Transcription of Political Perspectives #276
Speaker 1: You are listening to Love Maine Radio, hosted by Dr. Lisa Belisle and recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine in Portland. Dr. Lisa Belisle is a writer and physician who practices family medicine and acupuncture in Brunswick, Maine. Show summaries are available at lovemaineradio.com. Here are some highlights from this week’s program.
Harold Pachios: It’s anti-immigrant, it’s give me back the old job I had, technology has now made me obsolete. We’ve had that before. We had it in the Industrial Revolution. This is not anything new. When society is disrupted as we have been by globalization, it’s here to stay, but it’s disruptive. When people are disrupted, they look for any port in a storm and somebody promising them the old days is going to be somebody they follow. Some dangerous politicians have done that and been successful for a time.
Severin Beliveau: I think that the strength of our country is we’re the freest, the most open society in the world, and I think we will continue to be that way. I think that Mr. Trump has defined himself fairly well during the campaign, but now we’re finding that when he deals with the real world, whether it’s national security or economy, his position is changing on a lot of these issues.
Lisa Belisle: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to Love Maine Radio, Show #276, Political Perspectives, airing for the first time on Sunday, January 1, 2017. This month, we inaugurate a new president of the United States, which is certain to create change in both the nation and our state. Today we speak with two attorneys who have long had a passion for politics and have contributed greatly to our government. Harold Pachios is one of the founding partners of Law Firm Preti Flaherty. His private career in politics dates back to the Kennedy administration. Also a Preti Flaherty founding partner, Severin Beliveau directs the firm’s government affairs practice in Augusta and Washington, D.C. Thank you for joining us.
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Lisa Belisle: My next guest is an individual who is very well known on the Maine scene. This is Harold Pachios, who is one of the founding partners of the law firm Preti Flaherty. Prior to practicing law, he had a career in government and politics. He served as an associate White House press secretary under President Johnson, was nominated by President Clinton to the U.S. Commission on Public Diplomacy, and was appointed by Secretary of State Colin Powell to the State Department’s Special Advisory Group on the Arab and Muslim world. He now lives in Cape Elizabeth. Thanks for coming in today.
Harold Pachios: My pleasure.
Lisa Belisle: You’ve been around a long time doing this work.
Harold Pachios: I’m old. I’ve been around a long time. Yeah. I’ve done a lot of different things simply because I’ve survived.
Lisa Belisle: Well, it’s interesting to think back to President Johnson, press secretary under President Johnson. How did you even get that gig?
Harold Pachios: Oh, that was a different era. I was in the United States Navy after college. I got a commission when I graduated and went aboard a ship two weeks later in the North Atlantic. The campaign of 1960, on election day 1960, I came off watch, and I went to the radio room, we’re out on the North Atlantic, and I began pulling sheets off the AP and UPI tickers on reports from various states. I kind of got hooked. The next morning became apparent that Kennedy had won, and I thought to myself, “I want to go try to be part of what Kennedy’s doing.” I got very excited about John F. Kennedy.
I applied to Georgetown Law School, and you had a choice between day school and night school. I took the night school. I showed up there in mid August of 1961. Kennedy had been president for five months. I got a job, I didn’t know a soul in Washington. Got a job in a restaurant as a waiter. After ten days in school, one night at a contracts class the guy sitting behind me in a striped suit, tie, and I’m in my coffee-stained khakis said to me at the break, “Where did you go to school?” I said, “I went to Princeton.” He said, “So did I. What do you do?” I said, “I’m a waiter.” He frowned at that, and it really upset me, and I said, “What do you do?” He said, “I work for the president’s brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver. We’re starting a new agency called the Peace Corps. Do you want a job?”
This is no kidding now. A day later, I went there before school. A young man came out to interview me from this Peace Corps study group. His name was Bill Moyers. Nobody had ever heard of him. I had never heard of him. Moyers said, “Dick Nelson told us you want a job. We’ll give you a job.” Just like that. I’m just telling you, that’s the way it happened. I became associated with Bill Moyers at a very young age, and he was very young. He was in his twenties. I worked with him at the Peace Corps headquarters. All of the most interesting people that came to Washington because of John Kennedy worked in the Peace Corps.
It was a very small staff. We got to know each other well. Moyers was one of them. Moyers was a good friend of the vice president’s, Lyndon Johnson. He was from Texas. When Kennedy was assassinated, Moyers was in Texas, came back on the airplane with Johnson, and didn’t leave his side really for the next two to three years. In the campaign of ’64, Moyers got me to come on the staff and work in a campaign, and then I went full-time in the White House following the campaign when Moyers became the press secretary, and I became his deputy. That’s it in a nutshell.
Lisa Belisle: If this was a different time that you’re describing and the way that one gets involved in politics was slightly different back then, do you think that that has translated into what’s going on in the modern day, do you think that that’s translated into a different way of approaching politics?
