Preliminary Findings from Pittsfield

The Pittsfield Saga

The isolation provided by the Berkshire hills and the protection of the Tariff Act of 1824 allowed the region’s industries to develop and strengthen. The city’s ties to the defense establishment date back to the War of 1812 and increased with the Civil War.

Production of textiles and rifles was replaced by William Stanley’s production of the first alternating current power generator in 1883. The Stanley Electrical Manufacturing Company was bought by General Electric in 1903.

Levels of employment fluctuated between peace and war time, with the latter always seeing spikes in employment. The largest such spike occurred during WWII, when employment at the Pittsfield General Electric plant peaked at over 13,000 employees. Struggles by labor agitating for better wages, working conditions and benefits were often met with coercion and fear-mongering; a factor that made union members fearful to voice dissent over ordnance production.

This is the former home of the Power Transformer Division headquarters. Over twenty years have passed since it closed in 1987. The building is part of the remnants of the hulking plant and everyday more of the buildings are torn down to make way for development of the William Stanley Business Park, named after the man who sold his electrical firm to General Electric in 1903.

The Cold War and the emergence of applied neoliberal economic principles in the developing world in the 1970s and its expansion to the US domestic sphere, helped foster an environment evermore hospitable to the whims of perpetual capital accumulation. The visionaries of the new hypercapitalism were the CEOs of megacorporations, like Jack Welch, former CEO of GE and resident of Pittsfield and academics at elite schools. Relationships between the country’s most powerful corporations and the US government had been carefully cultivated for decades and these connections began to coalesce in ‘invisible’ mergers with the US government.

Each division of GE was evaluated by accounting on grounds of its profitability and investment records. Corporate headquarters in Fairfield, Connecticut determined where investments are to be distributed. Managers at the local GE plant were more-than-likely from outside the region, giving their “nonnative” views preferential treatment when it came to matters of development. This cost accounting strategy sent low-profit production units to the southern US and overseas but kept power transformer and ordnance production in unionized plants in the north during the Korean War.

In the 1980s, Cold War hype pushed the Pittsfield GE plant to shift production from power transformer to “cost-plus” contracts for the US Army. Power Transformer employed more than 5,000, but by 1988 only 900 worked for the division. At the end of the Korean War, a few hundred were employed by Ordnance but their ranks had swelled during Reagan’s Cold War to over 5,000. “This was virtually a reversal of the proportion of those in civilian and war production at the end of the 1960s,” wrote June Nash.

Pittsfield’s relationship with the military-industrial complex manifests in a small Martin Marietta sign adorning a fence enclosing Hill 78. GE sold much of its ordnance division to Martin Marietta in 1993. Martin Marietta was a subsidiary of Lockheed but they merged in 1995. In 1997, General Dynamics acquired Lockheed Martin Defense Systems and Lockheed Martin Armament Systems. General Dynamics is the fifth largest defense contractor in the world and achieved that status through mergers, acquisitions, and divestment. They employ over 90,000 people worldwide.

For almost a century, GE’s leadership worked closely with city managers and politicians to control all matters related to economic development, barring competition from entering the area and ensuring hegemonic control over labor and the community. Local interests had little say and their concerns about pollution were delegitimized by GE’s paid corporate scientists and manipulated statistics. Local concern and discomfort with creating weapons systems was met with propaganda, coercion and fear. The military-industrial complex continues to disfigures local economic priorities, as it did in the 1980s.

Downsizing at Pittsfield’s GE plant forced laid-off workers to leave the city and search for work elsewhere. Beginning in the 1970s a gradual decrease of more than 15,000, or over 20% of the city’s population fled, depopulating neighborhoods and leaving communities devastated. Complicating matters, GE’s disposal of hazardous PCBs into the Housatonic River, Silver Lake, and various landfills around the city left much of the area a badly stigmatized brownfield. Widespread and serious PCB pollution compromised residents’ health and that of the ecosystem.

It didn’t take long for a multitude of social ills to plague the city. Unemployment, divorce, domestic violence, drug abuse, teen pregnancy, poverty, and crime were increasing as municipal budgets for the fire department, public school system, and other social services were being cut and channeled to pay for the kind of weapons production occurring at GE Ordnance. This structural violence has contributed to the maintenance of uneven development and aggravated Pittsfield’s social ills. Twenty years later, it seems the city hasn’t addressed the issues and is banking its future on relationships with General Dynamics and the military-industrial complex the way it did in the 1980s with a caveat. The rational and emergence of the creative economy and its linkages to big business may actually entrench deep-seated social problems and send the disadvantaged further into the periphery, creating a permanent underclass.

