Renaming LA Memorial Coliseum To United Airlines And Dealing With Statues For Disgraced Causes

[In this post, perhaps more than most, I'm stepping into my brain and tracing events in my life that affect how I think about this topic.  Be prepared to meander.http://whatdoino-steve.blogspot.com/2010/06/meandering.html]

From an LA Times article 

The University of Southern California’s $69-million sale of naming rights for Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum is being criticized as dishonoring the historic stadium’s dedication as a memorial to soldiers who fought and died in World War I just a few years before it opened.

(USC took over control of the Coliseum in a 98 year lease in 2013.  More details here.)

I personally became concerned about selling naming rights back around 1965 when UCLA built a new basketball stadium on campus and named it Pauley Pavillion, for the oil mogul who paid for naming rights instead of for John Wooden who had recently worked miracles with his Bruin basketball team.

When I was growing up, stadiums and other public places weren't plastered with billboards.  You could watch sporting events without being bombarded by corporate logos.  In fact, corporate branded T-shirts and other such swag were actually given away to people.  It was part of companies' advertising budget.

Since then, companies have somehow convinced people they should become human billboards for their products, but the billboards, not the companies, should pay for the opportunity.  But that's another blog post.

The Coliseum naming gave me an idea.  Why not let corporations or even individuals, buy the naming rights to all the offensive statues still standing in the US.  In most cases, there are few if any  people still living who knew the statues' models or would recognize their faces.  You could have the "[Insert Name Of Corporation] Horse and Rider."  Instead of spending money to tear the statues down, cities and towns can make money from them.

But my favorite option, one I came up with as a UCLA student, is to have plaques next to buildings and statues that tell the reader all the shady things the donor had done to make the money being used now to name the building.  And offending statues, whether built to commemorate defenders of slavery or killers of Native Americans, or polluters of the air and water, or the swindlers of the poor, could have the deeds listed that make the statues embarrassing today.  If we erase history, it's hard to learn from it.

My understanding of this was broadened as a sixth grade teacher in Los Angeles.  My students were all black and we figured out a way to work with each other so they learned something and I felt reasonably productive.  One day I was was reading from one of my favorite childhood books, The Story of Doctor Doolitle.  I had my own copy with me in class.  We were a few chapters in and I was reading out loud to class.  Dr. Doolitle and Polynesia were in Africa when the good doctor used a racist term for the native peoples.  Whoops.  I didn't remember Dr. Doolittle as a racist, but it was clear now it was part of his culture.  I stopped in mid-sentence and told the students it was time for our next activity.  What I SHOULD HAVE DONE was explain why I was stopping and then had an authentic conversation with them about racism.  They would have understood.   They were angry with me because the Dr. Doolittle book disappeared.

I should also note that I went to day care, K-12 schooling, college, and graduate school in Los Angeles.  When I saw the LA Coliseum on television during the 1980 Olympics in LA, I realized that it was one of the landmarks of my life.  I spent time at the Coliseum all the while I was growing up.  It was the setting for a diverse array of activities from rodeos and boy scout jamborees, from early LA Dodger games before Dodger stadium was built, to UCLA football games.  And it was just south of campus when I was a grad student at USC.  So there is a personal connection to that structure that is important to who I am.  And last December when we visited the Tutankhamun exhibit at Exposition Park, we walked over to the Coliseum ticket office that was surrounded by wooden barriers during the Coliseum's reconstruction.  But I do have this list of rules that I certainly don't remember from my childhood visits.

I, of course, am a supporter of keeping the old name.  My alma mater, USC, has become one the best fund raising universities in the world in the last decades.  That money credo has improved the academics, but it has also made money more important that ethics and other human values - like respecting history.   (For those who have missed it - USC, who now manages the Coliseum, has been wracked with scandals in its medical school as well as other programs, most recently the admissions scandals.)  So, the idea of changing the name of the Coliseum for $69 million is not even a decision.  It's a given.  It's been their modus operandi for a long time.  For a price, we'll do anything including looking the other way.

Is there a point to all this?  Yes.  Remembering good things, like the Coliseum as a Los Angeles memorial to WW I dead and NOT  auctioning off its name to the highest bidder, and dealing with the statues of fallen heroes or the misdeeds of corporate branders are all of the same issue.  I think I advocate for dealing with the past as openly as we can.  I don't mean 'can' politically, but rather 'can' in the sense that we are aware enough of the good deeds or misdeeds of whom or what is being remembered.  Let's acknowledge our collective misdeeds of the past as well as our collective good deeds.  And where we don't agree, let's sit down and talk about values that these people, entities, events embody and how they connect with who we are as a nation today.

[Yes, this could use a couple of rewrites before posting, but I've got posts waiting in line to be written and I've got grandkids to go pick up right now.]

Anchorage Elections - Cemeteries and Alcohol Taxes Going Down

Everything else seems to be going as expected.  See the results here.   Since this is an all mail-in ballot, there will be some time for more ballots to arrive.  But both the cemetery bond and the alcohol tax are losing by about 2000 votes so far, unless the rest of the votes are from tee-totalers or the dead, I'm guessing things will stand.

Here's what it says about the $5 million in Prop 3:

PROP 3:  AREAWIDE FACILITIES AND CEMETERY CAPITAL IMPROVEMENT PROJECTBONDS

For the purpose of providing areawide facilities and cemetery capital improvements within the Municipality of Anchorage, including roof replacements, HVAC, safety and code improvements, elevator modernization and bathroom renovations to public facilities, and lawn marker, fence and landscaping renovations at the Anchorage Memorial Cemetery, and other capital improvements, as provided in AO 2019-4, shall Anchorage borrow money and issue up to $5,513,000 in principal amount of general obligation bonds?

Chrystal Kennedy is beating  Oliver Schiess in the Eagle River  (#2) Assembly race.
Kameron Perez-Verdia is beating Liz Vazquez in District 3.
Meg Zalatel is beating Christine Hill and Ron Alleva in District 4.
Forrest Dunbar and John Weddleton are running unopposed in Districts 5 and 6.

Margo Bellamy and Starr Marsett are winning their races comfortably for School Board.

School bonds have a big majority.
Transit improvements, which often have problems with voters, won easily, maybe because it was bundled with some safety fixes.
Parks bonds won easily, roads and water passed easily.
Fire and Police won.
Changes to allow lease to own by the Muni passed and a change to allow someone other than police to remove junk cars passed.


I understand why the alcohol tax lost - there was high powered opposition from the liquor industry.
But cemetery improvements?  I don't get that one.