Harold Pachios: How I got involved is instructive in how other young people can get involved. I always tell young people, college students, who say, “Gee, I’d like to get a job in a congressman’s office or in politics.” I always tell them, “Proximity is the key to everything in this world.” Proximity. Whatever it is, think proximity. If you’re interested and there’s a campaign coming up, go volunteer in a campaign. When you volunteer, make sure that you become indispensable because if you’re an indispensable volunteer, you’re shortly going to get a paid job. They don’t want to lose you. That’s the key to make yourself indispensable while you’re a volunteer, and then they give you a job and then it’s proximity, and candidates know you, people running for Congress, Senate, they know who you are.
The best thing is to be the car driver, to drive them around. Nixon had two top assistants, one of them went to jail, Ehrlichman, the other one was Haldeman, they have very bad reputations, but they ran the Nixon White House, and how did they start? Driving Richard Nixon around when he ran for Senate in the 1950s. They were his car drivers. I can tell you about a lot of car drivers in campaigns who became very important aides to top politicians. Proximity, that’s what I would say.
Lisa Belisle: Do you think that this is one of the issues that we have these days is that we’re very connected but we’re not as connected where we can be connected socially on social networks but not as much face to face?
Harold Pachios: Absolutely, but also, another difference is, the amount of media, the number of sources of information. When we had just three television networks, just three, they had to play to wide audiences, broad audiences, so they couldn’t be very partisan. They had to be as objective as possible because in order to make money, if you were one of the three, you had to have very broad audiences. Now, MSNBC, FOX, they don’t need a very broad audience. They don’t need a lot of people to make a lot of money. They cater to just a sliver of the electorate, and that’s enough for them to make a lot of money. Just like talk radio. These people on talk radio make a fortune because they get a narrow group of people fired up. Those people can’t wait to listen to that talk radio show, whether it’s Limbaugh, whoever, and they get rich doing it.
No one has to talk to the middle anymore. That’s why rank-choice voting is so important because it requires politicians to think about the broad middle rather than just a sliver of the left or the right. That’s the biggest difference, and we can tune in now to… You can listen to whatever we want in terms of what we agree with. I have a mother-in-law that listens only to FOX. There are many people that listen only to FOX. Many. Well, you couldn’t do that in the old days. You had to listen to ABC, NBC, or CBS. Totally different.
I don’t know where we’re going now. We have this… Not for the first time in American history, we have this very strong populist movement, which Donald Trump has tapped into. It’s anti-immigrant, it’s give me back the old job I had, technology has now made me obsolete. We’ve that before. We’ve had it in the Industrial Revolution. This is not anything new. When society is disrupted as we have been by globalization… It’s here to stay, but it’s disruptive, and when people are disrupted, they look for any port in a storm, and somebody promising them the old days is going to be somebody they follow. Some dangerous politicians have done that and been successful for a time.
Lisa Belisle: Didn’t Hitler do that?
Harold Pachios: Hitler did it. It began as a populist movement. The Nazi party began as a populist movement. After World War I, Germany had been defeated. The German economy was in tatters. Twelve years later, there was a global depression. People did follow that and people elected… You know, the Nazi party was elected. It didn’t just take over, it wasn’t a coup. Millions of Germans voted for the Nazi party because they thought it was a solution to their problems. They later regretted it. I’m reminded, I was reading a book about World War II, I read a lot of World War II books, and when the U.S. Army was going into Munich in April, the end of April 1945, Munich was falling to the Allies, and there was a big white sign in the downtown side of a bridge that the U.S. Army went across, and the sign said, “I’m ashamed to be a German.”
Since that time, the Germans collectively have been very introspective. Why did we do this? Why did we as a country elect Adolf Hitler and put the Nazis in power? We don’t have anybody being introspective right now. We have a lot of columnists that are warning us, but we don’t really have a lot of individuals being introspective about what’s going on in this country.
Lisa Belisle: Is it also problematic that we don’t have a lot of time for reflection where the news is so immediate and it’s being reported in such an immediate way that there’s no greater contextual analysis?
Harold Pachios: You are correct. That is the biggest problem. No context. Because there’s no context, people go on the Internet and get untruths. Everybody is producing information now. I can sit in my house tonight and produce information and send it to a thousand people if I had their email addresses. A thousand people or more. I produce the information. Doesn’t have to be truthful, doesn’t have to be factual, but I can produce it knowing that my audience, the thousand people I’m sending it to, they would love to believe what I’m saying and they accept it, and you are correct. They give it no context. Most people aren’t interested in history. We devalue history now. We have people saying, “Why should I study history in college? What good will that do me? I want to go in the insurance business. What good will history be to me?” History allows us to put things, as you just said, in context.
Lisa Belisle: I read two books while I was on vacation. One was about the sinking of the Lusitania and the other one was about Pat Tillman, who was the NFL player who was killed….
Harold Pachios: In Afghanistan.
Lisa Belisle: In Afghanistan, and he was a victim of friendly fire. Both of them were so very interesting because it really spoke to how information comes out, sort of the timeline, and also who interprets it and why.
