Gerry Mander in Alaska

It has been an insanely busy month, and more excitement is coming down the pike.

The big news is from ol' Gerry Mander hisself, from a recent triumphant presentation in Alaska of How to Screw the Voters. Here's what will happen to the districts in which Goldstream and Ester lie, according to the News-Miner:

One notable shift at home: Ester, Fox and much of the Goldstream Valley would join a giant rural House district that includes scores of communities from across the state. It would straddle the Fairbanks area and stretch completely across Alaska — from the southwestern village of Holy Cross north to Arctic Village and southeast again to Chitina.:

Does this make sense at ALL? There was some of this before, too, almost as ridiculous: Coghill's district stretches from North Pole to Valdez.



Here's what Wikipedia says about gerrymandering:

In the process of setting electoral districts, rather than using uniform geographic standards, Gerrymandering is a practice of political corruption that attempts to establish a political advantage for a particular party or group by manipulating geographic boundaries to create partisan, incumbent-protected, and neutral districts. The resulting district is known as a gerrymander.…

The two aims of gerrymandering are to maximize the effect of supporters' votes and to minimize the effect of opponents' votes. One strategy, packing, is to concentrate as many voters of one type into a single electoral district to reduce their influence in other districts. In some cases this may be done to obtain representation for a community of common interest, rather than to dilute that interest over several districts to a point of ineffectiveness. A second strategy, cracking, involves spreading out voters of a particular type among many districts in order to deny them a sufficiently large voting bloc in any particular district. The strategies are typically combined, creating a few "forfeit" seats for packed voters of one type in order to secure even greater representation for voters of another type.

Gerrymandering is effective because of the wasted vote effect. By packing opposition voters into districts they will already win (increasing excess votes for winners) and by cracking the remainder among districts where they are moved into the minority (increasing votes for eventual losers), the number of wasted votes among the opposition can be maximized. Similarly, with supporters holding narrow margins in the unpacked districts, the number of wasted votes among supporters is minimized.

While the wasted vote effect is strongest when a party wins by narrow margins across multiple districts, gerrymandering narrow margins can be risky when voters are less predictable. To minimize the risk of demographic or political shifts swinging a district to the opposition, politicians can instead create more packed districts, leading to more comfortable margins in unpacked ones.

There is a public hearing in Fairbanks April 19, Tuesday, 2 to 6 pm at the Fairbanks City Hall, City Council Chamber on the 2nd floor: If you would like to comment on the utter monstrosity of a jerrymandered redistricting, please come to this hearing! If you are in another city, other hearings are taking place also and you can find out more from the Alaska Redistricting Board's website. PLEASE NOTE that I have also heard that these hearings will end at 4 pm, not 6, so I don't know if they've been curtailed, expanded, or if this is just a rumor. Getting there early if you can will be important. I will be taking time off work to get there.

Interesting how they timed it for most people's working hours, hmm?

At any rate, you might consider whether it is equitable or reasonable for Ester's Senate district to include--and no, I am NOT kidding--Sitka, or for us to be in the same district as, say, Arctic Village. This won't help the Bush and it sure won't help Ester or Fairbanks or Goldstream (or Sitka or Holy Cross) to be properly represented. This is sheer stupidity. There are two official options, both of which are clearly attempts to split voting blocks, with no regard for whether the residents of these areas have any commonalities of need or location. This won't serve anybody well. There are a few privately-suggested plans, also shown on the Board's website. There are several organizations proposing options.

Farming systems and Food, Inc.

Week four of the food systems course has again been chock-full of readings, ideas, and a movie: Food Inc.. I've heard about the film, which came out in 2008, but I'd never seen it. It's put me off feedlot anything: pork, poultry, beef. Yick.

I took notes during the film, which we watched on Feb. 8. The movie concentrates on food safety (or lack thereof) and the sort of indentured servitude in which farmers and factory workers are trapped in the Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, CAFOs, or factory farms/industrial farms that are where, horrifically, most of our meat is raised. It also goes into the influence of fast food and supermarket chains (in particular, MacDonald's and Wal-Mart) on the way meat is produced–their incredible purchasing power makes a big difference.

