The overlooked issues of 2007

Globe columnists and contributors name the big stories that most people didn't read about this year

December 29, 2007

We all know the Israel of wars, oppression, and precarious security, but what about Israel of the humming economy with 90 Israel-related companies on NASDAQ? What about Israeli films garnishing honors around the world: "Jellyfish" and "The Band's Visit" at Cannes, "Beaufort" in Berlin, "My Father My Lord" in Tribeca, "Sweet Mud" at Sundance, and "Aviva, My Love" in Shanghai?

What of Israeli solar power in California that has been saving 2 million barrels of oil annually for nearly 20 years? What of Arava Valley high-tech agriculture, with exports exceeding $100 million? Natafim, the drip irrigation system patented by Kibbutz Hatzerim, is now a multinational conglomerate selling millions of systems throughout the world. What of the Israel that is taking in Darfur refugees, and what of the first Israeli-initiated UN resolution, calling upon countries to share agricultural technology with developing countries, adopted overwhelmingly this month?

It's this other Israel that's underreported.

H.D.S. Greeway's column appears regularly in the Globe.

Over the last few years, hundreds of cities and local governments across the country partnered with Wi-Fi vendors to set up wireless Internet connections for public safety, municipal use, and to help bridge the "digital divide" with cheap or free public Web access. The business model looked like a win-win for all involved; cities would get techified, and the Wi-Fi companies would recoup their massive build-out bills by retailing high-speed access.

But over the course of this year, we saw the rollouts unravel - the costs ballooned, the access was patchy, the retail sales disappointed, and one of the biggest players, Earthlink, announced this summer that it wouldn't sink anymore dough into big metro-level projects (see: San Francisco, Houston or Philadelphia, where it all began).

The story is playing out everywhere on the local level, but the larger narrative hasn't really captured national headlines. What's at stake? Wider access, streamlined government, another line between the public and the private. We read about the wonders of Web 2.0 all the time, but who, in our society, really gets to plug and play? Are we tech-happy, or could government sans wires really be more efficient? We'll have to stay better tuned into this story to find out.

Elise Waxenberg is a senior at Dartmouth College and executive editor of The Dartmouth.

In a lifetime where as a child I saw the segregated schools of cousins in Mississippi, and used the outhouse of my grandparents, the 2008 presidential race is not an unsung story. Yet one cannot sing enough about it.

Going by the latest polls in the key early caucus or primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, either a black man or a white woman will win the Democratic nomination. It is happily hilarious to see the black man, Barack Obama, tout the white women who support him and the white woman, Hillary Clinton, parade the black people who will vote for her.

It is pure delight to visit small towns in Iowa and hear independents say they could go for either Republican John McCain or Obama and hear white women and black people say it is hard to choose between the candidates regardless of gender or race. Every time I scribble down the consternation of the voters, I hear an America struggling in the best sense to live up to its promise.

Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.

To my mind, poverty in the richest country on earth was the most underreported story of 2007, as it has been for many years now.

It should have been on the front page of every newspaper once a week. Every day, we should hear radio and TV news announcers reminding us that some 35 million people live below the poverty line; that 10 million Americans - 3 million of them children - experience hunger.

We should flip through the cable channels and find preachers exhorting the people in their stadium-sized churches, "Help them! Share with them!" Political figures should be making pickup-truck tours of the dirt roads of New England, where families live behind plastic-covered windows in temperatures that drop to minus-20 degrees.

But we've come to accept it somehow, as if there is nothing we can do or say, as if it's too much of a disgrace even to read about.

Roland Merullo's latest novel is "Breakfast with Buddha."

Sixty percent of Americans think the tax code is skewed to benefit the rich, according to a new poll. Considering how often politicians and populists inveigh against the well-to-do, it would be surprising if the public thought anything else.

The very rich may be different from you and me because they have more money, as Ernest Hemingway said, but they also pay a far higher share of their income in taxes. The media make much of income inequality and the high salaries earned by celebrities and CEOs. Rarely do they report on the tax burden borne by the highest earners. According to the latest Congressional Budget Office data, the top 1 percent of American households earned 18.1 percent of all income in 2005. Yet they paid an unprecedented 27.6 percent of all federal taxes and nearly 39 percent of income taxes.

By contrast, the bottom 80 percent of households, which earned 45.6 percent of all income, paid 31.1 percent of the federal tax take - and a paltry 13.7 percent of income taxes.

You think the super-rich should pay their fair share of taxes? Rest assured, they do. And then some.

Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.

Volumes have been written concerning the "subprime mortgage crisis," predatory lending practices, and skyrocketing foreclosure rates. While corporations are losing money now as these loans sour, they made billions of dollars for the years they were on the books.

Government officials, who should have protected the public from this disaster, are now a day late and a dollar short as they attempt to rationalize their neglect by pointing fingers. The combination of corporate greed and inept government has misled hundreds of thousands of homeowners to believe they could afford a home they could not. Before it is over, millions of people will be displaced.

Little has been written about government's failure and even less written about the social impact this will all have, particularly on uprooted children. Once again, it is the children paying the price for adults' mistakes, and no one seems to be paying attention.

David D'Alessandro is a former CEO of John Hancock Financial Services.

This was a year in which education reform clearly lost some steam in Massachusetts.

As a 2006 gubernatorial candidate, Deval Patrick said that before raising the current cap on charter schools, he wanted a new funding formula to eliminate tension between charters and the traditional public schools. But as governor, Patrick let the year pass without proposing a revised formula. (Dana Mohler-Faria, the governor's special adviser on education, says he expects funding recommendations as part of a broader educational-readiness report coming in the spring.)

In Boston, the February 2006 agreement between the schools and the teachers union proved to be worthless. That deal allowed for seven new pilot schools by September 2009. But with the union quietly discouraging conversion efforts, only the Gardner Pilot Academy has been approved.

Education reformers will need to rededicate themselves to the cause in 2008.

Scot Lehigh's e-mail address lehigh@globe.com.

Psst. Governor Deval Patrick is doing what he can to keep a campaign promise and advance the controversy-plagued Cape Wind project. Opponents are still trying to block a developer's plan to construct an offshore wind-power farm in Nantucket Sound and litigation still looms. But recent proposed changes to state environmental-protection laws could help speed up the 130-turbine Cape Wind project, as well as another plan for a 120-turbine wind farm in Buzzards Bay.

No one in the Patrick administration wants it to look like the fix is in. State officials prefer to cite their commitment to renewable energy. But they are also putting serious wind behind Cape Wind, via changes to the state's Chapter 91 waterways protection laws. One major change would stipulate that cables conveying power from wind farms and hydroelectric generating units are water-dependent. That would would make it faster and easier to get the green light from department regulators.

The Romney team did all it could to blow Cape Wind off course. Patrick has a lot riding on a change in direction. If his Cape Wind support is just hot air, he will disappoint a key constituency.

Joan Vennochi's e-mail address is vennochi@globe.com.