Harold Pachios: I’m glad you raised that point because I think that is critical for everybody to think about. You read those books, and it helps you with discernment. There’s very little discernment among the American public today. One of the problems and I’m going to get in trouble for saying this but I don’t care, what are they going to do to me, one of the problems is not enough education. We need to really push to educate people beyond high school. If you look at polls now of who people support and why, there’s huge divisions. It has nothing to do with who the candidates are, it’s what they’re selling, it’s what they’re promoting. There are huge divisions based on level of education. What does that tell us? Why should education be such a distinguisher among people as to how they vote? Why should education be the line, but it is, look at the polls. There was one in the Portland newspapers a couple of days ago showing, you know… the views of those with only a high school education and the views of those who have been educated beyond high school. Now in a populist movement like we have now, what people say in response to me is, “You’re an elitist. You’re an elitist, and that’s wrong, and we have to bring you down.” It’s too late to bring me down. I’ve gone along too long.
Lisa Belisle: You’ve been with Preti Flaherty since the beginning.
Harold Pachios: Kind of the beginning. I’ve been with Preti Flaherty since that firm began. I was with another firm briefly for a while called Berman, Berman, Wernick, and Flaherty. That’s where the Flaherty came from. I came to practice in Portland in 1969. I was born in 1936, so that’s a long time ago. I’m 80 years old now, and I’ve been practicing law let’s say 69… almost 50 years. A couple years short of 50 years at Preti Flaherty.
Lisa Belisle: What keeps you doing this? What keeps you showing up every day and being part of this?
Harold Pachios: I have other things to do, but the things I do relate to my profession in law and relate to making things happen, solving problems, and I like to read, but I wouldn’t want to be home all day reading. I just don’t want to do that. I like to do things. I see things all the time that, I’m a bit of a gadfly, that irritate me, and I try to do something about it. Most often I fail. Around town in Portland, if I see graffiti on buildings, I want to do something about it. I want to go talk to somebody about it. I want to call the city manager or whatever. It’s just my nature.
Lisa Belisle: Do you think that that’s unusual in this day and age?
Harold Pachios: I don’t know. It depends on the person. Look at George Mitchell. George Mitchell is three years older than I am, and he is the chairman of his law firm, which is the largest law firm in the world. He travels all over the globe. He is a problem solver, people call him up. He is the best, biggest business getter in the largest law firm in the world. He is a very busy guy. He spends an enormous time in Maine because of his Mitchell Institute. He reads all the time. He writes all the time. He writes books, he writes speeches. He’s a dynamo. I’m not saying that just because he’s my friend. He’s a dynamo. He’s 83. You do it I think as long as you can, and then when either God thinks it’s time for you to check out and end it or you get impaired in some way and you can’t do it anymore, but why not do it while you can?
Lisa Belisle: My father is still practicing medicine, he’s 70.
Harold Pachios: He is?
Lisa Belisle: He’s still got ten good years ahead of him according to your schedule, I guess.
Harold Pachios: Where does your father live?
Lisa Belisle: He lives in Yarmouth and he practices…. Actually, my mom’s still teaching, she’s 70. They both do it because they love what they do.
Harold Pachios: Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: They both, you know, right in this Portland Area.
Harold Pachios: It keeps them going and vital. They’re not just sitting around. They’re doing something that they like. They’re making a contribution and they’re helping themselves.
Lisa Belisle: Is that why you keep doing this?
Harold Pachios: I keep doing it because I’m interested. I don’t say, “Okay, I’m going to keep doing all this because it keeps me healthy or alert. It keeps away dementia or whatever.” I do it because I see things that I think are wrong, I’m not always right, and I want to correct them. When I worked for Sargent Shriver, who was President Kennedy’s brother-in-law, who is incidentally the most incredible man I’ve ever met in all my years, Sargent Shriver, Kennedy’s brother-in-law. The Kennedys didn’t think he was the most incredible guy, but many others who worked with him did. He invented the Peace Corps actually. Every detail of it. He invented it. Shriver was always fond of the quote by Edward Everett Horton, “I’m only one, but I’m still one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something.” I think that’s right. That isn’t all for good either. I am not saying that I’m altruistic. I’m saying that I like to make things happen. I’ll confess, at my age, it’s harder to make it happen.
Lisa Belisle: I wonder if one of the things that you just said is more wise than you realize and that’s, “I’m going to say this, it may not make a popular person, people may disagree with me, but I’m going to say it anyway.” I wonder if one of the things that is happening is that in this era of political correctness, people feel like they can’t say anything for fear of being criticized or ostracized, and so they just don’t speak.