Hey Dems - Disagreement Is Human, But Don't Cut Off The Supply Of AOC's

"HOUSE DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIP WARNS IT WILL CUT OFF ANY FIRMS THAT CHALLENGE INCUMBENTS"  is the headline of an Intercept article that tells us the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC)

"warned political strategists and vendors Thursday night that if they support candidates mounting primary challenges against incumbent House Democrats, the party will cut them off from business."

I don't know if that would have prevented Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez from knocking off one the most senior Democratic representatives last year in the primary.  I don't think they took her seriously or even considered he might lose.  Though the demographics of the district had changed in AOC's favor.

But look at yet one more example of how this young, articulate Democrat is shaking things up among the old white guys in Congress.  And, because of Youtube and other social media, the world gets to see her doing it.




Any one being honest with themselves has to be impressed with her content and delivery.   She's calling out people who have been getting away with murder (if you count all the lives lost because of poor health care access, because of the hundreds of thousands civilians who have died in our war in Iraq to avenge the three thousand or so who died on 9/11.  That's like a hundred eyes for an eyes for an eye.

But let's take heart in the powerful young, diverse, often female voices that are shaking things up in Congress.  I understand that the Democratic establishment is used to doing things a certain way and they have good reasons to believe in things like supporting incumbents.  But do you think you would be watching inspiring videos today if Joe Crowley had beaten AOC in that primary?  Did ordinary people even know who Joe Crowley is?

Competition makes incumbents stronger when they get in the general election.  DCCC back off.  Let the best candidate win the primary.  These young members of Congress will bring younger voters to the polls.  AOC says in the video she will turn 30 soon.  We remember Alexander the Great even though he died in his 3rd year.

The DCCC should be encouraging new young leaders.  It should also be teaching candidates how to run competitively, but fairly and on the issues.  If they must enforce anything, it should be personal attack against other Democrats.  It should help staff and candidates with addiction problems, with relationship and other problems.  Life is difficult in the US these days.  Our moral and emotional support systems are falling apart.  And campaigning is particularly challenging to one's social life and offers lots of temptation to compromise one's ethics.  

[Conservatives who see her as a threat, well, you should.  Your party is supporting the wealthy at the expense of everyone else and your inability to see that climate change is the biggest threat to humanity because of your personal vested interests, is not only tragic for you, but for all the rest of humankind who will suffer because you've refused to take action.  I'm sorry.  All your arguments on this topic are dead wrong.  Fighting climate change, as AOC says, will be much cheaper than not doing anything.  Actually, a carbon fee with dividend (a bill is already in the House) is the easiest and most effective first step.  Working to develop and support alternative energy not only will create significant numbers of jobs and help keep the US competitive in the post carbon world.  Though that won't have much meaning in a world of endless floods, storms, droughts, heat waves, that will result in disrupting agriculture that feeds the world and the wars that will follow.   You believe in the Rapture, but not Climate Change?  And the delay in countering climate change that AOC talks about is already costing us lives and health and disrupting how humans live.  Just a note - the war in Syria was preceded by a multi-year drought that forced farmers off their land and into the cities where they made up a large pool of unemployed and discontented revolutionaries.  There were other issues, of course, but the disruption of the economic system caused by drought was a big factor. But working together to fight this shouldn't be based on fear, but on the much better world that will come of it.]

Signs Of Our Discontent - Rally Outside Americans For Prosperity's Private 'Public Meeting"

Background:  The Alaska governor Mike Dunleavy introduced a budget that cuts almost everything drastically.  He recently announced public meetings across the state to meet with Alaskans on the budget.  We quickly learned that Koch funded Americans for Prosperity had organized and was running the meetings.  One had to get free tickets online by giving up personal information - name, phone, email, etc. - and agree to lots of stipulations including no signs, no political T-shirts, no recording, need to show ID, and on and on.  More specifics here.  And there was a hearing sponsored by House Finance Committee Sunday afternoon.

Various groups including Senate Democrats and unions called for a demonstration outside the venue where the governor was going to speak in Anchorage tonight.  Anchorage Assembly member Forrest Dunbar acted as the MC.  That was today.  Here's the first of a few posts of pictures of the demonstrations.  I'm guessing there were altogether, about 300 people.  The NYE (New York Equivalent is a metric I came up with a an anti-Palin rally to give people outside of Alaska a sense of what an equivalent crowd would be in New York City.) would be about 9000 people.

This shot I got from the stairs on the side of the 49th State Brewery where the Americans for Prosperity private meeting was held.  (They said they had room for 150, even though various legislators offered larger venues for free if the governor would speak without all the restrictions.)  This picture doesn't show all the people in front of the building, so I took this picture too.

So these posts are going to focus on signs.  There were lots of signs!  Some were printed up and distributed - particularly supporting education.  But there were a lot more home made signs.  I've  grouped them into categories.  Like all such groupings, there are instances that easily fit into more than one category.  But this at least tries to capture what people were expressing in a bit more organized way.

GROUP 1:  COMMENTS ON THE PRIVATE NATURE OF THE GOV'S PUBLIC HEARING

This first group seems to be focused on the fact that this 'public' meeting wasn't public.  That a private organization was staging what the public was going to hear from the governor and limiting what the public could say in the meeting and could even document to tell others.  (An ADN story did quote an AFP person saying that individuals could use their phones to record, so they loosened up, but still people had had to sign a document forbidding recording.)


GROUP 2:  CONCERNS ABOUT SELLING OUT THE STATE TO OUTSIDE INTERESTS

Tomorrow I'll put up more.  There was a lot of focus on raising revenues instead of cutting, opposition to the governor's budget in general, and more specific concerns, particularly cutting education.

Legislative Info Office Hearing on the Budget [UPDATED]

Given that the Governor's 'budget roadshow' is being handled by Americans for Prosperity, a Koch funded group, and requires one fill out a form online with more personal information than I want to add to AFP's data base, the House majority caucus is having its own hearings around the state.

It was jammed today with people testifying (mostly) against the Dunleavy budget and for reinstating an income tax.  I did hear two folks (one after the other) say they wanted their full PFDs and the state shouldn't subsidize lazy people.  But everyone else were ready to reduce their PFDs for public education, health care, etc.

If you click on this image it will get much bigger and clearer

I'll add to this later.

LATER:


There was a line that went out the front door, and I didn't get there until about an hour into the hearings.

There was an overflow room with a video of the session in the next room over.

And there was another overflow room.

And the hallway was full of people from the line that went out the door.  This was really the only big sign that I saw and did not seem to reflect the sentiment of most people testifying.