The Morning Star Church on Tyler Street, one of many Roman Catholic churches in the city under the jurisdiction of the Archdiocese of Springfield, has been vacant for years along with many others following fledgling church attendance, loss of community, and scandal.

The Economic “Development” Paradigm: Impoverish Ignore Imprison

This fall’s mayoral contest is insightful. Incumbent James Ruberto out-financed challenger Daniel Bianchi by a four to one margin. Ruberto raised $61,704 compared to Bianchi’s $15,665. Unsurprisingly, Ruberto culled the majority of his campaign contributions from the city’s wealthy southern quadrant and big business that have large stakes in the city’s economic redevelopment. Among campaign contributors is Executive Director of the Pittsfield Economic Development Authority (PEDA), William Hines; the president of Maxymillian Enterprises, James Maxymillian, whose construction company is demolishing former GE buildings to make way for the William Stanley Business Park; the co-owner and project manager of the new Beacon Cinema on North Street, Richard Stanley; the CEO of Unistress, Perri Petricca; and the owners of Jae’s Spice, Joyce Bernstein and Lawrence Rosenthal. Joan Bancroft, former president of Berkshire Life, also donated.

Ruberto’s campaign hired political operatives Dan Cence and Jay Cincotti of Brighton-based Cence Cincotti Strategies for “consulting and communications services” and paid $18,000 for their work. Cence Cincotti Strategies have worked for high-level state Democrats like Boston Mayor Thomas Menino and their work has come under ethical scrutiny.

Ruberto also spent $1,509 on advertising in The Berkshire Eagle, and the paper’s editorial board endorsed the mayor’s reelection bid.

Pittsfield Mayor James Ruberto stands at his desk before leaving his office to attend a swearing in ceremony for two Pittsfield Police officers.

In contrast, Bianchi received widespread support in wards throughout the city. He was also supported by The Massachusetts Laborers’ District Political Action Committee and John Downing, the Executive Director of Soldier On, a veterans advocacy group currently building a home for homeless veterans in Pittsfield. The majority of Bianchi’s financial contributions came from small donors and locally-owned small businesses. The election was the closest in Pittsfield’s history and Bianchi’s call for a recount failed to net him enough votes to overturn Ruberto’s slim victory. The origin of campaign contributions highlight longstanding conflict within the community.

After the election, I sat down with Mayor James Ruberto and discussed his plans and vision for the future. “The notion of tourism and the notion of the entire creative economy, as an element of our overall economic development plan, is definitely real,” Ruberto said. Nevertheless, “the importance of it is more to create an environment where we can accommodate business and industry . . . every bit as much as adding culture to the economy of Pittsfield,” he continued, stressing the importance of “creating” an environment that will attract “young entrepreneurs.” He mentioned that the entire impetus behind developing The Colonial Theatre, “behind the cultural development for the city,” has nothing to do with creating the infrastructure for the benefit of its residents, whose tax-dollars are used to create incentives to attract business, but for the nonnative the Pittsfield’s power elite hope to lure in by exploiting the region’s cultural heritage. Instead, the plan is to exploit it in the hopes of enticing business to William Stanley Business Park, located at the former GE complex, not for the city’s future generation of youth who will find it difficult to gain employment in the industries the city hopes to attract.

Maxymillian construction crew at work demolishing old General Electric buildings to make way for the William Stanley Business Park, Pittsfield's effort to attract big business to the city.

The city’s youth are being failed by a public education system that has been “literally gutted,” in the words of the Ruberto, “prior” to his election as mayor. But, the city’s public schools continue to inadequately serve their students who are to joining the military in increasing numbers. Ruberto’s pandering to elite, highly-educated outsiders goes beyond the domain of developing cultural institutions to attract them to remaking everything for them in their interest. What school systems will these young, highly educated engineers send their children to? The schools serving Morningside and the West side? That is doubtful. As is any serious future commitment to make these schools work for their students because the children that attend these schools do not hail from highly-skilled engineers that work at General Dynamics or the city’s other big business concerns.