Harold Pachios: Political correctness is a very interesting term. I even myself have over the years frowned on “political correctness”, but what is political correctness? Being nice to people? Is it being civil? Is that political correctness? Is, if you think another politician or somebody running for office is a jerk, if you fail to call them a jerk, and say, “Well, they’re all right,” you know, try to be civil, is that being politically correct? I think people that’s being politically correct. What they like about Donald Trump, a lot of people tell me what they like about Donald Trump, and you’ve heard it, we’ve all heard it, is, “He tells it like it is,” so that if he says that Jeb Bush is weak and a fool, if he says that Hillary is a crook, if he gives some horrible, other insult to somebody, he insults people every day, people love it. Some people love it. Some people. I better be careful, some people love it, and they saw, “Ah, look at that. He’s candid. He’s telling it the way it is. He’s not politically correct.” People would say that. In my judgment, and I hope they’re listening, are fools to think that, are fools.
Lisa Belisle: I think that I meant… well, I know this, not just I think that I meant this. I meant the situation where people…. I agree, we should be nice to people. I agree that we should understand where people are coming from, and that we don’t have to go out of our way to say things that are insulting.
Harold Pachios: Right.
Lisa Belisle: I think that what I’m talking about is college campuses where there’s evidence of micro-aggressions and nobody feels like they can say anything anymore.
Harold Pachios: I think it’s ridiculous.
Lisa Belisle: That’s what I mean by political correct, extreme political.
Harold Pachios: Okay, that’s what you’re talking about. Microaggressions. You know, at Yale, they’ve had Calhoun College for 100 years. Students protested because Calhoun was a slaveholder. Every signer of the Declaration of Independence south of Maryland was a slaveholder. Every one of them. Jefferson was a slaveholder. Should we tear down the Jefferson memorial? Is that offending people? I’m the son of Greek immigrants, and there are a lot of offensive things said about Greek immigrants. So? It’s over. So what? I’m not offended. I can’t go around being offended by everything. These people on college campuses, if they’re going to be so easily offended, are going to have a very tough time in life.
Lisa Belisle: I would have to agree with you there. I’m hoping that people can… we can get a little beyond that so that we can be nice to people and we can understand where everybody’s coming from, but we can still have an open dialogue so that we can move forward.
Harold Pachios: What do we do about it? I guess maybe it’s a fad, I don’t know.
Lisa Belisle: Well, we’ll see.
Harold Pachios: Yeah, we’ll see.
Lisa Belisle: You’ve been very gracious to spend time with us today and I know you’re a busy person so we’re going to take this time that we spent with you and wrap it up. Is there anything, one thing, that you hope to see as you continue your days on this planet?
Harold Pachios: Most of what I think about when I drive around and think about when I’m looking forward to something in the future, is Portland, Maine, and what it’s becoming and what it can become. To me, it’s the most exciting thing that’s happened to me is to live in this city through a period of enormous change. I have lived here in the bad days, in the down days, and now I’ve lived long enough to see this renaissance of Portland, Maine, and its potential is so much more. That’s what really excites me.
Lisa Belisle: I have been speaking with Harold Pachios who is one of the founding partners of the law firm Preti Flaherty and has a long and distinguished career prior to that in the political world. I really appreciate your taking the time to come in and offer these perspectives and to have this conversation with me today.
Harold Pachios: Thank you for having me.
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Lisa Belisle: My next guest is an individual well-known, really, in the state of Maine. This is Severin Beliveau, who is one of Maine’s best known attorneys and has significant experience in legislative and regulatory issues. He is a founding partner of Preti Flaherty and directs the firm’s government affairs practice in Augusta and Washington, D.C. I know this is a very short, we’ve shortened the bio, but yours is very long and….
Severin Beliveau: I’m humbled.
Lisa Belisle: Impressive and… I mean, you’ve been around doing stuff with the state of Maine and really nationally, maybe even internationally, for a long time.
Severin Beliveau: Many years, yeah. Fifty years. Think about it. Fifty years since I…. When I graduated from law school, returned to Rumford where I was born and raised. We’re from there, my father had just retired from our State Supreme Court, and my brother came from the justice department. We started a law firm with no clients, and we built on that, and I was elected district attorney at the time and that was kind of the beginning and then I was a state legislator. House, Senate. Eventually after I was married, we moved to Augusta, to Hallowell, where we’ve been for the last 25, some odd years, and a few years ago, after our children, our four boys left, after they were educated, three of them whom were out of state, one of whom is here, we moved here to Portland where we live in a condo on Munjoy Hill. Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: So, you saw a lot of change in Rumford, I would imagine, given what Rumford used to be and what Rumford has evolved into. What was your family’s interaction with the mill?
Severin Beliveau: That’s a good point. When I was a kid in the 50’s, the mill was thriving. The paper mill at that time employed over 3,000 men and women. It was a strong sense of community, where the company was owned by a family from Connecticut. Strong unions. Good pay, the salaries, the hourly wages were very high, one of the highest in the state, and there was, again, a strong sense of community there. Since that time, the mill, which is currently in its fifth iteration I think, fifth or sixth owner since then, now employs around 700. They reduced, declined the employment from 3,300 to 7,000; that’s fairly representative of what’s happening in all the mill towns in Maine today. That can be attributed to a number of factors. I think one is competition, ironically from the Far East, where paper’s manufactured there, and Canada as well because of cheap energy prices. We visit Rumford mill market, Jay, and all these mill towns, it’s sad because you’ve seen… It’s the end of an era, and despite what certain politicians are suggesting, there’s no prospect of returning to those days.