The control room was between the hearing room and one of the overflow rooms.  It had dark smokey windows.

Big Bright Vernal Equinox Moon Greets Us After Move To Amend Panel

After attending a  panel discussion on "The 28th Amendment" we walked out to see this giant moon pushing up over the mountains and not quite out of the clouds.

Here it's a little higher and we're out of downtown.

I'm still fighting my camera when the auto settings can't figure out what to do.  The manual settings just aren't intuitive and I use them so rarely.  The moon wasn't - as I remember it - so yellow.  

The panel was interesting and very civil.  The basic concern is with the impact of Citizens United and the problems of unlimited money from corporations and other non-human entities on elections in the United States.  The key objection I heard was that by limiting constitutional rights to human beings (Citizens United ruling was based on their First Amendment Right to free speech) organizations will be stripped of important rights, such as due process.  In response, Dr. Sharman Haley (standing at the mic in the picture) argued that such organizations are created and sanctioned by states and it is there, not in the constitution, that their rights should be established.  At least that's what I understood.  

To learn more, check out  Move To Amend.  

Another idea that was raised to make elections less contentious was ranked voting.  Dr. Haley argued that first, this would eliminate the need for primaries.  And second,  if candidates want to win, they have to be listed second on a lot of ballots.  Thus taking an extreme stand will likely lose them the election.   There's more on ranked choice voting here.

Alaska Governor's Roadshow Sponsored By Koch Funded Americans For Prosperity

We knew before the election that Dunleavy's campaign was largely financed by his brother in Texas.  But now it looks like that was just the beginnings of an actual coup.  The Koch's Americans for Prosperity have arranged and organized a set of what were advertised on the Governor's website as public meetings to discuss the Governor's budget proposal.  I'm starting to think that AFP actually had a lot to do with the budget itself now.  In fact, just after the election in November, Jeremy Price was appointed Dunleavy's Deputy Chief of Staff.  According to Must Read Alaska, a blog written by the former communications director of the Republican party in Alaska, 

“In 2014, Price was tapped to begin a branch of Americans for Prosperity in Alaska and has since grown the organization to a well-known voice for economic freedom. The group is supported locally and receives organizational support from its national parent, Americans for Prosperity, which is back [sic] by the Koch Brothers.”

ROADSHOW

The governor announced a road trip:  From the Governor’s Webpage:

“Governor Announces Statewide Roadshow to Outline Permanent Fiscal Plan for Alaska
March 18, 2019
Juneau, AK – Today, Alaska Governor Michael J. Dunleavy announced “A Statewide Discussion for a Permanent Fiscal Plan” a series of community focused discussions and meetings to outline a permanent fiscal plan for Alaska, including the vision behind his FY2020 budget proposal and a package of constitutional amendments meant to address the state’s long-term fiscal stability.”

Then there’s a long explanation of why his budget is necessary to save Alaska from deficit — cutting the state functions drastically is ok.  Raising any revenues — taxes —  is not.  (Trump seems ok with a trillion dollar deficit, but Dunleavy will have none of that.)  So here’s the posted schedule:

“Upcoming Events and Locations:
Kenai, AK – Monday, March 25, 2019
6pm – Public Event at The Cannery Lodge
Anchorage, AK– Tuesday, March 26, 2019
10am – Talk of Alaska
6pm – Public Event at 49th State Brewery
Nome, AK– Wednesday, March 27, 2019
4pm – Public Event at Old St.  Joseph’s Hall
Fairbanks, AK– Thursday, March 28, 2019
8am – Fairbanks Chamber of Commerce
6pm – Public Event at Westmark Hotel
Mat-Su, AK– Friday, March 29, 2019
6pm – Public Event at Everett’s
*Times and locations are subject to change.”

But there aren’t any links to these events on this announcement.  The Anchorage Daily News reports that 

“JUNEAU — A day after Gov. Mike Dunleavy announced he will hold a series of public meetings across Alaska to discuss his budget proposal and long-term fiscal plan, ticketing arrangements reveal the meetings are being sponsored and managed by the conservative-libertarian group Americans for Prosperity.
That sponsorship was not disclosed when the governor said he would hold public meetings in Anchorage, Nome, the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, Kenai and Fairbanks next week.”

Well, it’s not exactly clear what’s happening now.  I went to Americans for Prosperity (AFP) websiteand found six events listed for Alaska Public Policy Forums.   I’m posting a screenshot because I don’t know how long this will be there.  (The sixth one (another one for Kenai) just didn’t fit easily in the screen shot, but it looks just like the others.)

​

Note that these are labeled “AFP Presents:  Fortifying Alaska’s Future.  So, the public tour for the governor to discuss (that implies two way conversation, right?)  the budget with the public, turns out to be a propaganda event organized and paid for by Americans for Prosperity.  But clicking on these events gets you to a page that basically says this link doesn’t work.  

The ADN article touches on what I would have found at the links, I’m assuming, before the linked pages were taken down:

“The events’ ticketing web pages says [sic], “this is a private, policy focused event dedicated to discussing Americans for Prosperity’s issues,” but that isn’t true, said Ryan McKee, Alaska state director of Americans for Prosperity.
“They are open to the public, absolutely,” he said.”

And,

Dunleavy press secretary Matt Shuckerow agreed, adding in an emailed statement that the administration ‘partnered with AFP-Alaska and the Alaska Policy Forum to assist in hosting, organizing, coordinating these events’.”

And there were some restrictions.  From a press release from Alaska Senate Democrats 

“On the event website, Americans for Prosperity provided a 415-word disclaimer on the terms and conditions of the event which threatens Alaskans if they do not comply with their rules. If you don't follow these set rules, you will be denied admission or forced "to leave the event."

From the terms and conditions document.

“This is a private, policy focused event dedicated to discussing Americans for Prosperity’s issues.”

But the Gov was passing these off as public meetings from the governor’s office.  Here is an abbreviated and somewhat paraphrased version of the conditions:  

• All attendees must register themselves and guests with real names and may be asked to show IDs
• No signage allowed, No candidate stickers, pins, t-shirts etc.
• By attending you irrevocably consent and authorize AFP to distribute, use, broadcast, or disseminate into perpetuity your likeness in such media for whatever purpose without further approval from you and with no compensation forever and wherever
• But you may not record, reproduce, or transmit by any means any portion of or the entirety of any AFP event without specific written permission.  

You can see all the terms at the link.  [As I read the terms, I suspect this is a standard AFP document, not particularly written for these events.  I’m guessing they stuck it in rather than getting their attorneys to make a special one.]   Mind you, this is how the governor was going to explain his budget to the state, and, since they were called public meetings and discussions  by the governor, most of us thought there would be two way communication.  Governor's explanation and public responses.  

