, rightly think that theft of public property is wrong. That's true regardless of whether the thieves were motivated by thoughtless malevolence, a desire to exploit the secondary market for municipal welcome signs, or a wish to engage in social commentary with respect to self-absorbed, self-conscious quaintness in a time of general economic turmoil.

Since Jim Kenyon fancies himself such a staunch righter of social wrongs, he ought to devote himself to solving what he derisively calls "this classic who-dun-it" instead of making fun of people who improvidently refer to their neighbors as shopping at Talbot's instead of Kohl's. "Kohl's?," asks Kenyon. "What about Wal-Mart?" Well, what about the Listen Center? As I write, I am wearing a shirt I bought there a week or so ago for less than $4. And I am a law professor, married to a doctor, with a new Prius on order.

In fairness to Jim Kenyon, he is not the only writer at the LDN who is determined to perpetuate the concept of Norwich as a wealth-besotted teapot-tempestville regardless what evidence supports or refutes this theory. Susan Boutwell did the same thing on July 24. Here's the gratuitious lede from her front-page story: "It's been a quiet few weeks in town: The long-debated bandstand has been built on the Norwich Green, a bicycle lane in the works for a decade is now in use and the last few Selectboard meetings have taken place without a fight. So Norwich officials were pretty unhappy to report yesterday that a handmade sign welcoming visitors to their village had been stolen."

The LDN might have abandoned that angle, for once, and reported that this year only five tax valuation appeals were made to the Board of Civil Authority (which, by way of full disclosure, I chair), as opposed to the 31 appeals from last year. Since real estate values in Norwich do not appear to have been declining, what accounts for this apparent uptick in general satisfaction with the work of the Board of Listers? Might this be good news? I am not the first person to point out that good news is not considered conducive to newstand sales.

I am also not the first to wonder why the LDN, in its quest to limn the outrageous excesses that wealth induces, is obsessed with Norwich while ignoring Hanover. According to the most recent U.S. census, Norwich (population 3,544) had a measly 14 families below the government's official poverty level. Hanover (population 10,850) had just TEN such families! If the newspaper is scrounging around for evidence of rich people who have nothing better to do than advance their storybook image of quaint New England villages, forget cute welcome signs for a minute and take a look at how Hanoverians have ridiculed and derided Dartmouth's upcoming Visual Arts Center on Lebanon Street, designed by one of the nation's best architectural firms but a building that is not calcuated to look as if it was conjured up 200 years ago. At least wealthy folks in Norwich (many, many of whom owe their wealth to certain green-colored institutions in nearby New Hampshire) have the public spiritedness to settle in a state that is willing to tax itself responsibly so as to provide the public services that the unlucky among us ought to receive from their communities.

I considered but rejected the idea of expressing these concerns in a letter to the editor of the LDN. Doing that would mean playing the game by the LDN's rules: arbitrary word limits, editing by some of the very people being criticized, publication at a time and with a prominence of the editors' choosing. The very web-based channels of communication that are driving daily newspapers to extinction empower us to stop playing by the LDN's rules, and now that we live amidst newspaper monoculture (given the recent folding of the Connecticut Valley Spectator and its affiliated publications) I am more and more inclined to do so.

Readers of the world -- or of the Upper Valley -- unite! Just as Senate Democrats are, at this very moment, looking to consumer-owned cooperatives as a big part of solving the healthcare crisis, reader-owned and cooperatively organized journalism organizations (whether distributed electronically or, less likely, on paper) are a compelling answer. If we owned the LDN, we could fire Jim Kenyon and replace him with someone who is able to get beyond his personal obsessions and his odd dislike of the town in which he lives. There is a wealth of unreported but real news in places like Norwich, Hanover and surrounding communities -- information that would empower us and reinvigorate our democracy, some of it inspiring, some of it embarassing, a bit of it likely to enrage us. It looks like we will have to find that news ourselves, either directly or, better yet, by employing dedicated professional writer-seekers to gather it for us.