As I said, when I was a kid, Rumford had a population of around 10,000, it’s down to around 6,500. We were one of the first families, my grandfather McCarthy, Matthew McCarthy graduated from the University of Maine Law School in 1900, and he was one of the first lawyers and the first judge in that town. My father, he was a prosecutor. I was, my uncle and my grandfather, we were the four DAs in that county for a number of years. We had a strong presence in that part of Oxford County. Unfortunately, no family members are there today. We have a home in Rangeley, and I travel through Rumford, and I have friends and all, but it’s fairly representative of what’s happening in Maine today, and I think that this last election kind of reflected that. You look at the voting patterns. The areas which were predominantly, strongly Democratic because of the unions and the workers, have voted for Trump in a big way because people are unhappy and angry and saw the economy floundering and thought that maybe there’s some way out of it. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. I’ve lived through all of it, and one statistic I like to cite is that in Maine, in the last five years, our population has increased by 900 people. Were it not for the influx of immigrants and refugees, we would be in tough shape. That’s not a political statement, it’s just a realistic statement.
Lisa Belisle: You have actually a family background that’s not that dissimilar from many people’s family backgrounds. In fact, the three of us sitting in the studio including Spencer Albee, our audio engineer, we all have this French-Canadian, Irish-Catholic thing going on. We’ve talked about this with actually the Lewiston coach, soccer team coach, and his family background also had that French-Canadian, Irish-Catholic. That used to be the dividing line. That used to be… You have one side, the French-Canadian Catholic, other side Irish Catholic. It seems like it’s just again, the same story. It’s been going on for a long time. It probably will keep going on for a long time.
Severin Beliveau: Yeah, I think you’re right. In those communities, particularly in the 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s as they migrated from Ireland and from Canada and Acadia, they each had their own culture and language. That was reflected in the schools and the churches in all those communities, in Lewiston and Bedford and Saco and all these and Rumford and Madawaska, Jay, all these communities, had two churches and two schools. You had the Irish school and Irish church and Irish priest and the French priest. I went to French school at Rumford. Spoke French at home to my father. We were very much aware of the cultural differences, but we didn’t experience that in Rumford. I mean, that tension between the two cultures didn’t exist, again, because you had this strong economy. When things are going well, people get along well. It’s when they’re under economic stress that all these other issues surface.
If we had a strong economy, much of the problems we have in Maine today wouldn’t exist, I think. People wouldn’t be complaining as much about the immigrants and others who are coming here. You’re right. You see the evolution here in Maine where all the economic activity is really in two counties, York and Cumberland Counties. North of Brunswick, the populations of 14 counties, beginning from Androscoggin, Oxford, Somerset, Franklin Counties and all, the population has not increased by 1% in 50 years. As a matter of fact, it’s the converse. It’s declined, and so it’s a real challenge for all of us who are committed to the state are to find ways of dealing with this. I don’t know what the solution is, but we’re out there struggling, you know, trying to find a solution to it. That’s why we all moved to Cumberland County, I guess.
Lisa Belisle: Do you think that part of what needs to happen is that people who live, and I’m one of these people, I grew up in Cumberland County and have lived here most of my life, would benefit from understanding the perspective of people who live in other counties in the state because the assumption that tends to be, “Well, we all live in Maine, so we all must think alike.” That’s just not really true.
Severin Beliveau: Oh no, no, no. You couldn’t be more right. There’s a big bubble here in Cumberland County. This area does not reflect in any way what’s occurring in the rest of the state. I can cite a number of examples. I think probably the best example is… I don’t want to inject politics into it because that’s the way life is. On the Democratic side, during the Democratic caucuses this spring, you had a clear division between the limousine liberal side from Cape Elizabeth, Falmouth, Cumberland, so forth, they all supported Hillary Clinton, and the rest of the state went with Bernie in a big way. They dominated. They wonder why poor old Emily Cain lost the second district. The problem is not the social issues, which certain people love to focus on, but it’s the economy. It’s jobs. That’s what people are concerned about.
You see this happening in all these other counties where people aren’t worried about Planned Parenthood. I mean, that’s important, and we all support it, but all these social programs don’t solve anything. We have some underlying fundamental issues that we have to deal with that is how do we strengthen our economy, how do we create more jobs. With all due respect to my neighbors and friends and colleagues and my law firm who live in this part of the world, they don’t understand the culture, the dynamic in the rest of the state. Until that happens, that’s why, again, I hate to be political about it, that’s why the Republicans do so well because they connect, that people feel somehow that they’ll…. At least they’re focused on it and may in fact produce a result. That remains to be seen, but at least they’re looking in that direction.