Here's a few items I jotted down:

• In the chicken ranches of the south, debt by the large-scale chicken meat sellers like Perdue or Tyson is deftly put onto the farmers, who (a) don't own the chickens (b) but must raise them to the specifications and requirements of the meat company and have no control over how their business is run. The farmer, who earns maybe $18,000 a year, ends up in major debt (in the realm of $100,000 to a half-million) because each chicken house costs a huge amount and the equipment, feed, and antibiotics (a necessary part of the operation) are also expensive--but the price the farmer gets for the meat is pretty much dictated by the company.
• The movie described the way the hog industry had dramatically changed, following the pattern in the poultry and beef industries.
• It went into the tactics of companies for dealing with regulation: infiltration of the agencies responsible for oversight by former lobbyists and former or future employees of the industries they are supposed to regulate, the reduction of funding for agencies, and the demonizing of government regulation and promotion of "personal responsibility" and "self-policing." The most interesting former employee (of Monsanto) was Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who worked as a lawyer for the company and later wrote the Supreme Court majority opinion that allowed Monsanto to prosecute farmers for seed patent infringement when their crops had been contaminated by Monsanto's Roundup-Ready GMO crops (the farmers have to prove they didn't steal it). Thomas didn't recuse himself, obviously. (He didn't recuse himself in the Roundup-Ready alfalfa case, either.)
• The film spent quite some time on the case of Moe Parr, who ran a seed-cleaning company and was being sued by Monsanto for, essentially, assisting in theft. He was driven out of business, eventually. (Monsanto has a reply to Food Inc. here.)
• The movie talked about Kevin's Law, that was introduced in response to the death of a little boy, Kevin, from a hamburger contaminated with a virulent strain of E. coli bacteria. Kevin's Law, simply put, would give the USDA the power to shut down meat packing plants that have too many health infringements, among other things. And guess what? it keeps dying in committee, even though it gets introduced every year since 2005. The ironic thing was that I had thought that it had been passed, and that we had protection like this already. The interviews with his mother were both very interesting and moving--not schmaltzy, even though it dealt with the very personal loss of her son. She and her mother have gone on to be very active politically for foodborne illness research and prevention.
• Another interesting aspect of the tactics used in the meat-packing industry was the undermining of unions, the hiring of illegal or new immigrants (but it's the immigrants who get hauled off to jail, not the managers or officers of the companies), and effect of NAFTA in driving Mexican farmers out of work and off their land because of cheap, subsidized corn from the US. The film made mention of Upton Sinclair's 1906 book, The Jungle, and how this led to the meatpacking industry's strength for many years as one of the safest, best-paid, and generally good industries in which to work in the US due to union effort and the public's appalled reaction to the horrors Sinclair described. Now, however, the meatpacking industry is back to being unsafe, and has lost much of the gains made during the middle of the 20th century.
• In one of the funnier ironic moments of the movie, an engineer and efficiency designer for one of the companies involved in the meat processing industry was glowingly describing their control room, where they could monitor and adjust the speed and activities of the machinery moving and treating meat in plants across the country. He said, with obvious pride, that it was "a marriage between technology and industry"--but apparently, I observed, not a marriage with agriculture.
• A stomach-turning moment for me came when they showed how a percentage of ammonia-treated beef is mixed into hamburger as a means of sterilizing the meat so that harmful pathogens don't survive. Again, a prideful manager spoke about how the percentage of meat in the industry that had this stuff in it should be up to 80% by 2010. I wondered about the effects of that ammonia on me when I eat the burger. I'm afraid I'm not buying hamburger any more unless I know this crud isn't in it.

In contrast to the industrialized food system, the movie interviewed Joel Salatin, an author and farmer and a wonderfully outspoken, biting, funny man. There were several good bits in the interview, but his point that growth in market share is not an end in itself was important. He doesn't want to get big—he'd no longer be farming.

And that, I think, was the essential point of the movie: that the consolidation and overmechanization of food/agriculture operations had made them into an industry, a means of making money—and they really have nothing to do with actual food or human beings anymore, resulting in an industry that isn't safe, isn't producing food, subsidizes disease, and has no connection to the land, plants, people, and animals it is supposedly about.

Previous posts in this series:

Financial finagling in food and sustainability
Food systems, policy, and foodsheds
Food systems and shizen
Sustainable food systems class

Cross posted at SNRAS Science & News.

Cats and cancer

Last year, our cat Archie developed a fatal cancer, and we had to have a vet come out to give him a lethal injection. We buried him in the garden and this year grew huge bunches of catnip over his grave. Now our big rangy ditz of a feline, Hexer, also has cancer, this time of the intestine--and quite probably throughout his lymphatic system. It's fatal also, and so we will be putting him down later this week too. Not only am I greatly upset by this (and Hans is too), I am afraid for our other cats and for ourselves--I suspect that we may have a radon problem.

