Throughout the early 1990s Bulgaria was wracked by political instability and strikes. The former communists were a powerful influence. Although the end of the decade was more stable, there was little tangible progress with economic reform.

Under Bulgaria's former king, Simeon II, who was prime minister between 2001 and 2005, the country pressed ahead with market reforms designed to meet EU economic targets.

It achieved growth, saw unemployment fall from highs of nearly 20% and inflation come under control, but incomes and living standards remained low.

Bulgaria was not among the countries invited to join the EU in 2004. However, it signed an EU accession treaty in April 2005 and joined in January 2007.

EU officials set tough entry requirements, reflecting their concerns about corruption and organised crime. After a series of reports found that the Bulgarian government had failed to tackle these issues effectively, the EU announced in July 2008 that it was suspending aid worth hundreds of millions of euros.

In September 2010, the EU again called on Bulgaria to take urgent action to tackle crime and corruption, and later in the year France and Germany announced that they would block Bulgaria from joining the Schengen passport-free zone until the country had made "irreversible progress" in this area.

Another cause of friction has been the Kozloduy nuclear power plant, which supplies over a third of Bulgaria's electricity.

Amid concerns over the safety of communist-era nuclear facilities, four of Kozloduy's six reactors were shut down as a price for Bulgaria's EU membership, two of them closing just minutes before the country joined the EU.

In a bid to offset the loss of production at Kozloduy and restore its position as a major power exporter in the Balkans, Bulgaria revived plans for a second nuclear power plant, though these were later put on hold because of a lack of funds.

Bulgaria is also involved in two rival gas pipeline projects: Russia's South Stream pipeline and the EU-backed Nabucco pipeline.

The oil boom in western North Dakota has sparked a massive migration. Communities that struggled to keep people are now tripling in size as workers from all over seek their fortunes. In South Dakota, officials say there’s oil in their state too. But before drillers head toward Mount Rushmore and the Black Hills, North Dakota’s experience is being watched closely.

“We want to change the Republican Party,” said Chris Stearns, the Virginia state director for the Ron Paul campaign. “We are making sure our people get in positions of leadership — in the nation, in their state, in their county and city, all the way down to the grass roots level.”

Libertarians such as Stearns aspire to nothing less than the kind of bottom-to-top takeover that proved so successful for the religious right and anti-abortion forces in the 1980s. Many of the men and women who swept into local party office then inhabit top rungs of the GOP now. And similar to that movement, Ron Paul and his campaigners for liberty are looking down the road.

“This is not just for this term,” Stearns told CNN Radio from the southern end of the state, “but four, six or eight years from now.”

Nearly 200 miles away, in northern Virginia, a separate Ron Paul supporter is similarly forward looking.

“Four years, eight years, 12 years, we are here for the long haul,” said Patrick Bailey, a 26-year-old who moved from New York to Washington specifically to get involved in electoral politics.

He plunged in on Saturday as one of three Paul supporters running for delegate to the national convention from Virginia’s 8th Congressional District.

Battle in the grass roots

That kind of local party election is often ignored by headlines and pundits, but it’s where Ron Paulians are waging their most furious battle.

Primaries and caucuses often dictate how a state’s delegates should vote, but it is these internal state and local party conventions that determine who the individual delegates will be. They represent hundreds of small but open doors to get your troops to the convention.

The 8th District, which includes the Washington suburbs of Alexandria and Arlington, felt the Paul surge Saturday. Four years ago, the district convention saw some 350 participants. The 8th District Republican chairman told CNN that participation had nearly doubled this year.

Anyone can attend and vote, as long as they sign up by a deadline and have not voted in a Democratic primary in the past five years. This is how the Paul strategy works: Sign up. Show up. Vote.

“We have been calling and e-mailing,” Bailey said ahead of the vote. “Our turnout’s looking great.”

But some feel it is an attempt at political hijacking.

“There are people out here who are still fighting for Ron Paul who got defeated at our primary,” said Fran Redmon, who has been involved in the 8th District Republican Party for 40 years. “It’s so ridiculous. They should either be a Republican or not be here today.”

Asked what she thought the Paul supporters were trying to accomplish, Redmon replied, “I think they aren’t really thinking it through. I suppose they think we’re people who don’t have an agenda or something.”

Indeed, the agenda is the rallying cry for the libertarian forces.

CNN spoke with more than two dozen Paul supporters at this local Republican meeting and they shared common goals: substantially smaller government both in spending and in power, far more limits on the Federal Reserve, an end to what they see as American interventionist policy overseas and a cry of concern for individual rights.

The second-ballot gambit

“This is a movement,” said Homan Rabie, who came to the 8th District convention with his high school friends, “(Republicans) need a true philosophy.” They need to bring in more minorities and young people like his group, he added.

So it’s a movement. Why then all the national convention delegates?

Especially in a place like Virginia where, by Republican rules, nearly all the elected delegates must vote for Mitt Romney on the first ballot.

Let’s get the nomination theory out of the way.