“So you have to build around them,” Ruberto says of catering to General Dynamics, because it “is certainly a business that has benefitted our community.” The Mayor didn’t  elaborate on exactly how the fifth largest ordnance producer in the world has benefited the community aside from “creating” hundreds of jobs since the beginning of the “Global War on Terror.” But, where do the jobs come from and who is filling those positions? The GWOT has sent the military-industrial complex into hyperdrive. Incomprehensible amounts of tax-payer dollars are redirected from social programs budgets to prop up an industry that profits when Americans kill the Other overseas.

When GE Ordnance Systems closed in 1990, General Dynamics took up their defense contracts. Over four hundred new employees have been hired since 2004 and they work on programs that help submarines fire Trident ballistic and Tomahawk missiles. Another Pittsfield firm, Protech Armored Products, has greatly benefited from the surge in military production. They produce armor plating in flak jackets used by service members. In the five years since the war in Iraq, hundreds of new jobs in Pittsfield’s defense industry allow some in the city to applaud the ‘progress’ in ‘job creation’ but in contrast to the over seven thousand employees in GE ordnance in the 80s, “few opportunities for high-wage employment exist for Pittsfield High School graduates, who were enlisting in greater numbers in the military.” The kind of jobs at General Dynamic are for highly-skilled technicians and engineers, as the mayor pointed out in my interview with him, and not production-based –– no one out of high school would be able to get them anyways.

What’s more, “The talent they continue to recruit into the area are young engineers [italics my emphasis],” says the mayor. “Typically,” he notes, they are “going into their second job in engineering with young families.” The positions being filled at General Dynamics aren’t coming from natives of the region who are having an increasingly difficult time staying afloat after their tax dollars propped up failing Wall Street corporations and continue to subsidize two failing and foolish wars while unemployment, foreclosures, homelessness, and myriad other factors tear apart the social fabric of the country. But again, the hardest hit populations are ignored because “obviously you need to build around for them,” Ruberto advises, in reference to General Dynamics and the current and future corporate interests in the community. “And that’s why I am really committed to making sure Pittsfield has the finest school system that it can conceivably have.” The corporation is responsible for helping push the revitalization of the downtown and “the environment, help[ing] add amenities, because they need good, young talent [italics my emphasis].”

The state of Pittsfield’s public school system is “a reflection of the fact that we need in this country, not just alone in this city . . . solid pre-k instructional programming,” Ruberto informed me. The tendency to generalize and the city’s problems to the national level serves to deflect blame and talk of mismanagement and applies not only to the Mayor’s office, but to community organizations like the Berkshire United Way, who operate in close coordination with the city and business interests. No one mentioned the diversion of public funds from education spending to military expansionism and the creation of weapons and the correlation between the two and community decay. Mayor Ruberto’s admission that “wide spread [differences] between the learning points at which children are entering kindergarten” stems from “poverty and . . . other social and demographic problems” contradicts his entire economic development plan.

This is the view elementary students at Allendale have when they play or look out the window during class. Hill 78, a highly toxic waste dump, is clearly visible in this photo (small hill with blue tarps on top) and the PCBs dumped here seep into groundwater because it isn’t lined. An aquifer close by has test positive for PCBs. In 1950, when the school was built, the city was granted permission by GE to remove fill material from Hill 78 to use on school grounds.

The Mayor’s comments demonstrate who “redevelopment” is designed for and intends to benefit. The closure of Power Transformer division in 1988 followed by sale of the Ordnance Systems in 1990 and the eventual sale of GE Plastics to SABIC, a Saudi firm, in 2007, left locals with few options for secure, year round, high-wage employment. Many area residents found employment in the seasonal service-sector economy, propped up by superfluous money spent by rich multiple homeowners from New York, Boston and other wealthy enclaves. I asked the mayor if he expects this to change and how his economic redevelopment plan will integrate people from the poorest neighborhoods in the city. “I see Pittsfield as being the home to many of the employees in the hospitality industry in the lower tier entry level kind of work,” Ruberto told me. “Particularly because the [low] cost of housing in Pittsfield,” has the added advantage of making, “what we will call ‘working class values’ fit very, very well into our community.”

Residents in the West side and Morningside communities, who live in dilapidated housing and send their children to underperforming schools, are stigmatized by the community. Considered to be bastions of crime, havens for drug dealers and addicts, pregnant teenagers, and “welfare rats,” among other ill-conceived conceptions, the two neighborhoods and their residents are dehumanized constantly and are the recipients of heavy policing and disenfranchisement. According to Mayor Ruberto they can expect to be integrated into the not-yet expanded low-wage, service sector hospitality industry. In order to do this, “we have to truly do better in the area of public transportation so we can get our workforce to those works sites and back and forth,” he added. “And that’s something that we are working on right now.” The mayor did not mention job training as part of his plan to integrate this segment of the population into the industries and businesses his administration hopes to attract, nor did he mention any sort of initiative to promote entrepreneurship within these communities so that they may develop self-sustaining businesses.

