Waiting For The Shoe To Drop: "[Trump's defense] so far is not recognizable to an attorney as any sort of legal defense at all"

I got this email teaser this morning. It's for a book that keeps Trump's lies alive.  (Sure, it's worth someone checking out just to see if there's anything there that can help understand all this, but one person can buy one copy and tell us about it.)

I'm wondering why they are featuring a book by apologists for the president.  I guess that's part of 'being fair' and offering 'both' sides to every argument. I learned long ago - sometimes there is only one right side and the other side is wrong.

Another book came out last week that I started reading.  I'm only into the first chapter, but this book promises to paint in a lot of the missing background to the indictments and other news bits occasionally escaping the Mueller investigation.

The title of Seth Abramson's new book Proof of Collusion:  How Trump Betrayed America  tells us Abramson's conclusion.   But that doesn't necessarily mean the book is biased or hype.  After all a book titled  Charles Manson: Proof of Murder wouldn't be questioned.

As I've written and rewritten this post, I've cut out some quotes that I surely need to share with you, so I'll just drop them in here. I also need something interesting in the title.

"[My work here is made easier] by the almost historic absence  . . . of any exculpatory evidence suggesting the president of the United States did not conspire with our enemies to violate federal law." 

"...the defense he and his team have mounted so far is not recognizable to an attorney as any sort of legal defense at all"

I wonder if the quote about the lack of a legal defense simply reflects Trump's disregard for any rules or laws that confine him and that he believes that he can win this politically.  Or perhaps those pursuing various policies and appointments hope simply to gain as much as they can from him before he crashes.

Now, to the book.

Introduction: A Theory Of The Case 

After pages of background and context, Abramson offers us this:

"In the case of the ongoing Trump-Russia probe, the only plausible theory of the case that coordinates with all the existing evidence is that Donald Trump and a core group of ten to twenty aides, associates, and allies conspired with a hostile foreign power to sell that power control over American's foreign policy in exchange for financial reward and - eventually - covert election assistance.  This theory doesn't contend that anyone in the president's sphere participated in any hacking or even knew about Russia's cyber-intrusions in advance;  it doesn't allege that the conspiracy many members of the Trump team were involved in was finely wrought, as opposed to chaotic, amateurish, and quickly capable of producing a mountain of incriminating evidence;  it doesn't require that all elements of its grand narrative take place in private, as indeed many of them occurred in the plain sight of millions of Americans;  and it doesn't allege that any of the actions involved rose to the level of statutory treason - a federal criminal statue that applies only if America is in a declared state of war.  What this theory of the case  does do is explain decades of suspicious behavior by Donald Trump, his family, and his closest associates, behavior that suggests that these bad actors expected and received a massive financial reward for taking policy positions friendly to the Kremlin and adverse to the interests of the United States.  The theory further maintains that once Trump had sufficient knowledge of Russian crimes to be legally responsible for not aiding and abetting them with promises of policies unilaterally beneficial to the Kremlin - a point Trump reached on August 17, 2016, a the very latests - any additional actions taken to advance Russian interests were criminal."
 

Chapter 1 is in three parts.

1.  The summary - About half a page and it begins like this:

"After fifteen years of financial failures in Russia - failures born not  of a lack of desire to succeed, but a lack of access to the people in Russia who make wealth creation possible - the Trumps discover that the key to making a fortune in real estate in Russia is greasing the skids with influential Russian officials.1  [I've left the footnote in and linked it, because Abramson tacks a source on most every claim.  That doesn't make it true, of course.  Someone else could have made it up.  There are three in this short summary]

2.  The Facts - Eleven pages of specific history, that covers Trump's failed attempts to do business in Russia, how his US businesses were funded by Russian mobsters when banks would no longer take the risk, and how things got better for Trump in Moscow after the Miss Universe contest in 2002 where the Trump picked winner was the girlfriend of a 'Russian gangster' and the object of Putin's 'secret admiration.' (At the bottom of the last page of facts is footnote 92.)

3.  Annotated History - 18 more pages (ending at footnote 193) of excerpts from the fact section, where Abramson expands on the meaning of those facts.



Abramson is like the Vin Scully of the Mueller investigation, giving color and background to the Trump-Russia investigations and other related questionable acts. When (I'm going with when, not if) the Mueller investigation starts becoming public, I suspect Proof of Collusion will be the  program used by many to figure out who all the players are.