Lisa Belisle: I noticed even in my practice in Brunswick which is still Cumberland County so it’s still… It’s actually a somewhat diverse medical practice, and we have people from the military who worked at BIW, we have people who are fishermen and farmers and our catch area is larger than just Brunswick. There are a lot of different people with a lot of different political views who come through the doors of our office that I am able to have conversations with. I don’t think that that is something everybody has access to.
Severin Beliveau: No, no. You’re right. Brunswick is somewhat part of that limousine liberal crowd because of Bowdoin and others. You have Bowdoin, you have Brunswick and naval air stations… On the government side, I consider that to be an artificial economy. Augusta and Kennebec county thrives well because it’s the seat of government. You’ve got thousands of state employees there. Ironically, in most of the state, I’d say at least 13, 12 or 13 counties, the best jobs are government jobs. They’re not private sector positions. I can cite examples all over the state. I love people that say, “Keep government off our backs.” If we took government out of our economy, this state would collapse. Literally collapse. Not so much in this part of the world, in Cumberland and York counties, but also here to a great extent. Some of the better jobs are, particularly with the federal government, state government. The private sector can’t compete in many ways with…. Even in the healthcare side. That’s government for all practical purposes. It is.
The private sector has a ways to go in Maine, and to your point about whether the people who live in Cumberland and York Counties can connect or relate in any way to the rest of the state, I see it in a number of ways. For instance, in creating the state park, that monument up there in Moosehead Lake in the Katahdin region. The resistance, the opposition came from the locals because they were fearful that somehow this would affect their economy. Where did the support come from? Southern Maine. People who grew up there, spent a week there, a year, are not dependent upon that area for a livelihood. That dynamic is there, and I think the greatest opportunities and also one of our greatest risks is the fact that we haven’t capitalized completely on our forest products economy. You know, we have 14 million acres of forestlands here in Maine, and we’re still sending wood to Canada to be processed and returned here in a better form.
I know I’m probably expanding a little more, but I think the one big issue that would change Maine in many ways is if we had… Our energy costs. We have the highest energy cost, particularly electricity cost, in the country. We have 75% of our people dependent upon electricity. We have very little natural gas, and there’s been a real attempt to bring gas in from Pennsylvania and New York here, and there’s been tremendous resistance from people who don’t depend upon the… If our paper companies had natural gas, that’s a big factor, is energy costs because over the last 25 years, paper companies have been acquired and purchased by out of state investors, primarily investment groups, a lot of them from New York City, who have disposed of all the land. Paper companies do not own any forestlands today. When I was a kid years ago, they had their own source of raw materials, so they could control it. They only own their own energy. They had their own hydro-projects in Rumford, Jay, in Lewiston, Merrimack, all the mill towns. All those energy generating facilities have been sold to third parties so now they’re paying market rate, and it’s very uncompetitive.
Lisa Belisle: This is interesting for me because you have many years of personal perspective, but you also have family perspective if your grandfather graduated from the University of Maine School of Law in 1900. You obviously have had this familial exposure to Maine history and politics. Do you have any solutions for these problems that you’re bringing?
Severin Beliveau: I don’t have any solutions. You’re right about the history is, Maine is still a very young state. We’re a small state. My grandfather and I didn’t make… My father read law in his office. My father never went to college, but he ended up on the State Supreme Court. Those things happen. It happened back then.
Again, there’s no simple solution. I think that energy is a big factor. Last week I was in Austin, visiting my oldest son and I was talking to Emmett about it, I said, “What is there about Austin that’s so attractive to people?” He says, “The climate, the culture, and taxes,” he said. Those are the three issues. Now we’ve got the culture, we have a claim to some extent. The tax structure as a result of this most recent referendum, we’re going to be probably the second highest in the country. None of us enjoy paying taxes, but we recognize we have to pay them. Prepare to do it. It’s the price of civilization. We have a lifestyle here that is the envy of the world, and publications from your company for instance kind of reflect that. I suspect most of your members or buyers are from out of state, they’d love to have something that connects to Maine on their tables so they can show it to people.
To answer your question, I don’t know. I think energy, if I were to identify one issue, it would be energy and taxes, energy being a priority. Taxes is a big factor. In our law firm, we represent a number of businesses, and we know clients of ours who are looking carefully at Maine right know and who are having second thoughts about either remaining here or when you have a tax rate of over 10%, they would think about another…. Our incremental tax rate would be the second highest in the country for those making over $200,000. Now should we complain about it? Probably not, but they’re the ones, the people who are earning that type, they’re the ones who lead the companies and create the jobs and strengthen our economy. You can criticize them all they want, but that’s the way it is.