But, certain “parts of cities are always going to be neglected,” Ruberto said when I asked him how he responds to criticism that his administration has ignored these neighborhoods in pursuit of a policy that favors the well-off and people that don’t yet live in the city. It would seem the city’s planners and management see the residents of the Morningside and West side as good enough to change sheets in South County hotels and inns, nothing more. The current extent of “redevelopment” in the two neighborhoods consists of demolishing vacant properties and “strong code enforcement . . . making absolutely sure that the properties are being better maintained.” Many have credited the lousy condition of housing in the area to absentee landowners but the condition of housing will not change until more residents have access to decent jobs and wages.  The city’s definition of the North/South Street corridor as the limits of the official downtown are the demarcation lines that constrain development and serve to keep the communities to the west and northeast, the West side and Morningside communities respectively, outside the bounds of the development of the creative economy. While these neighborhood wait for revitalization to reach them, increased police presence has.

In the summer of 2009, the city cut budgets for the fire department, public schools and Department of Public Works but increased police spending. The contentious debate between the two mayoral candidates over the interpretation of the city’s crime statistics focused on whether or not overall crime had decreased. According to the mayor and the ticker on the police department’s website, “local crime stats mirror national trend . . . overall crime down for 3rd year in a row.”

It is intriguing that even after claiming crime is down Ruberto continued to insist that the police department needs more money. According to police statistics, there were no recorded murders in either 2007 or 2008, but there have been 2 already in 2009. The population has also decreased slightly from 2007 and 2008 figures, which changes the per capita rate of crime.

The county’s prison system has benefitted from its chief patron and Berkshire County’s longest serving deputy, Sheriff Carmen C. Massimiano. Under his leadership, county tax-payers built a $39.1 million, state of the art jail, “making the transition ‘from [the] Civil War to Star Wars.’” The prison consolidates Massimiano’s power because he “operates the Berkshire County Sheriff’s Communications Center in Pittsfield, providing fire, police and ambulance emergency 911 and non-emergency communications for 23 communities in Berkshire County, Hampden County and Southern Vermont, 24 hours a day.” The addition of 120 new full time employees brings total full time employees to over 200, up from 79 – over 150% increase. What’s more, the sprawling detention facility doesn’t pay taxes, and following a bill passed by the Massachusetts legislature, Massimiano saw a pay raise of 21%. He now makes $123,209. The state spent $1.4 billion locking people up in 2008, more than the total spent on public higher education.

Completed in 2001, the Berkshire County Jail and House of Correction “is a direct supervision facility of 160,000 square feet, built on 25 acres . . . the facility features 288 cells divided equally among eight two-tiered housing units, or pods. Total inmate capacity is about 500.”

Sheriff Massimiano legitimates his business through a mix of coercion and philanthropy.  The Diocese of Springfield has awarded his efforts with the “Catholic Schools Recognition Award” and his “charitable” acts are “well known” around the county. It is with the blessing of the Catholic church that the sheriff sends local youth to jail for nonviolent drug offenses, taking them away from schools and universities in their formative years. He serves on the Pittsfield School Committee, where he has the ability to influence other committee members on issues like teacher’s contracts. It is possible to see how the sheriff might be less inclined to advocate in the best interests of the teacher’s when his jail’s budget competes with public school funding.

Predictably, the latest economic crisis has hit Pittsfield and the Berkshire’s residents hard.  For example, the demand for heating fuel assistance has increased 12% for all households and 36% for the elderly. The demand for emergency food assistance has also risen in recent years, with a 40% increase in soup kitchen meals served. Children under five years old are twice as likely to live in poverty than those in the rest of the state. Babies born in the Berkshires are more likely to have a low birth weight than the rest of the state and mothers are less likely to receive adequate prenatal care – 50% of whom are on publicly funded prenatal care, 15% more than the state average. Teenage pregnancy remains a considerable issue, exceeding the state average for almost a decade and rising 20.5% while the state average decreased by 21.7%.

These issues of course, aren’t new.