So far in the book there's a lot of circumstantial evidence.  A lot of people whose spheres of influence overlap the worlds of Trump and of Putin.  This format results in a fair amount of repetition, but there is so much information, that's repetition is helpful.  And going back to the summary for this post was also helpful - being reminded what Abramson thinks is important.  I'd note that I had intended to focus on Chapter 1, but then the "Theory of the Case" seemed important too.  As an indication of how much is here, I'd forgotten that at the end of the Introduction, Abramson offers us a theory.  And so, I spent unnecessary time trying to reconstruct what his theory was from the first seven pages of the introduction.  His actual theory of the case only shows up on the last two pages.  But the exercise gives me more insight.

And I'd remind everyone that Abramson is not some flake writer simply gathering all the details that others have produced and organizing them.  He's got unique qualifications which you can see  at his wikipedia page.  He's got an interesting educational background.  For starters:

"Abramson is a graduate of Dartmouth College (1998), Harvard Law School (2001), the Iowa Writers' Workshop (2009), and the doctoral program in English at University of Wisconsin-Madison (2010; 2016).[1]"

You can read the Introduction (The Theory of the Case) and Chapter 1 here.

Edward Snowden On Blockchains/Masha Gessen On An Injustice

Ben Wizner explains why he's making this discussion public:

"Through it all, I’ve found him to be the clearest, most patient, and least condescending explainer of technology I’ve ever met. I’ve often thought that I wished more people — or perhaps different people — could eavesdrop on our conversations. What follows is a very lightly edited transcript of one of our chats. In it, Ed attempts to explain “blockchain” to me, despite my best efforts to cling to my own ignorance."

and this comes almost a the very end of the discussion:

"This is the one interesting thing about blockchains: they might be that one tiny gear that lets us create systems you don’t have to trust. You’ve learned the only thing about blockchains that matters: they’re boring, inefficient, and wasteful, but, if well designed, they’re practically impossible to tamper with. And in a world full of shifty bullshit, being able to prove something is true is a radical development. Maybe it’s the value of your bank account, maybe it’s the provenance of your pair of Nikes, or maybe it’s your for-real-this-time permanent record in the principal’s office, but records are going to transform into chains we can’t easily break, even if they’re open for anyone in the world to look at.
The hype is a world where everything can be tracked and verified. The question is whether it’s going to be voluntary."

You can see how Snowden and his interviewer got there here.



Another example of our  imperfect justice system.  Some of it is 'the system.'  Much of it is people who simply don't care and do their job perfunctorily, without considering how they can make the system work better.  And some people get off on their power, which they can best demonstrate by harming others unnecessarily:

The Injustice of Siwatu Ra’s Imprisonment and the Relentless Logic of Mass Incarceration

"A story can defy belief and appear ordinary at the same time. This is such a story. Siwatu Ra, a twenty-six-year-old woman with no prior criminal record, was sentenced by a Detroit court, in March, to two years in prison on felonious assault and felony firearm charges, after brandishing a gun at another woman during an argument. Ra maintained that she pointed the gun in defense of herself, her mother, and her two-year-old daughter; her gun was unloaded and licensed, and she has a concealed-carry permit in Michigan, which is an open-carry, Stand Your Ground state. Ra was incarcerated as soon as she was sentenced, even though she appealed her conviction, and even though she was nearing her third trimester of pregnancy. Three months later, she gave birth in St. Joseph Mercy Hospital, in Ann Arbor, in the presence of four armed guards. Her son was taken from her two days later."

One can't help wishing that stats were easily available to test my belief that this result (the incarceration) would be less likely to happen at all if this were a white man, instead of a black woman.

The author,  Masha Gessen, has US and Russian citizenships, wrote a biography of Putin, and is just smart - both in intelligence and street smarts.

But I spent a good part of the day at the Kiddie Museum with my three grandkids.  Such activities are necessary for one's mental health in today's world, and because they still need to have a childhood full of fun and new experiences.

We Give Thanks Today, But Few United States Citizens Contemplate Giving Back

History books have given us a pretty story of the origin of this holiday.  But as time has passed and the stories of the victors have been challenged, more and more people are jumping in to tell a different version.  Some just quibble over the facts.

Some excerpts from the Daily Signal

"The Pilgrims very famously didn’t celebrate Christmas. They said, “There’s not a place in Scripture that authorizes the celebration of Jesus’ birth. There’s no scripture that tells us when it occurred.” And they saw it as an invention that the Catholic Church had basically created. . ."