The other issue here, and I have to give some people credit, we do have an expanding government, and why, because there’s a vacuum there and people want goods and services, but that’s not the long-term solution. Adding more government jobs, having more people hanging around, isn’t a solution. Maybe for the short term, but I think that health care is another very big issue here which cannot be neglected any longer. As you know we have over 65,000 people who are without insurance here because the administration refuses to support the expansion of Medicaid in Maine. Those are things that we have to talk about because Forbes Magazine just listed us as the 50th worst place to do business in the country. We went up from 47th to 50th. Think about it. What kind of a message does that convey to people? All kinds of factors contributed to it but I think taxes are one and the fact that we’re the oldest state in the country, a non-expanding economy. Paper companies that are struggling. Three or four of them shut down in the last four or five years. We have probably four or five functioning, productive, successful companies, two of which went through bankruptcy in the last three or four years. I don’t know, I think the solution is getting radio business, you know, like yourself. That’s where the future is.
Lisa Belisle: I think there is something to be said, actually, about the possibility of improving communications. I’m sure that you’re somewhat kidding about getting into the radio business, but there is something that I think that I see happening that is encouraging, and that is that there is a greater opportunity to communicate with people that maybe we don’t live right next to. There is a greater opportunity if we’re willing to listen. There are more people who are… At least the people that I interview for the show and for the magazines, and even people that I see as patients, there is a sense that it is possible to try to address the problem oneself.
Severin Beliveau: The other thing I failed to mention was the importance of the University of Maine and the University of Maine system itself. The fact that we have five different campuses. We still have an essentially… not uneducated, but the percentage of students going onto college from high school has remained flat, it may in fact have declined a little bit. I think what’s happening here at USM, I think, is very encouraging. It’s been revitalized under the new leader. I think he’s doing a very good job. I think education is critical. I agree with the referendum as to its objective in providing additional funding for secondary schools, but the real need is in the college and university level because we no longer are a public university. The legislature, the government only contributes I think like 36%, 40% of the funding for the University of Maine. The rest of it comes from the private sector. It’s no longer a public school. History has shown us in those countries, in those states where they have a strong education system, the economy thrives.
My thesis is, inject more money into the University of Maine, subsidize these kids, get them to school, and that plus the immigrants. When you think about it here in Portland, there are 7,000 students in the Portland school system, and I’m told that 2,000 of whom are immigrants. What would we be without them? In Lewiston, almost 5,000 people are there, and they’re all starting to contribute. You get a lot of resistance to it, but as you know your family, my family years ago, they all migrated here from Quebec or Acadia, Ireland or some other country. It took us a while to acclimate, but we adjusted and produced something. I think they’re doing great things here in Portland in terms of welcoming immigrants and injecting them into the economy and into the school systems. I think the future here, but for the immigrants, we’d have a negative growth in terms of live births in Maine. For the last two years we’ve had more deaths than births. I think we still have to welcome immigrant communities. I think we have to do it like Canada’s doing. Canada’s open arms. Here we think that we’re terrorists or something, but in fact they have a great deal to contribute.
We know the Burundis for instance. There are a number of former French speaking colonies where their immigrants are now refugees, and they’re moving to Maine. They’re all of a sudden, even the churches there, we go to the Sacred Church in Portland. The mass is in French now. Those institutions would be gone. Even during high school. Look at the number of, in Portland high school, 26, 28 languages are spoken? That, believe it or not, I think is the future of our state because these people want to be successful, they’re grateful to be here. They don’t want to be dependent upon the government for the most part. It’s not all bad I guess.
Lisa Belisle: You worked on the Kennedy campaign back when you were a young man, so this was probably one of your early exposures to politics. That was a time of great hope. That was a time of great change. Things were happening. Do you think it’s possible that we will come to that place again?
Severin Beliveau: Hard to predict in light of what happened November 8, what’s going to happen, but I have a lot of confidence and faith in our system. I think the checks and balances are there. I think some extreme statements by politicians will… I don’t think they’ll be executed in that sense. You’re right, I’ve been involved in a number of campaigns over the years. I was involved in Watergate. I was deeply involved in the Watergate. It was my phone that was tapped at the Watergate, and I’ve been involved in lawsuits with… the Nixon committee, I’m totally familiar with that. Even back in ’73 when Nixon, when he resigned pending his impeachment. Everyone thought that that was the end of democracy as we knew it and as a matter of fact, it strengthened it. I think we clearly have some challenges ahead of us in the next four years and only time will tell, but I think that the strength of our country is we’re the freest, the most open society in the world, and I think we will continue to be that way. I think that Mr. Trump has defined himself fairly well during the campaign, but now we’re finding that when he deals with the real world, whether it’s national security or economy, his position is changing on a lot of these issues because he ultimately has to act responsibly, and the Congress I think will be a good check for him as will the judiciary.
You’re right. 1960 was a challenge because of the religious issue in many ways, particularly in West Virginia and that part of the country. Here we have a broader one. We have just a group of unhappy men and women who really believe that there’s a group of elitists who’ve been running the country and they have been forgotten, they have been marginalized. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know, but that’s the way they feel, that’s how they voted. Even in Maine, a good example of that. Southern Maine was strong liberal, support for Chellie Pingree, second district went for Poliquin, very conservative. I think we have it all here in Maine. Again, it’s the economy, it’s jobs, and you can talk about anything else, I think it’s secondary.