This really sucks.

GVEA bylaws vote

I have yet to sit down and thoroughly examine the packet GVEA sent us regarding the bylaws, but I did receive an opinion piece from the group GVEA Ratepayers' Alliance. Nancy Kuhn, the author, evaluates GVEA's power generation priorities--and the Healy 2 coal plant should not be among them.

The Golden Valley Electric Association Issues blog recommends voting no on lifting or expanding the debt cap, and I agree. We're in too much debt already. He also gives some information about the subsidy that the Eva Creek wind project would be eligible for, plus a few PowerPoint presentations on the project that GVEA created (but doesn't seem to have on the GVEA website--go figure).

Raising a rumpus: Wells Fargo's preferred provider

Neil Davis writes the Dose of Reality column for The Ester Republic, and seems to have raked up a bit of muck this month. Wells Fargo is the state's new health care/insurance administrator, and recently sent out an announcement indicating that it had entered into a preferred provider agreement with Alaska Regional Hospital in replacement of the one the state formerly had with Providence Hospital, because it would be cheaper.

Well, this caught Neil's eye because he'd done some cost-comparison research on these hospitals for his book, Mired in the Health Care Morass. The crucial piece of information here is that Alaska Regional is a for-profit hospital, whereas Providence is, like Fairbanks Memorial Hospital, a nonprofit hospital—and markups at for-profit institutions can be significantly higher than nonprofit institutions. So he looked into it, and sure enough, it appears that's still the case for Alaska Regional. Generally speaking, procedures at this hospital tend to be more expensive or about the same as those at Providence.

So why would Wells Fargo claim that it's the other way around?

One possibility is that it IS cheaper—for Wells Fargo. The companies could have a steep discount for their payments. This does not mean, however, that it is any cheaper for the patients who are getting their care there, or for the state of Alaska.

Neil rightly raises these questions, and suggests that they be looked into. I agree.

The Onion's got it right

Again.

Congress Deadlocked Over How To Not Provide Health Care

"Both parties understand that the current system is broken," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters Monday. "But what we can't seem to agree upon is how to best keep it broken, while still ensuring that no elected official takes any political risk whatsoever. It's a very complicated issue."

"Ultimately, though, it's our responsibility as lawmakers to put these differences aside and focus on refusing Americans the health care they deserve," Pelosi added.

The legislative stalemate largely stems from competing ideologies deeply rooted along party lines. Democrats want to create a government-run system for not providing health care, while Republicans say coverage is best denied by allowing private insurers to make it unaffordable for as many citizens as possible.

"We have over 40 million people without insurance in this country today, and that is unacceptable," Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) said. "If we would just quit squabbling so much, we could get that number up to 50 or even 100 million. Why, there's no reason we can't work together to deny health care to everyone but the richest 1 percent of the population."

"That's what America is all about," he added.

Thank the gods for the Onion.

Congress & Obama in cahoots with the insurance companies

I've been listening to the news about the latest blah-blah in Congress and from the White House about the supposed health care "reform" they plan to foist on the public. "We'll have a great new plan by July!" gushes Speaker Pelosi. "Coverage for everyone!" promises Obama.

Well, who gives a flying fuck, huh, really?

"Congressional leaders on health care have taken single payer off the table as politically impractical." Um, yeah, the insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry might not fund their campaigns next time. "Coverage" and "insurance plans" just arent' going to cut it. The proposals seem to be headed straight to a private-profit, public-cost type of plan. Single-payer advocates have to disrupt the hearings to even get the phrase mentioned in Baucus' hearing rooms, although that isn't helping it get addressed, exactly.

Last time, says Catherine Arnt of Business Week, the Clinton adminstration botched health care reform because they didn't engage all the players:

The Administration apparently learned its lesson from the Clinton experience, which hammered out its bill behind closed doors, with little to no industry input. By bringing the insurance and hospital executives to the table, it makes it that much harder for them to derail the effort altogether. At a White House press conference, Obama Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters: "Let's not minimize the impact of the difference between being at the table working constructively for comprehensive health-care reform that cuts costs for the American people, vs. campaign-style ads to derail it. I think today represents, in many ways, a big shift in the ground underneath people that have been working on health-care reform for decades."