Instead this shows how completely Dunleavy has been bought by the Koch’s to do their bidding.  And raises serious questions about how much of Dunleavy’s budget and policies have been crafted by Koch and Americans for Prosperity. 

Fortunately, unlike  in Wisconsin and Kansas and Michigan and other states that have had this sort of attack, in Alaska Gov. Dunleavy doesn’t have a fool-proof supportive legislature.  A lot of Republicans in the Senate (which they control), are not happy with the governor’s budget.  And somehow — I still have figured out how — the Democrats pulled off a coalition of all the Democrats and a number of Republicans in the House. 

It’s still not clear to me that this roadshow is going to actually happen, and if it does, how one is to get tickets, or whether the AFP Terms and Conditions can legally apply to ‘public’ events of the governor. 

We’ll see.*  And for folks who have been through this in the last decade in other states, pay attention and let us know who these imported characters — like our ‘visiting budget director’ Donna Arduin — and what they did before they got here.  We are doing lots of research, but first hand knowledge is helpful.

And if you want to keep track of what’s happening, long-time Alaska reporter Dermot Cole seems to be the most relentless interpreter of Alaska political events at the moment on his blog Reporting From Alaska.

*Before posting this, I just called Noah Hanson, press secretary for the Senate Democrats and learned that Sen. Donny Olson of Golovin has offered to pay for a venue for a public forum in Nome if there are no stipulations such as the AFP agreement discussed in this post.  

"The legislature now has a balanced budget before them THEY now can decide priorities of the budget. My administration is agnostic on this."

A short one today, I hope.  Some reactions to the governor's letter to the university community.

"The previous administration burned through nearly every dollar in the state's savings account."

Actually, he wanted to increase revenues with appropriate taxes but the Republican controlled Senate banned the word taxes.  And he did cut the budget each year.  But rather than destroying the state, the way your budget will, he got some money from the PFD account (lowering the checks) and from savings accounts.  You, governor, also refuse to consider increasing revenues.  That's a serious problem.

 "While some wish to ignore Alaskans and propose billion-dollar taxes and PFD grabs, I've made clear that this is out of line with the core beliefs of most Alaskans."

Whether it's out of line with people's core beliefs, I can't say. If that's true, you're saying the core beliefs of most Alaskans are:  we want our services and our free oil money, but we refuse to pay for any of it.   Taxes are certainly NOT against the core beliefs of most educated Alaskans who understand the numbers and the impacts these proposed cuts will have and who understand that there are some things - like roads, police, schools, public health - that are a much better bargain for a society if the public pools their money (as in taxes) to buy collectively.  Yeah, some with lots of money can buy private security guards and send their kids to private schools, but society as a whole needs everyone to get a decent education.  Only con artists benefit from an uneducated public.

And those who believed Dunleavy's campaign promises that he'd balance the budget and pay out the old PFD cuts and keep the state running - they desperately need  good education and mental health systems.

"The legislature now has a balanced budget before them  THEY now can decide priorities of the budget.  My administration is agnostic on this."  

As strategy, I guess this is a good move on the governor's part.  He's basically saying, I've balanced the budget and the legislature can decide on where to cut.  They'll get the blame, he hopes.  But really, to tell the university they can work out with the legislature where to cut is like telling your kids, "Hey, here's 50 cents, go buy yourself dinner.  I'm agnostic about what you eat, but just keep it within our budget."  You can't buy dinner for 50 cents and you can't run a university on 40% of last year's budget.  It's a disaster for years to come.   (Dermot Cole has already addressed the governor's claim that it's only 17%.)

I don't know who's helping the governor do all this.  Well aside from Donna Arduin.  Or if he really thinks - "the sky won't fall" because government is bloated.  This is like not believing in gravity.

I once asked my students - as we discussed ontology - if the University was real?  They all agreed it was.  I argued it was just something that people made up. And they could make it up into something entirely different.   That the state could decide to sell all the buildings to some company and they could call it whatever they wanted and the university simply wouldn't exist any more.

But that was a philosophical argument to make a point about the nature of reality.  It seems our governor is trying to prove my point.   Some people will die.  Others will suffer needlessly because of the cuts this budget requires.  Even if the legislature restores half the cuts.

In a letter to the editor the other day, someone wrote this was simply the governor's opening gambit of a chess game.  There is no opening gambit in chess that compares to this.  Well, there's one - knocking over the board and all the pieces.

What the governor does have going for him is that his letter is in good English, it's polite, and if you don't know anything about the situation, it might sound reasonable.

Working Conditions of Some Folks Who Feed Your Electronic Media Habits

Some pieces on the less visible side of our rapid adoption of electronic media.

Computer Games - From Real Life

"During a quarterly earnings call on February 11, Bobby Kotick, the CEO of Activision Blizzard — one of the biggest companies in video games, publicly traded with a market cap of about $35 billion — announced excellent news for investors: His company had just completed a “record year” of revenue. But then he had even better news for them: Activision Blizzard was set to lay off 8 percent of their workforce, to further increase shareholder margins, meaning 800 employees would be losing their jobs.
The cycles of extreme crunch and job churn have meant that game employees often burn out after a few years in games: In 2017, the industry had the highest turnover rate of any in the country. Games companies are not troubled by this, because they bank on the aura that their products and their fan communities give them. The idealism and passion of the young people who come to games hoping to work in a field that inspires them and brings them joy end up making them ripe for exploitation, a pattern many young writers, actors, and musicians might recognize. At so-called triple-A studios like Rockstar or Ubisoft, they get chewed up and spit out in the name of creating an expensive few hours of pleasure for middle-class consumers."

Casey Newton's The Trauma Floor:  The Secret Lives of Facebook Moderators in America, tells the story of contract workers who screen FB posts to eliminate inappropriate posts.  It starts of at a training session:

"For this portion of her education, Chloe will have to moderate a Facebook post in front of her fellow trainees. When it’s her turn, she walks to the front of the room, where a monitor displays a video that has been posted to the world’s largest social network. None of the trainees have seen it before, Chloe included. She presses play.
The video depicts a man being murdered. Someone is stabbing him, dozens of times, while he screams and begs for his life. Chloe’s job is to tell the room whether this post should be removed. She knows that section 13 of the Facebook community standards prohibits videos that depict the murder of one or more people. When Chloe explains this to the class, she hears her voice shaking." 