One supporter at the 8th District convention mentioned a much-forwarded idea that Paul delegates could abstain on the first ballot, forcing a second vote at the convention and then, on that second ballot, cast votes for Paul. But there are two problems with this notion: One is that if a delegate abstains, an alternate delegate, who may or may not be a Paul supporter, would step in. The other problem? Many Paul supporters told CNN they think it’s a pipe dream. They’re distancing themselves from the idea.

“To me personally, it doesn’t look like any way that’s going to happen,” said Bailey, the candidate trying to get to Tampa. “I don’t see (the Paul delegates) going in and causing a ruckus. The last thing we need is to become a scapegoat (if Republicans don’t win in November).”

Change the party from the bottom up

Paul says as much himself. He told CNN last week that the idea of disrupting the national convention “is not in my plan. That is against my plan.”

The plan, say supporters up and down the Paul chain, is to put their people in Republican positions of power from the bottom to the top, and change the party.

Saturday, the few hundred voters at Virginia’s 8th District convention chose between seven candidates for three national convention seats. While Bailey came in fifth, his friend and fellow Paul supporter Matthew Burrow took third place and won a spot for libertarians in Tampa.

Stearns says Paul supporters have won 15 of the 24 congressional delegate spots decided in Virginia so far.

Add it to the list. Paul took all 21 elected delegate spots in Maine and the vast majority of the elected delegate positions in Nevada, state party officials confirmed to CNN.

Party officials in Minnesota have not been able to certify their exact results to CNN but agreed that Paul won most of the up-for-grabs delegates there as well. That is especially notable because Minnesota’s delegates are not bound on the first ballot at the national convention.

But the 2012 nomination is not the point, Bailey reminded those around him.

Instead, it’s learning the process, getting better at it, gaining positions and changing the Republican party, no matter how long it takes.

“We’re all getting training on the ground now,” he said. “At the end of the day, this is all practice for the next time. And the next time all be practice for the time after that. And eventually we are going to win.”

It is a big plan, requiring not just determination but stamina.

]]> http://mainefarmsforthefuture.com/ron-paul-backers-plan-transform-the-gop/feed 0 http://mainefarmsforthefuture.com/an-iconoclast-and-his-students http://mainefarmsforthefuture.com/an-iconoclast-and-his-students#comments Thu, 17 May 2012 17:02:04 +0000 Peter Trellis http://mainefarmsforthefuture.com/?p=7977

By STUART ISACOFF

Orchestras are the luxury liners of the classical-music world—beautiful, huge and often unwieldy—and many are finding it increasingly difficult to stay afloat. So last year, three music industry veterans—publicist Mary Lou Falcone, Opus 3 Artists president David Foster and festival director Tom Morris—launched a program to help turn things around. The “Spring for Music” festival at Carnegie Hall comprises six orchestras from around the country, selected for proposing especially creative programs, and offers audiences seats for just $25.

Spring for Music:

New Jersey

Symphony Orchestra

Carnegie Hall

May 9

“I believe programming is an art, not a formula,” Mr. Morris says. “This is a challenge to orchestras to demonstrate thoughtfulness and a sense of adventure. Some construct their programs around a theme, others build an evening so that each work illuminates the others.”

Steven Rosen

The links between Busoni, Weill and Varèse, three individualists.

One particularly interesting concert this time around will take place on Wednesday, when the New Jersey Symphony, under the direction of Jacques Lacombe, presents the little-heard Piano Concerto by iconoclastic 20th-century composer Ferruccio Busoni, along with works by two of his equally individualistic students, Kurt Weill and Edgard Varèse. On the surface, the three could not be less alike. Weill is perhaps best known for his “Threepenny Opera” and its signature pop hit, “Mack the Knife,” but his early First Symphony is in a starker, more dissonant mode. Varèse’s advanced modernist music, which relies on unusual, percussive timbres, is represented by his final work, “Nocturnal,” complete by his student, Chou Wen-chung. Busoni’s 1904 Piano Concerto score is sprawling and lush. “The contrast is important,” Mr. Morris explains. “The Busoni is such a huge Romantic potboiler, you want to go the other way in the first half with a completely different sound world.”

Busoni is a fascinating figure, more often talked about than heard. “We know him mostly by his Bach arrangements or his late works,” says pianist Marc-André Hamelin, who will be soloist in the concerto. Those piano arrangements add dynamic intensity and drama to Bach’s solo writing; Busoni became so associated with them that several anecdotes depict people accidentally addressing his wife, Gerda, as “Mrs. Bach-Busoni.” But his essays and books peer into a future in which the 12-note scale is divided into even smaller slices, and music takes on an aesthetic of “oneness”—rising beyond mere sensuousness and subjectivity.

“Somehow I was under the mistaken assumption that Busoni’s piano concerto was one of his late works and would be dark and mystical,” Mr. Hamelin reports. “But it turned out to be this gloriously rich and serene work, and I knew it had to be played. Then, I worked to get it under my fingers and realized it is a bear.” That’s quite an admission from a brilliant pianist who seems capable of playing anything, from the standard repertoire to the most finger-breaking rarities, with seeming ease. Nevertheless, he says, there is nothing flashy about Busoni’s solo writing here. “The work is a sort of symphony with piano. If you expect the traditional concerto, you are going to be disoriented. All the movements are very long—the slow movement alone is over 20 minutes. So you must be prepared to experience the kind of narrative more commonly associated with the symphonic utterance. The difficulties for the pianist are of an internal kind—getting the grasp of the harmonic and architectural world of the piece, and coordinating the minute changes of tempo and shifting balances with the orchestra.”