". . . The first time that you really would say that Thanksgiving becomes a national holiday is during the American Civil War. And that would not have been realized at the time—we see it more from hindsight. But Abraham Lincoln in 1863 issued a proclamation in the fall, making the fourth Thursday in November of that year a day of national Thanksgiving. And he primarily means it as a day of thanksgiving for the way that God was aiding Northern armies in the war against the South. And that also doesn’t endear Southerners to a Thanksgiving holiday."

" . . .And I joke—but also sort of mean it seriously—that one of the things that ultimately reconciles Southerners to Thanksgiving is the development of football.
And by the 1890s, the national championship game for what was the forerunner of the NCAA was being held annually in New York City on Thanksgiving Day. And well before 1900, the tradition of having football games on Thanksgiving Day is sweeping across the country. And Southerners find out that the holiday isn’t that bad after all."

"There had been 18 wives on the Mayflower, 14 of whom had died in the first winter. And so most of the married couples now were separated by death.
Large numbers of the children had lost a parent, there were some children present who had lost all parents and siblings. It was an overwhelmingly male, now single gathering, and also a young gathering, in that about half of the group was teenagers or younger."

Some put the relationship with the indigenous peoples into a different perspective like this one titled "The Real Story of Thanksgiving" (again, some excerpts)

"The story began in 1614 when a band of English explorers sailed home to  England with a ship full of Patuxet Indians bound for slavery. They left behind smallpox which virtually wiped out those who had escaped.  By the time the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts Bay they found only one living Patuxet Indian, a man named Squanto who had survived slavery in England and knew their language.  He taught them to grow corn and to fish, and negotiated a peace treaty between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Nation. At the end of their first year, the Pilgrims held a great feast honoring Squanto and the Wampanoags.
But as word spread in England about the paradise to be found in the new world, religious zealots called Puritans began arriving by the boat load. Finding no fences around the land, they considered it to be in the public domain. Joined by other British settlers, they seized land, capturing strong young Natives for slaves and killing the rest.  But the Pequot Nation had not agreed to the peace treaty Squanto had negotiated and they fought back. The Pequot War was one of the bloodiest Indian wars ever fought.
In 1637 near present day  Groton, Connecticut, over 700 men, women and children of the Pequot Tribe had gathered for their annual Green Corn Festival which is our Thanksgiving celebration. In the predawn hours the sleeping Indians were surrounded by English and Dutch mercenaries who ordered them to come outside.  Those who came out were shot or clubbed to death while the terrified women and children who huddled inside the longhouse were burned alive. The next day the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared "A Day Of Thanksgiving" because 700 unarmed men, women and children had been murdered."

Or give the indigenous credit for being more than the 'savages' that they were portrayed as in this more academic look at the government to government relationships between the new country and Indian tribes in Flashpoint:

"When Christopher Columbus thought he had discovered the “New World” in 1492, it is estimated that 10-30 million native people lived in North America, that is, in the present day countries of Mexico, United States and Canada. These millions of people lived under governments of varying sophistication and complexity. These native governments were viable and fully operational political bodies which controlled their citizens and their territories and were an important factor in the development of the United States government we live under today."

This National Geographic article says the population dropped in half not long after Columbus arrived.

European Americans justified their decimation of the Native population first on what they saw as their obvious superiority - based on not only their technical superiority, but also on their Christianity.  They also, of course, justified killing Indians based on self-defense.  The fact that they had invaded Indian land didn't seem to cross their minds.

The wealth of the United States - national and personal - is based on the take over of the land that had been inhabited by the indigenous people, through lopsided treaties (often signed by representatives of a tribe picked by the whites), through removal (ie Trail of Tears), and through massacre.

Our debt is so massive that for most US citizens, repaying that debt is inconceivable.  But it's a debt we owe, and which should be repaid, if not in whole, in a significant way that is more than a token reparation.

We need to start imagining how this can be done.  As well as recognize how much we still commit the kinds of crimes against other people today, that we committed against North America's indigenous people.  

[Sorry, this one is rushed - being called to dinner.]

Hockney Pool Painting - One Of My Favorites - Sells For $90 Million

When I took a computer art class with Prof. Mariano Gonzales at the University of Alaska Anchorage years ago, I realized on the first day, that everyone else in the class was a real artist.  Mariano tried to reassure me.  He said that all the others began with a different medium - water colors, oils, etc. - and had to adapt it to the computer.  I was coming to this fresh, with the computer as my first medium.

At the end of the class, we had to copy a masterpiece.  Simply duplicate it completely digitally.  I started to panic.  First I thought of doing a Mondrian.  For example.  At first that seemed like a copout, but when I looked at some of his paintings closely, I understood that they were much more subtle than I first realized - lots of subtle shades blended.