So, apparently the Obama administration plans to botch this attempt too, by excluding the single-payer players, which represent better than 60% of the public. John Conyers bill, HR 676, is ALREADY prepared and ready to go.

So really, it's quite clear that they JUST DON'T CARE. Obama might possibly care, but he's not listening to the science, or the facts, or the people who could tell him the facts. Nope. It's 'politically inexpedient.'

This is really, really, foul. Senator Baucus knows there's a problem, but if it's the crisis he says it is, why isn't he willing to even consider a possible solution, one that is working in almost every other industrialized nation? Why is he supporting a model like Massachusetts' plan, which, as Neil Davis points out in his upcoming Dose of Reality, is failing miserably?

An oil industry bias

I've been rather busy the last week due to the upcoming John Trigg Ester Library Lallapalooza and the Perennial Problem of Paper Production (which ALWAYS takes far longer than I anticipate), so I haven't been posting here of late, despite the fascinating news stories abounding. So I'll try to make up for that in the next couple of days.

First up: after all the brouhaha with certain saurian Republican legislators chastising UA President Hamilton for the supposed 'anti-development attitude' of University of Alaska students who dared to come down to Juneau and (gasp!) express doubts about particular mining projects, I received an interesting press release from PEER about Professor Rick Steiner, who is getting his NOAA grant yanked by Sea Grant.

It seems that last year, Dr. Steiner, a marine scientist, protested a pro-oil industry bias that he saw in Sea Grant programs.

Hmmm.

Here's an excerpt from the release:

Professor Rick Steiner, a noted marine scientist and environmentalist with the University of Alaska Marine Advisory Program, incurred the wrath of NOAA officials by protesting a pro-industry slant in Sea Grant programs to promote oil drilling in Alaska’s Bristol Bay. Shortly after Steiner’s March 18, 2008 letter [PDF] and press conference, his dean was approached by National Sea Grant Deputy Director Jim Murray, who according to an e-mail from Dean Denis Wiesenburg recounting the conversation, indicated that NOAA had “an issue with Rick Steiner” because “he was acting as an advocate and asked if he was being paid with Sea Grant funds”, adding that “one agent can cause problems nationally”.

As the basis for urging that Prof. Steiner “not be paid with Sea Grant funds” NOAA’s Murray cited manual guidance that Sea Grant extension agents should strive to be “neutral brokers of information”. Ironically, Prof. Steiner, a tenured professor, had been publicly protesting that the Sea Grant program was violating its own principle of neutrality by stacking a program to favor offshore oil development and improperly minimizing potential resource damage to Bristol Bay fisheries and marine life.

“Under Bush, NOAA programs, including Sea Grant, were ordered to lubricate oil company initiatives,” stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch whose organization is urging incoming NOAA Administrator-designate Jane Lubchenco to strengthen the Sea Grant role in ocean protection. “The Sea Grant program needs a thorough housecleaning starting with its leadership.”

As a result of the NOAA threat, Dean Wiesenburg recommended in December that Professor Steiner’s Sea Grant funding be terminated because Steiner “has chosen to be a maverick and work independently,” noting that “Mr. Steiner has devoted some of his energy during the review period to publicly attacking the Alaska Sea Grant program,” and that “Steiner regularly takes strong public positions on issues of public debate.” Significantly, the dean did not mention the quality or quantity of Prof. Steiner’s award-winning marine conservation extension efforts.

“The present crisis in our nation’s marine and coastal ecosystems requires a clear and urgent national response,” said Prof. Steiner. “But instead of responding to the ocean crisis, this new de facto gag order from NOAA Sea Grant will have a chilling effect on scientists who want to advocate for greater ocean protection and restoration.”

More on pollock, trawling, salmon, and money

John Enge recently posted a column on Alaska Report, "Science vs. Barons of the Fish Business:"

It is apparent that the two trawl fisheries mentioned above [Neah Bay, Washington, and the Bering Sea] are not conducive to family fishermen, subsistence and sport users, the many other species of fish in the ocean, or the coastal communities. The problem is that these giant factory trawlers, and many independent trawlers fishing for shore plants with 'legal rights to process a certain % of the total catch,' don't mind snuffing out all other species of sea life. The big fishery in the Bering Sea is the pollock fishery, prosecuted by mid-water trawlers. That would seem to be a safe way to fish. Just scoop up the schools of pollock, leaving plenty behind for replenishment of the stocks. (Except that half the pollock fishery is right before propogation and the pollock never get to sow the seeds of the next generation.)