The community has been ignoring the issues and many others for over twenty years until it became pressing to at least draw up reports highlighting social problems. Perhaps the incentive is to clean up the area in order to rid the city of its reputation and undesirables to attract big business to the community.

Cloaking Chaos and Managing Suffering: The “Misery Industry” in Pittsfield

The Berkshire United Way (BUW) is supported by big business and corporate interests in Pittsfield and Berkshire county. The organization doesn’t target the root causes of poverty, teen pregnancy, homelessness, or crime, for example, because to do so would threaten their existence and upset balance in the status quo. It would obliterate the high-paying salaries of its employees who work in a spacious and well-furnished office and operate on a massive budget. Their ‘community investments’ focus on sustaining and managing suffering instead of tackling the systemic nature of injustice and oppression.

Before finding employment with BUW as the Director of Community Engagement and Evaluation, Nancy Stoll worked in advertising on the US Army account, “encourag[ing] people to join the army” by offering the disadvantaged incentives to enlist: education, travel and opportunity – the very human rights that have been denied to them by a state apparatus that denied them their rights to begin with. She is the co-founder of Plum Market Research and Greylock Discovery Tours, where she was also Marketing Director. Another new addition to the staff of BUW is Maryanne Boenitz, the Resource Development and Volunteer Coordinator. Prior to this position, she was employed by TD Banknorth for 29 years, leaving the one of the corporation’s “predecessor companies” as the Vice President of Community Relations.

The Board of Directors represent various local big business and international corporations. Brenda Burdick is the Marketing and Public Relations Manager at General Dynamics AIS and sits on the BUW board. Three board members are employed by Berkshire Life Insurance Corporation of America, a national insurance company whose 2001 merger with The Guardian Life Insurance Company makes them “a new force to be reckoned with in the twenty first century.”

The about page on Berkshire Life Insurance Corporation of America’s website is akin to an advertisement for Mayor James Ruberto’s economic “redevelopment” plan. “We are headquartered in the heart of beautiful Berkshire County, Massachusetts,” readers are informed. That comment, followed by statements like, “While we call the Berkshires our home, Berkshire Life is a national company represented by field offices from coast to coast,” function to serve as an example and instill confidence in executives considering bringing their business to the William Stanley Development Park. “If Berkshire Life can profitably run a national company from Pittsfield,” it seems to say, “your business can too.” Curiously, Berkshire Life makes an appeal to anyone reading the about page to “Visit Some of Berkshire County’s Cultural and Historical Connections,” and provides links to Tanglewood, Mass Moca and The Mount, among many others. They also provide links to The Berkshire Chamber of Commerce and the Berkshire’s Visitor’s Bureau.

Law enforcement is represented by District Attorney David Capeless and Pittsfield Police Chief Michael Wynn. Five of the counties largest banks have representatives on the board and the county’s lucrative for-profit healthcare industry is represented by Berkshire Health Systems and Hillcrest Educational Centers. Four “community volunteers,” as the BUW website describes them, and one representative each from Lenox Public Schools, Pittsfield Public Schools and Berkshire Community College make the board appear diverse but ensure a majority vote can always be held by agents representing the county’s power elite.

This is exactly what happened in the GE days. The administrations and medical staff from Pittsfield’s health care industry were silent on public health issues related to PCB exposure and pollution. Getting involved in the issue was seen as potentially bad for profits because of probable conflicts of interests with clients and corporate donations. Berkshire Medical Center, the largest hospital in the Berkshires, bought Mercy and General Hospital in the 1970s and Hillcrest merged with BMC in 1996.

Direct corporate financing of the organization doesn’t allow BUW to step outside of its current operating capacities as it threatens financial stability. BUW legitimates the behaviors of corporations and law enforcement, whose representatives “serve” the board. BUW’s position within the community and its general perception as an agent of good, protects the businesses that support them from critical public scrutiny. The relationship is legitimizing and makes all parties involved seem beyond reproach. When I asked Nancy Stoll, Director of Community Engagement and Evaluation at Berkshire United Way, if she felt that this compromised the stated goals of the organization, she told me:

“I personally don’t see how it will conflict. And I will be very open to hear how you think it might. But, how I think it won’t is because whatever it is that they’re involved in, they work in this community. They exist in this community. Their employees, all live, most of them . . . at least work in the community. Many of them maybe live outside the community but many of them live in the community. So it’s in their best interest to maintain a community where people will want to be, will want to live and work.”