So I picked out one of my very favorite pictures - David Hockney's “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures).”   It has the feel of the chaparral hills that I knew so well growing up in Los Angeles.  It has a sparkling swimming pool.  And a man in a salmon colored jacket by the side of the pool and another man swimming.  Except for the people and the vegetation on the hillside in the background, it's pretty angular.  Or so I thought.  

Image from larger LA Times photo

 I had to recreate it from scratch.  I think in that class we were using Corel Draw.  It's amazing how much of a picture you don't see until you really, really look at it.  

But I managed to get a reasonable copy of the picture - at least for someone who didn't know the picture well.  

It was good enough that Mariano has told me that he showed students in later classes - an example of what someone who is not an artist did.  I'd show you my version, but my copy is on an old disk that doesn't fit any current computer I have.  And I'd show the copy I have hanging in the garage.  Except we're with family for Thanksgiving out of state.  And our house sitter isn't technologically savvy enough to take a picture of it and send it.  

But here's a picture from the LA Times article from the auction the other day where it went for $90 million.  I don't think that's a particularly good thing - monetizing art like that.  But that is several more blog posts.  For now, it's important because this is a picture I love and know fairly well. There are some arrangements where the artist gets a percentage of future appreciation of their work.  But I don't think this one is likely to be covered.  It was sold long ago.  

Here's a link to the whole LA Times story.

The Future Of Tipping - Every Solution Has Unintended Consequences

But that doesn't mean we should just stop and take things as they are.

I started thinking seriously about tipping when we had breakfast in Talkeetna last May.  I read this sign and as we left, without leaving a tip, I mentioned the policy to the person taking our payment.  Who then started talking about some of the side effects.  For one thing, I asked about the legal obstacles to tipping mentioned in the sign.  (I think that was part of what held up this post - I didn't have much internet access when we were at Denali and didn't want to spend on legal research.)

Basically he said that they went to this policy - abolishing tips and raising prices - because only the wait staff could legally benefit from tips, and they didn't think that was fair.  Some of the issues he brought up included:

1. The serious loss of income for the best servers.  People here on vacation or for climbing often have a lot of money and will tip a good server quite a bit, so when the policy was announced - after discussing it with everyone, if I recall right - some went to other restaurants were they could earn a lot more money through tips.  
2. They had to raise prices to pay everyone minimum wage without tips.  I get that, but I also figured the difference wasn't that great and was probably what I would have paid in a tip anyway.  
3.  Not everyone left tips and those people don't feel the way I do about the raised prices.  

This was last May and I can't find the notes I wrote down so I'll stop there.  I know I did want to look into the law, but I'm guessing that after several days at Denali, this slipped from my conscious todo list.

But Sunday, two things brought tipping back to my attention.  First, I got a thank you note for a tip I put into my check for a year of the Anchorage Daily News.  Our news carrier leaves our paper right  at our doorstep every day.  She doesn't throw it into the bushes or two steps from our door.  It's right there.  I can open the door barefoot and lean down and pick it up.  This is particularly appreciated in the winter.  How much should one tip a mail carrier?  My decision wasn't so much thinking about what she is paid, but more about saying, "Even though I've never seen you, I want you to know that I appreciate your great service."  Apparently I tipped her more than most others because she wrote the thank you.  Maybe it's just her route isn't full of fancy homes with high income earners.

She also noted in her thank you  - which was taped to the orange plastic bag the paper comes in - her appreciation that I was the only one of her customers who recycles the plastic bags.  I called the ADN once and asked about that, and they said to leave them outside and the carrier will pick them up.  Since then, I've been stuffing the new bag each day into one of the bags until the bag is
full.  Then I leave it out on the front steps - secured so it doesn't blow away - and in the morning it's gone.  I mention this so others who think about recycling plastic bags know you can do it this way.  (And the Assembly recently passed a law banning plastic bags at stores, but not for newspaper delivery.)  I'm not sure how they reuse the bags - since I'm sure it's easier to pull one off a role than to try to retrieve them out of a used bag, but knowing she thought that was a good thing and not a pain in the neck, was also positive.

Finally,  a Washington Post article reprinted  in the ADN Sunday about tipping and getting rid of tipping by requiring restaurants and hotels to pay the minimum wage not counting the tips.  It doesn't deal with the issue of losing servers (which wouldn't happen if a law were passed instead of one restaurant voluntarily making that decision).  Here's one snippet that I wanted to push back on a bit:

"Customers shouldn’t have to subsidize an employee’s wages through their tips, whether they’re ordering a pizza or taking a white-water rafting trip. And now, finally, it looks like we’re slowly reaching the point where we agree: This can’t go on."