…Many times, the electronics are indicating the wrong kind of fish; fish that they are not permitted by law to keep. So down goes the nets and up comes millions of pounds of squid, king salmon, chum salmon, halibut, herring and anything else that lives in proximity to the pollock. It's not like they all live in separate apartments. You clean out one apartment and you get a mixed bag of occupants. Remember, the trawl nets are like pulling a football field-sized sieve sideways through the water, with everything in that amount of space for miles squeezed into a 'sock' on the end of the net. (I won't even go into bottom trawling where Oregon State University researchers found that it extinguishes 30% of the species complex where they have been.)

According to the Marine Stewardship Council, the Alaska pollock fishery is seeking recertification as a sustainable fishery. There is a lot of money in pollock, especially in sustainably fished pollock, and some serious drivers in the purchasing end of the business. For example, McDonald's:

McDonald's purchases more than 18,000 metric tons, or 43.2 million pounds, of fish a year for its popular Filet-O-Fish sandwiches. Filet-O-Fish is made with pollock, a whitefish that lives in the cold waters off the coasts of Alaska and eastern Russia. The Marine Stewardship Council has certified U.S. Bering Sea/Aleutian Islands and the Gulf of Alaska pollock fisheries as models for sustainable fisheries management, but many retailers and foodservice operators still use whitefish from other fisheries that are less sustainable and traceable.

McDonald's is very interested in obtaining fish from sustainable sources, providing an economic incentive for fisheries to obtain certification of sustainability. But is that level of sustainability certified by the MSC sufficiently sustainable? or is it just better than no certification at all? or, as Thomas Royer asks, is it really only a myth?

Fisheries are generally classified as a sustainable resource on the assumption that they can be maintained for future generations. However, studies have demonstrated man's ability to deplete major fisheries since the Middle Ages.

A recent book, "The Unnatural History of the Sea" by Callum Roberts, traces the destruction of fish populations from the estuaries of England after 1000 AD to the most recent demise of orange roughy off New Zealand. It has been estimated that 90 percent of large fish have now been depleted.

Will the Bering Sea pollock fishery continue to decline? Is it already too late?

An Anchorage Daily News article last summer points to the decline in the pollock fishery, which certainly doesn't sound like it's very sustainable. One interesting thing that Callum brings up, and that is discussed at the Progressive Policy Institute, is that of subsidies "to help keep catch levels up." These subsidies to build boats were in vogue until around 2004. There is a whole blog on the subject, in fact. Among the interesting recent posts are:

• WTO beaten by the Marine Stewardship Council
• US: fisheries subsidies and advice to President Obama on fisheries policy
• US: $170 million subsidies for commercial fishers of salmon in the West Coast
• USA: fisheries subsidies and WTO Trade Policy Review
• The pain of high fuel prices: US Senators introduce a bill proposing fuel subsidies for fishermen

Sustainability codes, of course, are only as good as their policy—and compliance.

Nonsustainable industry practice: stupid wanton waste

This extremely pertinent question was posted on Fiery Blazing Handbasket, and picked up by Kodiak Konfidential, but it's just too barbed a point not to repeat once again:

Does anyone else find it odd that the Bering Sea pollock trawlers can catch and discard as bycatch over 100,000 king salmon per year while the small, community-based fishing effort has to shut down? That we haven't even managed to let enough kings by on the Yukon to meet our treaty obligation to the Canadians?

All so Americans can eat cheap fish sticks?

It's real stupidity, and corruption in action, that's what it is. Bycatch waste has got to be the stupidest shortsighted cut-off-your-nose practice in the fishing industry. It costs fisherfolk a lot of effort, time, money, and bad press--but it's the bottom trawlers and big industrial-size factory fishing boats and nets that do the real damage. "Bycatch" is dead dolphins in the tuna harvest (finally got some protections there, after a long, long fight), king salmon in the pollack harvest, dead sea turtles, dead sharks, dead birds, and so on and so on....and it's a HUGE problem. According to Global Chefs magazine, something like 25% of all fisheries catch is wasted.

Bycatch.org has a database of bycatch reduction methods, and NOAA has a whole Fisheries Feature devoted to the issue.

But, as Global Chefs and others point out, consumer action can have quite an effect. And it's the big fleets and megacorps, not the little Yukon River villages, that do the most damage.

Here's an interesting article from March 1999 from the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations on the management issues regarding sustainability, with a good bit of background on the present problems.