The concerto, which the composer saw as the culmination of his early manhood, is in five movements, including a lively Tarantella and a finale with male chorus. The text comes from a never-completed setting of “Aladdin,” based on a tale from the “1001 Nights.” It’s a poem of praise to Allah—”Lift up your hearts to the Power Eternal”—envisioned as a melody that “blossoms and ascends without end.”

“The links between these featured composers are not so obvious,” Mr. Lacombe explains. “But they all knew each other and worked together in Berlin in the early part of the 20th century. And there are some wonderful programmatic connections. The Busoni concerto and Varèse’s ‘Nocturnal’—a work based on Anaïs Nin’s ‘House of Incest’—both call for male chorus, for example. In the case of Weill, you see the attempt of a young composer to try out a lot of things, and you can sense the influence of Busoni at times—in his fugal writing, for instance—while there are also moments that sound almost like Broadway. It’s all there, and very touching.

“I’m proud of the New Jersey Symphony’s ability to pull it all off,” he continues. “We have all the qualities necessary: the strings are gorgeous in the Busoni, and the orchestra does a fantastic job with Varèse’s varying timbres. ‘Spring for Music’ makes it possible for us to present the program without having to worry about the business and marketing details. For us, it’s a very exciting moment.”

Mr. Isacoff’s latest book is “A Natural History of the Piano: The Instrument, the Music, the Musicians—From Mozart to Modern Jazz and Everything in Between” (Knopf).

Corrections & Amplifications

“Spring for Music” was organized in part by David Foster, who is also the head of Opus 3 Artists. An earlier version of this article misidentified Mr. Foster as a record producer.

A version of this article appeared May 9, 2012, on page D7 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: An Iconoclast and His Students.

(Fort Edward, N.Y.) The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is currently conducting a five-year review of the cleanup that has been conducted so far on the Hudson River PCBs Superfund site, which extends from Hudson Falls, New York, to New York City. The cleanup work is being performed in the Upper Hudson River north of Troy, New York. The purpose of this five-year review, which is legally required under the Superfund law within five years after the start of on-site construction, is to ensure that the cleanup is working as intended and continues to protect public health and the environment.

In conducting the five-year review, the EPA is reviewing site operation, maintenance and monitoring information. The plan for dredging underwent extensive review by the EPA and the General Electric Company at the end of the 2009 dredging program. The dredging was also reviewed by a panel of independent scientific experts at that time. The results of that evaluation will be summarized in this five-year review and will be supplemented with information gathered during the 2011 dredging season. The five-year review will also include a review of the 1984 cleanup plan for the areas of PCB-contaminated sediment upstream of the areas targeted for dredging. These areas, known as the remnant deposits, became exposed after the river water level dropped following removal of the Fort Edward Dam in 1973.

Between 1947 and 1977, an estimated 1.3 million pounds of PCBs were discharged into the river from two General Electric capacitor manufacturing plants located in Fort Edward and Hudson Falls, New York. The dredging of the Hudson River was designed to occur in two phases. The first phase of the dredging project was conducted in 2009 and the second and final phase began in June 2011. The cleanup is being conducted by General Electric Company under a legal agreement with the EPA.

Under the law, the ongoing five year review of the Hudson River dredging project must be completed by the end of April 2012. The results will be shared with the public and will be available on the EPA’s Hudson River website at www.epa.gov/hudson and in the local repositories established for the site: Edgewater Public Library, 49 Hudson Avenue, Edgewater, NJ 07020; Adriance Memorial Library, 93 Market Street, Poughkeepsie, NY 12601; NY State Library, Cultural Education Center, Empire State Plaza, Albany, NY 12230; Crandall Public Library, 251 Glen Street, Glens Falls, NY 12801; Saratoga County EMC, 50 W. High Street, Ballston Spa, NY 12020; EPA Hudson River Field Office, 421 Lower Main Street, Hudson Falls, NY 12839; and at the EPA Region 2 Superfund Records Center, 290 Broadway – 18th Floor, New York, NY 10007.

Project information can be found on the Internet at http://www.epa.gov/hudson and http://www.hudsondredgingdata.com.

For further information or to submit comments on the five year review of the Hudson River PCBs Superfund site, please contact Gary Klawinski (Remedial Project Manager) at klawinski.gary@epa.gov
or Larisa Romanowski (Community Involvement Coordinator) at romanowski.larisa@epa.gov. They can also be reached at:

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Hudson River Field Office
421 Lower Main Street
Hudson Falls, NY 12839
(518) 747-4389 or (866) 615-6490 (Toll Free)

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Many people believe money can solve all their problems. But Richard Watts, a financial and legal advisor to the very rich, says there’s some truth to the saying, “more money, more problems.” Watts speaks with host Michel Martin about his new book, Fables of Fortune: What Rich People Have That You Don’t Want.