The piece goes on to talk about how these employees are NOT really FB employees and their pay and working conditions are much different from those in Menlo Park. Interviews with a number of former and current employees reveals high mental health problems, with sex and drugs a common way to cope.  While there are counselors, they aren't there all the time.   A long section in the middle discusses the difficulty of interpreting the rules for what is allowable and what isn't.  As you can imagine there is a fine balancing act between not offending people and not being overly protective.

"In some cases, the company has been criticized for not doing enough — as when United Nations investigators found that it had been complicit in spreading hate speech during the genocide of the Rohingya community in Myanmar. In others, it has been criticized for overreach — as when a moderator removed a post that excerpted the Declaration of Independence. (Thomas Jefferson was ultimately granted a posthumous exemption to Facebook’s speech guidelines, which prohibit the use of the phrase 'Indian savages.')"

The scores employees get keeps track of their accuracy.

Eventually gets to tour the Phoenix workplace under controlled conditions where employees say things aren't as bad as he's been led to believe.


And finally (for this post anyway) (and a slightly different focus)  "AR Will Spark the Next Big Tech Platform—Call It Mirrorworld" in Wired, by Kevin Kelly.  This begins with a description of AR as experienced by Mythbusters' Adam Savage:

“I turned it on and I could hear a whale,” he says, “but I couldn’t see it. I’m looking around my office for it. And then it swims by my windows—on the outside of my building! So the glasses scanned my room and it knew that my windows were portals and it rendered the whale as if it were swimming down my street. I actually got choked up.” 

Kelly gives an overview.  (Wired assumes everyone knows what AR means and doesn't define it.  But I suspect not all my readers do.  It stands for Augmented Reality.)

"The first big technology platform was the web, which digitized information, subjecting knowledge to the power of algorithms; it came to be dominated by Google. The second great platform was social media, running primarily on mobile phones. It digitized people and subjected human behavior and relationships to the power of algorithms, and it is ruled by Facebook and WeChat.
We are now at the dawn of the third platform, which will digitize the rest of the world. On this platform, all things and places will be machine-­readable, subject to the power of algorithms. Whoever dominates this grand third platform will become among the wealthiest and most powerful people and companies in history, just as those who now dominate the first two platforms have. Also, like its predecessors, this new platform will unleash the prosperity of thousands more companies in its ecosystem, and a million new ideas—and problems—that weren’t possible before machines could read the world."

So what?

Every new technology inherently brings change to the society that adopts it.  I remember reading about an indigenous group of people's first contact with foreigners, who gave metal hatchets to people in the group.  The possession of tools like these had been restricted by tradition to village leaders.  Now everyone had such a tool and the whole social order of the community fell apart.

We've been on an incredible technology ride as we adopt one new technology after another with very little concern for how these technologies have and will impact us.  Digital imagery manipulation has destroyed the idea of photos and videos as reliable evidence of truth.  And the internet is currently being used to further destroy any notion of a provable truth.  Democracy requires a level of agreement on what is true.

But aside from the content of the internet and how it influences our world views, there is also the impact of how the technology is produced - the materials, the work settings, wealth redistribution.  And capitalism itself makes it hard to control the impacts of new technology.  Cloning and genetic modification of humans will happen (have happened?) despite strong ethical concerns.  Capitalists supply what they think they can profit from.  We know, for example, the free market plays a key role in the extinction of species - either because some part of them is valued like rhinoceros horns, or because their habitat is destroyed as a side-effect (externality) of resource development and the unregulated dumping of waste.

Before you give up because you think the problems are too great to solve, remember your own consumption and waste management strategies.  Talk about the side effects of computer games with your friends and relatives who made Activision Blizzard a $35 billion! company.

Killers Of The Flower Moon - Chilling Story Of Power, Collusion, Racism, That's Relevant Still Today [UPDATED]

David Grann's Killers of the Flower Moon tells the chilling and disgusting story of how white men in

power murdered scores, maybe more, Osage Indians in the 1920s, to get their 'headrights' which was their right to their share of the oil wealth. The headlights couldn't be sold, but they could be inherited.

Grann's interviewed children and grandchildren of murdered Osage.  He reviewed archival documents in libraries and agencies, What he found reveals a much bigger impact than others had.  The FBI quit investigating when the got convictions of two key people, but Grann suggests a lot more people were involved in the murders - both as perpetrators and as victims.

Basically, most ofl the important white men in Osage territory were involved.  The Osage had chosen what they thought was relatively desolate land in Oklahoma on the belief that whites would take over any decent land, as had happened to them previously.  But they did have a good attorney and they reserved the underground rights to all their territory.  When oil was discovered, they became rich.  That in itself was a problem because whites derided the idea of rich Indians living in nice house with fancy cars and clothes.  And the idea that Indians had whites working for them in their houses.

The law also had problems with the idea of rich Indians.

"The law mandated that guardians be assigned to any American Indians whom the Department of the Interior deemed "incompetent"  In practice, the decision to appoint a guardian - to render an American Indian, in effect, a half citizen - was nearly always based on the quantum of Indian food in the property holder, or what a state supreme court justice referred to as "racial weakness." (p. 78)

So the headright owners had to have a white guardians watch over their money.  This position gave the guardians many opportunities to syphon off money for their own uses.   But this wasn't enough for the white power structure of the area.  They began a long and relentless crusade to murder Osage headright owners to gain control of the money.  They used guns, they used poison, they even blew up someone's house.

They got away with this because all the key people - the mayor, the private investigators the families of Osage hired, the doctors who did autopsies, the undertakers, the various attorneys, the judges, the bankers, the juries, when there was one, were all involved.  All benefited financially.

It's a horrible story that should be highlighted in American history books, but isn't.  The FBI got involved because they'd already been embarrassed by an earlier case involving the Osage.  Hoover wanted to establish his new agency's credibility.  An upright Texas ranger who'd joined the FBI took over the case and managed to get witnesses to testify who hadn't before.  But when they got a few men convicted - notably William Hale and his nephew Ernest Burkhart -  they stopped there, not investigating the many other suspicious deaths.  Both these men were not given the death sentence for killing Indians, and were out of prison after serving relatively short terms.

Here's a bit of a summary from near the end of the book.