This argument ignores the fact that Jack Welch and other high powered executives called Pittsfield home for decades. Their relationship with the city had absolutely no bearing on decisions made to cut production and employees; focus on military production at the expense of the integrity of the community; and completely and utterly destroy the local environment through PCB pollution and exposure whose true cost in lives and ecological chaos will never be fully known.

Perks of Privilege: Reinforcing Institutionalized White Supremacy and Framing Issues Through Access to Media and Capital

The Pittsfield Prevention Partnership, a pilot project started by BUW, was formed in 2004 to prevent teenage drinking and “drug abuse.” Underwritten by a 2007 Federal “Drug Free Communities” grant that gives the organization $100,000 each year for five years, the money pays for expensive advertising and market research.

Take for example, the “Totally Free” concept campaign. Widely ridiculed among peers and generally misunderstood by city youth, the campaign reinforces negative social stereotypes, reinforces white cultural, economic hegemony and ‘superiority’ and seeks to control discourse related to teen consumption of alcohol and drugs. The PPP frames the issues of underage substance “abuse” as one-dimensional, obscuring complex social and economic forces and Pittsfield’s contemporary context where the community’s youth are want of opportunity and languish in a public school system that is failing them.

A "Totally Free" advertisement in the Morningside neighborhood runs next to public service announcement about teen pregnancy. On the other side of the billboard, an advertisement for beer competes with the "Totally Free" message.

PPP Coordinator Karen Cole told me the “Totally Free” propaganda campaign was  “planned and implemented” before she was hired. “So I’m not sure of where all the input came from in terms of design,” she said. I was told “that there was a request for proposals put out to marketing organizations, and various proposals were considered by the PPP marketing committee [my emphasis].” The chosen design was the one “that got the highest ratings.” This makes sense given the marketing and PR backgrounds of some of BUW’s high-ranking employees.

The PPP bought billboard space all over the city to disseminate their message. The ads contains pictures of city youth that label them as “totally gangsta” and “totally ‘hood.” Young men of color were chosen to represent these two versions of being “Totally Free.” The irony and paradoxical nature of somehow simultaneously being “free,” “‘hood” and “gangsta” is a contradiction that apparently wasn’t considered. In the pictures, the young men look angry, and mean -  the way Whites are socialized from birth to think about every Black man. The “totally us” advertisement pictures seven young White females and a young Black female.

If considering this advertisement with the other messages, it appears to indicate that they look like the “Us” of the Pittsfield as opposed to the “Other” represented by the misleading and insensitive “totally gangsta,” and “totally hood” message.

The PPP is supported by local law enforcement. Its representatives on the Steering Committee include Kim Blair, of the Berkshire District Attorney’s Office; Jason Cuyler, of the Berkshire County Sheriff’s Department; and Pittsfield Police Officer Michael Ortega.

A photograph on the Totally Free website pictures Berkshire County District Attorney David Capeless accepting an award for his “commitment to substance abuse prevention.”

It could be said that his “commitment” manifested in his office’s tough stance on teenage drug possession that saw the arrest, conviction and imprisonment of scores of youth under the “mandatory sentencing” laws that require the alleged offender to spend two years behind bar if arrested within 1,000 feet of a school zone.

Social issues are framed for the city’s youth by this organization and their use of advertising and employment of marketing firms to design propaganda campaigns making the problem, and by extension, all social problems, one-dimensional. It completely ignores the past thirty years of Pittsfield’s history and makes the city’s problems seem like they’re merely an extension of national trends.

It ignores broken homes caused by economic crisis and the resulting social ramifications that could lead to an increase in teen substance abuse outside of the bounds of peer pressure and fitting in. It is this paralyzing factor that has kept the BUW in the dark as it relates to Pittsfield’s teen pregnancy epidemic, following established patterns of blaming the victims for their travails. I asked BUW director Nancy Stoll what accounts for Pittsfield’s teen pregnancy epidemic. “We don’t know,” she said. “We’re actually trying to look into that.” Stoll mentioned that a former guidance councilor in the Pittsfield public schools said many of the pregnancies were “planned,” but that doesn’t answer why.

How this organization is still unaware of origins of the teen pregnancy epidemic even though its sordid history has been well documented through extensive press coverage and the highly-regarded work of Joanna Lipper, who chronicled the lives of six Pittsfield teenage mothers and directly correlated their situation with the closure of the General Electric plant in her book, Growing Up Fast, is puzzling.