Lisa Belisle: I guess the reason I keep pushing for the possibility of hope is, like you I have children, so I have a son who’s 23, a daughter who’s soon to be 21, another one who’s 16, and I guess I want to believe as someone who’s lived in Maine all of her life and has several generations behind me and hopefully many generations ahead of me living in Maine, I want to believe that we’re still continuing to evolve and there’s still possibility here, and that we don’t want to be overly optimistic, but I think that the possibility that we can put work into this and have some success, I think that’s important for me.
Severin Beliveau: I think you’re absolutely right. Getting back, again, I have four boys. My eldest son moved to Austin, after a job he worked at the White House for seven years, he was assistant to the president, he was head of the military office. He had one of the best jobs in the White House. He would like to come back to Maine, he was a lawyer, but didn’t want to practice law. He looked around and not many opportunities here. My second son is a teacher at a charter school on the West Coast. He’d love to come back here and find work. He’s desperate. My third son lives here in Portland. He’s the happiest man in the world. He married recently. He loves the environment, he’s totally engaged, totally committed. Works very hard, there aren’t too many easy jobs here. For a young man and woman, sometimes you have to have several jobs in order to survive.
I share your concern about…. We all want our families to be here. We want to continue whatever we’ve contributed to the state. Again, it gets back to the economy. I agree with you. I think that almost by default Maine’s going to do well because we have the lowest crime rate in the country, strongest environmental laws, the culture is very strong, and there’s still a sense of community here. We don’t have extremes. We have politicians who are fairly verbal, and they express themselves, but beneath that veneer I think they’re all concerned about the good of the state. They view it differently than some of us do, but I think we’re all involved in a common cause in that sense. I think you want your children to stay here, and I’d like to get my kids back here if we could. I was in Austin last week and talk about a thriving community. A million people, just excitement everywhere, you just sense it. Portland has some of that here. York County has some of that here, but boy, it’s lacking in the rest of the state.
Lisa Belisle: Well, I guess we’ll see what happens. We’ll see what happens in the upcoming years, but I do appreciate the time that… not only the time that you’ve spent with me today, but also the time that you’ve spent in the state and really working to create a place that’s good for our children, grandchildren, generations to come. Any last words for us?
Severin Beliveau: No, I think this program that you have here, I think contributes a great deal to what you were talking about, communications, and people want to express themselves. They want to feel that their opinions mean something significant that carry some weight. They don’t want to feel that they’ve been dictated to. That was what I think happened this past campaign. I’m not being partisan about it, but you know, the Democratic side, you’ve got the Clintons who’ve been around for a long time, and I think there’s a lot of resentment as to whether or not they should dictate to us as to 330 million people, do we need two families, do we need the Clintons and the Bushes as the only ones who could lead our country? That’s undemocratic in many ways, and I think we saw a lot of that. I think that’s ending. It has ended, and I think on balance it’s a good thing. I cited the example of divisions within the Democratic party and to some extent within the Republican party, but there are people = from Cumberland County who haven’t the slightest idea how people are struggling in the rest of the state. They don’t relate. Where do they go? When they travel, they don’t go north. They go south. They go to Boston, New York and Florida, right? Except for you and me, we still stay here to struggle. Try to get by.
Lisa Belisle: Well thank you for coming in and having this conversation with me. I’ve been speaking with Severin Beliveau who’s one of Maine’s best known attorneys and who has significant experience in legislative and regulatory issues and is also the founding partner of Preti Flaherty and also a father of four and married to, I’m sure, a very wonderful person.
Severin Beliveau: A lovely lady, a former nun. How’s that? That was a spiritual attraction.
Lisa Belisle: Very good and now living here in Portland, so thank you for spending time with us today, and thank you for the work that you’re doing.
Severin Beliveau: Thank you, Lisa. This has been enjoyable. Yeah, I’ve really had a great time talking to you.
Lisa Belisle: You have been listening to Love Maine Radio, Show #276, Political Perspectives. Our guests have included Harold Pachios and Severin Beliveau. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit lovemaineradio.com. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show, sign up for our e-newsletter and like our Love Maine Radio Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter as Dr. Lisa and see my running, travel, food, and wellness photos as bountiful1 on Instagram. We would love to hear from you, so please let us know what you think of Love Maine Radio. We welcome your suggestions for future shows. Also let our sponsors know that you have heard about them here. We are privileged that they enable us to bring Love Maine Radio to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. I hope that you have enjoyed our political perspectives show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. Happy New Year, and may you have a bountiful life.
Speaker 1: Love Maine Radio is made possible with the support of Berlin City Honda, The Rooms by Harding Lee Smith, Maine Magazine, Portland Art Gallery, and Art Collector Maine. Audio production and original music have been provided by Spencer Albee. Our editorial producer is Paul Koenig. Our assistant producer is Shelbi Wassick. Our community development manager is Casey Lovejoy, and our executive producers are Kevin Thomas, Rebecca Falzano, and Lisa Belisle. For