"I remembered the Shouns.  They were the doctors who had claimed that the bullet that had killed Anna Brown had disappeared  The doctors who had initially concealed that Bill Smith had given a last statement incriminating Hale and who had arrange it so that one of them became the administrator of Rita Smith's invaluable estate.  The doctors whom investigators suspected of giving Mollie Burkhart poison instead of insulin.  Many of the cases seemed bound by a web of silent conspirators  Mathis, the Big Hill Trading Company owner and the guardian of Anna Brown and her mother, was a member of the inquest into Brown's murder that failed to turn up the bullet.  He also manage, on behalf of Mollies' family, the team of private eyes that conspicuously never cracked any of the cases.  A witness had told the bureau that after Henry Roan's murder, Hale was eager to get the corpse away from one undertaker and delivered to the funeral home at the Big Hill Trading Company.    The murder plots depended upon doctors who falsified death certificates and upon undertakers who quickly and quietly buried bodies.  The guardian who McAuliffe suspected of killing his grandmother was a prominent attorney working for the tribe who never interfered with the criminal networks operating under his nose.  Nor did the bankers, including the apparent murderer Burt, who were profiting from the criminal "Indian business."  Nor did the venal mayor of Fairfax - an ally of Hale's who also served as a guardian.  Nor did countless lawmen and prosecutors and judges who had a hand in the blood money.  In 1926, the Osage leader Bacon Rind remarked, "There are men amongst the whites, honest men, but they are might scarce."  Garrick Bailey, a leading anthropologist on Osage culture, said to me, "If Hale had told what he knew, a high percent of the county's leading citizens would have been in prison"  Indeed virtually every element of society was complicit in the urderous system.  Which is why just about any member of this society right have been responsible for the murder of McBride, in Washington:  he threatened to bring down not only Hale but a vast criminal operation that was reaping millions and millions of dollars." (pp. 590-91)

In the background, we learn a little about the development of police departments in the US and some about J. Edgar Hoover's beginnings at the FBI.  We learn about private detective companies like Pinkerton and the William J Burns International Detective Agency.   And we learn about how greed and prejudice trumped justice.

Often the web of connections that enable the well-to-do to commit crimes in impunity is invisible to those on the outside.  This book shows those connections and how insidious they can be.  This is a valuable lesson as Mueller unravels the connections that Trump had with Russia.  And, of course, Trump had in New York that allowed him to swindle and scam clients, contractors, and the public through connections with New York high society and lawyers who would buy off any potential threats with a binding non-disclosure agreement.

It's also a reminder that reading well researched and written books can offer us a much better overview of a situation than the daily snatches of news that pop up and disappear, leaving us with a temporary outrage, but no context to put it in or to help us remember the details.

[UPDATE Feb 21, 2019:  As an exclamation mark to my comments about how this is relevant still today, here's a Miami Herald story about a judge ruling. 

"A judge ruled Thursday that federal prosecutors — among them, U.S. Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta — broke federal law when they signed a plea agreement with a wealthy, politically connected sex trafficker and concealed it from more than 30 of his underage victims.
U.S. District Judge Kenneth A. Marra, in a 33-page opinion, said that the evidence he reviewed showed that Jeffrey Epstein had been operating an international sex operation in which he and others recruited underage girls — not only in Florida — but from overseas, in violation of federal law.
'Epstein used paid employees to find and bring minor girls to him.,’’ wrote Marra, who is based in Palm Beach County. “Epstein worked in concert with others to obtain minors not only for his own sexual gratification, but also for the sexual gratification of others.'’’

This is exactly the kind of thing that happened in Oklahoma around the Osage killings.  Judges, prosecutors, attorneys, and the wealthy worked out deals that they hid from the victims.    In this case, the prosecutor then is now Trump's US Secretary of Labor.  And in the researching I've done in the last few years, I've run across stories saying that Trump was one of the people who enjoyed going to Epstein's parties and the young girls he provided.  From Think Progress:

"Trump told New York Magazine about his relationship with Epstein in 2002.
'I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with,” Trump said at the time. “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it: Jeffrey enjoys his social life.'”

Bill Clinton and many others were also party-going friends of Epstein according to this article.

My point is not to indulge in gossip here, but to make the bigger point:  That white men (particularly) in power take care of each other to cover up their illegal and often despicable actions.  And it's still happening today.  Epstein's out of prison after a short stint, Trump is president, and Acosta is his Secretary of Labor.  The victims still have gotten no real justice.  Exactly like the Osage Killings.

Heavy Rains In San Francisco While Alaska Hit By Unnatural Disaster As Dunleavy Reveals Budget

From Accu Weather:

"Atmospheric river to fuel torrential rain in California"

It was raining steadily, but not terribly hard as we caught the bus to the CalTrain station this afternoon to visit good friends who live a little south of SF.

But the disaster happening in Alaska is totally man-made.  The ads promised a balanced budget and Permanent Fund Dividends forever.  They were paid for, in large,  by candidate Dunleavy's brother.  And the people who vote based on such ads and party identification - but ignore any kind of obvious signs, like the ones I saw at the special hearings set to pass Erin's Law.  





The Alaska state budget is a daunting document.  While I acknowledge that it is complicated, often the people preparing a budget have a vested interest in making it as confusing as possible.  Terms aren't clearly explained or the explanation is hard to find, especially online.  The lists of budget terms online like this one and this one don't explain all the terms and acronyms used in the budget.

Quantities aren't always clarified - like how many zeros you need to add to the numbers in columns to get the actual number.  Often people hide things they don't want people to discover - like funding for a pet project or removal of funding from an agency.

And there are different types of budgets.  Operating and Capital Budgets for instance.  But also Unrestricted General Fund That's all preface to the next item.

x

Screen Shot Budget 2020-02-13 by on Scribd

Note:  I'm not even sure what LF means on this page GF is General Fund.  Unrestricted means the funds are restricted to a specific use.  This page comes from here.  But at the State's Budget page you can find a whole slew of different takes on the budget.

I've just highlighted the education parts of the budget.  Despite the fact that Dunleavy taught in public schools in rural Alaska as well as being principal and a superintendent, this budget show total disdain for public schooling.  That was already clear when he talked about 'parental rights' at the Erin's Law hearings.  The parental right movement is related to the father's rights movement.  It's also connected to the home-schooling movement.  There's a touch of anti-government and a tough of fundamentalist religion and a touch of so called 'traditional family values.'  And it was clear to me back in 2012 that Dunleavy would try to cut public schooling if he were in a position to do it.  (Let me say that like in any group that forms, there are people with legitimate issues about how they were treated.  But a number of movements are really protests against losing power they once had - like men's power over their wives has eroded quite a bit over the last 100 years.  See this article on father's rights groups.

