Category: Uncategorized
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Coal Ash Clean-up: Duke’s Bill Exceeds $5 Billion
Cleaning up coal ash in North Carolina will cost Duke Energy $5.2 billion, 50% more than previously estimated, and the electric utility has indicated it will seek rate hikes beginning next year to recoup its costs. Duke has spent $770 million so far on the clean-up, which entails recycling and landfilling more than half its…
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“Blood on the Mountain”
Jeff Thomas, author of “Virginia Politics & Government in a New Century” and podcaster, interviews former Bacon’s Rebellion contributor Peter Galuszka about the “war on coal” and the Upper Big Branch mine disaster in West Virginia. Peter also appears as a prominent “talking head” (his words, not mine) in a documentary, “Blood on the Mountain,” coming…
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Exploring the “American Lake”
Here’s what the Virginia Band of Goat Eaters, Rum Guzzlers and Low-Adrenaline Adventure Seekers learned from a week-long excursion to the Lesser Antilles: Cruise ships use their market dominance in small islands to extract lucrative terms – 30% to 70% of revenue from what we heard – from their local tour operators. Fortunately, the Internet…
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Mofongo!
The Bacon family is on the road again. Well, on the “road” is perhaps not an accurate description. We’ve made our way to San Juan, Puerto Rico. As always, I try to partake of the local cuisine (unless it’s something disgusting like sheep eyeballs or monkey brains). In Puerto Rico, that means eating mofongo. The…
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Chesterfield Finds $83 Million Unfunded Liabilities
Our society is riddled with unfunded liabilities. Nowhere is the magnitude of short-term thinking more egregious than the federal government. As case in point, the U.S. military has put off maintenance and repairs to the point where we don’t have the money for the military we have, much less the military we would like to have. “The…
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Economic Development “Reset” Needed in Virginia
It’s time for a “fundamental reset” for the way Virginia’s colleges and universities think about economic development, John O. “Dubby” Wynne told the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) board yesterday. Wynne, former CEO of Norfolk-based Landmark Communications, is a driving force behind the Virginia Go initiative. “For the first time in decades,…
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The Self-Employed as a Political Constituency
The maker movement is transforming the American economic landscape. The number of people who make a self-employed living making stuff is still small — almost imperceptible in a U.S. labor market of 160 million — but it is growing. In 2014 more than 350,000 manufacturing establishments in the U.S. had no employee other than the…
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Food Pantries, the Latest College Craze
There’s a new wrinkle on the college affordability crisis. Some students are so strapped for cash that colleges are setting up food pantries. As CNN reports, membership in the College and University Food Bank Alliance has quadrupled in the past two years to 398 members. “Even if you don’t hear about hunger being a problem,…
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Thoughts on Donald J Trump
From one Donald J to another. Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States. He won less by his own virtue than by the lack of virtue ascribed to the political elite by millions of voters. For many Donald Trump represented a break from the kind of political orthodoxy exemplified by his…
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The 5,000-Year Sovereign Debt Bubble
by James A. Bacon Every financial bubble has its own unique characteristics. The late-1980s Savings & Loan Bubble was restricted mainly to anachronistic savings & loans institutions. The Internet bubble was limited mainly to tech stocks. The real estate bubble was tied mainly to mortgage finance. The common thread is that in each case, the powers…
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Three City Council Seats, Only One Candidate
The City of Manassas Park in Northern Virginia has three open City Council seats this fall — but only one candidate will be on the ballot. The situation is a stark example, suggests the Washington Post, of the apathy that is growing more prevalent among America’s small cities and towns. Who can blame Manassas Park citizens…
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How to Cut UVa Tuition 74% without Really Trying
by James A. Bacon Helen Dragas, former rector of the University of Virginia, tried yesterday in op-eds published in the Roanoke Times and Daily Progress to jump-start a conversation about how to dispose of roughly $100 million a year income from a $2.3 billion “Strategic Investment Fund” cobbled together from various sources. That conversation never occurred in…
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Richmond Outsources Alternative School to Private Firm
by James A. Bacon Maybe there’s hope for the Richmond city school system after all. The School Board has approved a contract to outsource the education of students with disciplinary issues to a private company, Camelot Education. Under the contract, Camelot will take over operation of the Richmond Alternative school, which serves students who have…
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The House that Bacon Built
The Gwaltney mansion in Smithfield, built by pork and bacon magnate P.D. Gwaltney Jr., is up for auction after staying within the family for 115 years. The building has been on sale on and off for several years. Latest asking price: $940,000. The Virginian-Pilot has the story here.
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RVA Snapshot: Nice Vision, but the Devil’s in the Details
by James A. Bacon The Capital Region Collaborative, a not-for-profit dedicated to building a more livable, prosperous Richmond region, has just published RVA Snapshot, a set of metrics that compares Richmond to six peer metros of comparable size. The accompanying commentary summarizes the conventional wisdom regarding the region’s strengths and weaknesses, and articulates a “shared vision”…