"The fathers’ rights movement is defined by the claim that fathers are deprived of their ‘rights’ and subjected to systematic discrimination as fathers and as men, in a system biased towards women and dominated by feminists. Fathers’ rights groups overlap with men’s rights groups and both represent an organised backlash to feminism. Fathers’ rights groups can be seen as the anti-feminist wing of a range of men’s and fathers’ groups which have emerged in recent years, in the context of profound shifts in gender, intimate and familial relations over the past four decades (Flood, 2010). While fathers’ rights groups share common themes, there are also diversities in their degree of opposition to feminism, their involvements in political advocacy, their reliance on Christian frameworks, and so on.Three experiences in particular bring men into the fathers’ rights movement. Painful experiences of divorce and separation, as well as accompanying experiences of family law and the loss of contact with one’s children, produce a steady stream of men who can be recruited into fathers’ rights groups"

And here's a piece on parental rights from a Home School website.

I offer those links, not as 'proof' or as an exhaustive review of the topic, but just as an appetizer to become more aware of the code words 'parental rights' which sounds very reasonable on the surface.  I think the link to the Home Schooling movement helps predict this budget.

The other issue that people have raised with this budget is the 'visiting budget director' as Dermot Cole dubbed Donna Arduin.  I haven't done adequate research on her, so for the time being, you can look at this (Sarasota) Herald-Examiner article form 2014 that reviews her run as a Libertarian 'expert' budget slasher, whose budget analyses are regularly debunked by real economists.

Sometimes being in Alaska and late on Lower 48 trends is a good thing.  We can learn from others' experiences.  Here's hoping that Alaskans will figure out really quick what we've done by electing Dunleavy before too much damage is done. Here's hoping we can learn from what's happened in Kansas, Oklahoma, Michigan, Wisconsin, and elsewhere.  [UPDATE Feb 14, 2019:  I added Kansas and links for a little more background about those states' outcomes of cutting taxes and government.]

Hopefully, those who blindly believed Dunleavy's promises to get people all their back PFD checks AND balance the budget without any new revenues, will realize it was all a scam before the state infrastructure for schools and health and safety are destroyed.  Perhaps the people who are now finding out that those tax rebates Trump promised are not really coming, will transfer that awareness to what Dunleavy is trying to pull off.

How Much Does The US Owe African-Americans For The Unpaid Work They Did?

[Consider this post more like notes about a concept.]

I came across this Newsweek  article about how much reparations for African-Americans would cost if they were reimbursed for the work they did as slaves.

". . .[Craemer]  also has come up with what he says is the most economically sound estimate to date of what reparations could cost: between $5.9 trillion and $14.2 trillion.

Craemer came up with those figures by tabulating how many hours all slaves—men, women and children—worked in the United States from when the country was officially established in 1776 until 1865, when slavery was officially abolished. He multiplied the amount of time they worked by average wage prices at the time, and then a compounding interest rate of 3 percent per year (more than making up for inflation). There is a range because the amount of time worked isn’t a hard figure. 

Previous estimates of reparations have ranged from around $36 billion to $10 trillion (in 2009 dollars), Craemer says. Those calculations mostly looked at wealth created by slaves as opposed to services provided, resulting in underestimates. Craemer believes that “the economic assumptions underlying [his method] are more sound” than those used in previous papers."

It's really hard for people to give back what they stole, especially after enjoying it for a long time and assuming that it was rightfully theirs.  My step-mother told me stories about getting back to her home after being in Nazi work camps.  Neighbors had taken over her family's home and she saw her family furniture and other belongings in the houses of other neighbors.  But it's not simply the labor of black slaves that allowed many white southerners get rich and pass that wealth on to their heirs for generations.

From American Slavery: Separating Truth From Myth,  Daina Ramey Berry writes:

Myth Four: Slavery was a long time ago.
Truth: African-Americans have been free in this country for less time than they were enslaved. Do the math: Blacks have been free for 152 years, which means that most Americans are only two to three generations away from slavery. This is not that long ago.
Over this same period, however, former slaveholding families have built their legacies on the institution and generated wealth that African-Americans have not had access to because enslaved labor was forced. Segregation maintained wealth disparities, and overt and covert discrimination limited African-American recovery efforts. [emphasis added.]

Some of those covert discriminatory practices included red-lining, restrictive covenants, unequal school, job discrimination, and internalized racism that still causes people to make discriminatory assumptions about black Americans.

War reparations are not anything new.  The Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law defines them this way:

"1 War reparations involve the transfer of legal rights, goods, property and, typically, money from one State to another in response to the injury caused by the use of armed force. While often considered a sub-category of reparations obligations existing under the classical theory of internationally wrongful acts and State responsibility law, the practice of claiming and paying war reparations in fact dates back to ancient times and presents several specific features."

International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTA) puts reparations into a larger context of transitional justice:

"Transitional justice is rooted in accountability and redress for victims. It recognizes their dignity as citizens and as human beings. Ignoring massive abuses is an easy way out but it destroys the values on which any decent society can be built. Transitional justice asks the most difficult questions imaginable about law and politics. By putting victims and their dignity first, it signals the way forward for a renewed commitment to make sure ordinary citizens are safe in their own countries – safe from the abuses of their own authorities and effectively protected from violations by others."

Reparations do take place.  Most recently in the US, reparations were paid to Japanese-American survivors of WWII relocation camps.  But such efforts are ongoing around the world. The International Center for Transitional Justice lists seven countries where they have worked to get reparations for victims:

The Philippines: Aided by many years of active engagement by ICTJ, legislation was passed that granted reparations and recognition to victims of human rights violations committed during the Marcos dictatorship. We also advised a joint commission of the government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front on approaches to transitional justice that the state should adopt as part of implementing the peace process, including on reparations for victims of violations, marginalization, and historic grievances.
Sierra Leone: Our advice helped to improve the accessibility of the reparations registration process for victims of the civil war. We advised on how to staff and schedule the interview and statement-taking process, to ensure that more victims in rural and hard-to-reach areas of the country could register.
South Africa: With our technical support, we helped the largest apartheid survivors’ group in South Africa to challenge the government’s limited post-Truth and Reconciliation Commission reparations policies.
Sudan: In relation to the conflict in Darfur, we analyzed the extent to which the right to reparations of victims has been incorporated into the different attempts to create a peace agreement. We used our presence in negotiations to disseminate our findings to relevant stakeholders.
Timor-Leste: We worked with parliamentarians to enact legislation to implement the reparations recommendations of the two truth commissions (the Commission for Truth, Reception and Reconciliation and the Commission on Truth and Friendship) that were established to investigate abuses that occurred during the Indonesian occupation.
Tunisia: After the overthrow of President Ben Ali in 2011, we assisted government agencies and officials to design reparations policies that would be effective and relevant to the needs of victims of the dictatorship.
Uganda: In response to long-running civil conflict, particularly in the north, we provided relevant state agencies with critical information about the reparative needs of victims, and helped to identify capacity gaps and resources that would be required to design and implement effective reparations programs. We supported civil society organizations, especially women’s organizations, to provide reparations policy proposals to submit to state authorities.

A major reparations model to individuals in the 20th Century is how the Germans calculated and paid reparations to victims of the Nazis.  My own mother got reparation checks - called Wiedergutmachen, or "making good again"- in recognition of the loss (as I understand this) of her family's business and house, her parents, and her lost education.  I'd note that despite these payments, Germany is still one of the strongest economies in the world.


Here's an article that focuses on legal history of reparation rights, particularly in the context of German reparations. .  From  "A Legal History of International Reparations" by Richard M. Buxbaum in the Berkeley Journal of International Law:

To explore these two cases in the European reparations context, five strands of thought-three general and two specific to Germany-need to be separated and then rewoven. One: whether state claims for reparations encompass compensa- tion for particularized harms suffered by a subject of the claimant state. Two: may that subject make a claim directly against the other state? Three: do claims, either by the state or its subjects, encompass compensation for harms caused by non-state actors of the offending state? This issue also raises the question of whether those private actors may be sued directly, either by the claimant state or, more typically, by the victim-subject of that state. Four (an issue historically specific to World War II): the temporary disappearance of Germany as a sover- eign state actor and the substitution of the Occupying Powers as that sovereign. Five (again, historically specific): the nature of the atrocities committed by the Third Reich against both its own persecuted subjects and those of other states that was qualitatively different from those known to modem warfare.

Japanese-Americans were given a token amount that did not reflect the total loss of property or what they might have earned during their years of incarceration.  For many, more important than the money was the acknowledgement by the US government of the wrong that was done.  Craemer's figures - into the trillions - means that African-Americans will, at best, never get more than a token reparation.  Particularly if you consider the debt the US has to Native Americans on top of the debt to African-Americans.  This is an injustice that is a stain on the US until it is reasonably resolved.

Fight Citizens United - Call Your Assembly Members to Support Constitutional Amendment [UPDATE: It Passed]

There's a resolution before the Anchorage Assembly tonight.  It would support a Constitutional amendment to counter Citizens United, the US Supreme Court decision which allowed for unlimited money in US elections from corporations.

There are conflicting views on the effectiveness (and unintended consequences) of this proposed Amendment, but it seems to be the leading contender to push back the effects of Citizens United.

Here's the FAQ page of the website of Move To Amend, the organization sponsoring this around the country.

The ACLU supported Citizens United in the Supreme Court.  Here's what they say about it on their website.  

HERE'S TONIGHT'S RESOLUTION:    (I put the actual Amendment in red)

1. A RESOLUTION OF THE ANCHORAGE MUNICIPAL ASSEMBLY
2. 2  SUPPORTING AND CALLING FOR AN AMENDMENT TO THE CONSTITUTION
3. 3  OF THE UNITED STATES TO ADDRESS ISSUES THAT RESULTED FROM
4. 4  COURT DECISIONS SUCH AS THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT’S
5. 5  DECISION IN CITIZENS UNITED v. FEDERAL ELECTION COMMISSION.

6 7

8. 8  WHEREAS the heart of democracy is the right of human beings to govern
9. 9  themselves, and the United States is the first and foremost democracy since the days of
10. 10  ancient Greece; and

11

12. 12  WHEREAS the founding documents of the United States, the Declaration of
13. 13  Independence and the Constitution, recognize that human beings have certain inalienable
14. 14  rights; and

15

16. 16  WHEREAS the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution
17. 17  do not mention or grant any rights to corporations or to any artificial entities other than the
18. 18  United States of America and its constituent States; and

19

20. 20  WHEREAS corporations and other artificial entities are not and never have been
21. 21  human beings, and are only entitled to the legal powers and protections that the People
22. 22  grant to them; and

23

24. 24  WHEREAS recent judicial decisions, including the United States Supreme Court
25. 25  decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 130 S.Ct. 876, 558 U.S. 310
26. 26  (2010), have held that corporations and other artificial entities are “persons” under the
27. 27  United States Constitution with a constitutional right to spend as much money as they wish
28. 28  on political speech, thereby greatly expanding the power of corporations and other
29. 29  artificial entities to influence elections and otherwise undermine the power of the People to
30. 30  govern themselves; and

31

32. 32  WHEREAS when freedom of speech is equated with freedom to spend money, the
33. 33  free speech of 99 percent of the People is overwhelmed by the messages of the few who
34. 34  are able to spend millions of dollars to influence the political process; and

35

36. 36  WHEREAS respected national political polls show that large majorities of the
37. 37  People from all parts of the political spectrum believe that corporations and other artificial
38. 38  entities have too much power in our political system; and

39

40. 40  WHEREAS we the People are supreme, and have the power to overrule the
41. 41  Supreme Court through a constitutional amendment; and

42

AR supporting Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Page 2 of 2 to address effects of the Citizens United decision

WHEREAS over 800 municipalities and local governments, and 19 state governments, have already passed resolutions calling for an amendment to the United States Constitution to address the types of issues identified above;

NOW THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the Anchorage Assembly supports, and calls for, an amendment to the United States Constitution, establishing that:

Section 1. The United States Constitution does not create or grant or protect any constitutional rights for corporations or other artificial entities; and
Section 2. That money is not speech, and that the government has the right to enact statutes and regulations governing the expenditure of money to influence elections and political decision making, to the end that all voices and opinions of the People can be expressed and heard.

The Municipal Clerk is directed to deliver copies of this resolution to the Anchorage delegation to the Alaska Legislature and to Alaska’s delegation to the United States Congress.
PASSED AND APPROVED by the Anchorage Assembly this ____ day of ______________, 20____.


This is the most organized effort to blunt the effects of the Citizens United decision.  While it won't solve the campaign finance problems completely, and it raises some free speech questions, I think it forces the debate to a higher profile.  That's worth supporting this.  


Here's a list of Assembly members' email addresses.

If you don't know who your Assembly members are (most people have two), here's a map of the districts.  For more precise maps you can click on each district:  ( District 1) ( District 2) ( District 3) ( District 4) ( District 5) ( District 6)

Even if you don't want to call or attend the meeting tonight, you should at least know who your Assembly members are.  

[UPDATE Dec 22, 2018:  I'm told it passed with little or no comment.]