My quibble here is the phrase "subsidize an employee's wages."  I'd argue we're subsidizing the owner's profit.  After all, the owner should be paying a fair wage.  And our tips, as important as they are, don't pay for health care or retirement.  And I want to acknowledge I know there are differences between small family owned restaurants and large corporate chain restaurants.

Of course, this is should all be in the larger context of the laws and customs that favor the educated and wealthy in ways that increase the gap between the very wealthy and everyone else, and our continued clinging to the morality of the Protestant work ethic to blame the poor for their poverty and assuage any guilt the wealthy have (since they deserve it for their assumed hard work.)

And I'll try to check on the Alaska laws about tipping to see how that fits in.

Avoiding The Dark Because It's Too Nice To Stay Inside

Yesterday, after watching Dark Money at the Bear Tooth, the sun came out.  Not so dark.  So I did a bike ride around the Universities bike trail.

South fork of Chester Creek runs through the UAA campus.

Goose Lake was telling the sky, Backacha.

And even though the sun was getting down low on the horizon, the amanita mascara were brightening up the groundscape everywhere.

And this morning when I took the kitchen scraps up to the compost, I picked my morning raspberries.

But I am still thinking about Dark Money.  It's not that I didn't know the basics - how Citizens United has made it possible for large corporations to invisibly support candidates with tons of unmarked campaign dollars - but the details of the movie's example of stealing seats in the Montana legislature is still disgusting.

I'm not sure how many hurdles would have to be overcome, but what's bothered me about politicians getting to office through various undemocratic shenanigans is that no one really gets punished.  Laws that get passed by such politicians stay passed, benefiting their shadowy supporters and screwing everyone else.  (OK, the guy in the movie got fined about $60,000, but I doubt his supporters didn't help him out there.  He didn't resign, though his term was up shortly.)

 Besides murky campaign help, I include gerrymandering as well. Today's ADN had a Washington Post  article about how a federal appeals court had found - once again - that North Carolina had illegally gerrymandered the state so that while Republicans had 53% of the vote they got 77% of the state's delegation to the US House.

“I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats,” said Rep. David Lewis, a Republican member of the North Carolina General Assembly, addressing fellow legislators when they passed the plan in 2016. “So I drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the country.”

He added: “I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.”

To say this out loud, in public, shows that he knows there's nobody who's likely to hold him accountable.

At least the judges understood that the Republicans had essentially stolen that last three elections and weren't inclined to let this next election go as is - despite how late it is in the election cycle.  After all, it's late because the Republicans kept appealing the decision and making more mischief.

"He said the court was leaning against giving the North Carolina legislature another chance to draw the congressional districts.
“We continue to lament that North Carolina voters now have been deprived of a constitutional congressional districting plan — and, therefore, constitutional representation in Congress — for six years and three election cycles,” Wynn wrote. “To the extent allowing the General Assembly another opportunity to draw a remedial plan would further delay electing representatives under a constitutional districting plan, that delay weighs heavily against giving the General Assembly another such opportunity.”

This sort of stuff is a threat to the whole idea of democracy.  The movie made it clear how corporations can set up shell organizations to hide money and then spend tons of money on last minute ads that lie about  and smear their anointed candidate's opponent.  And once they have them elected, the movie narrator said, there's no longer even the need to lobby, because they own that official.

I don't think removal from office, prison terms, even nullification of ill-gained legislation are too harsh a punishment for the both the corporate manipulators and their elected stooges.  And people like Rep. David Lewis.  These are domestic (well not all the corporate funders are necessarily domestic) terrorists, taking over our democracy.

Have some fresh raspberries.

Using The Right Word - Burgeoning

Often students would write their graduate papers using words they would never say, and which, quite often, they used incorrectly.  When I'd ask, they'd tell me they found a word in the thesaurus, that this was grad school and they wanted to sound more academic.  Did you look the word up?  No, it was in the thesaurus so it was a synonym.

Well, usually synonyms have a related meaning, but they don't all mean exactly the same thing.  So when I read this sentence in the paper this morning about the Alaska railroad, my antennae began to twitch.

"The stronger 2017 revenue figures were driven by continued growth in the railroad's passenger service — largely attributable to Alaska's burgeoning tourism industry." (emphasis added)

Burgeoning?  Alaska's tourism industry is 'burgeoning'?  It's been strong and growing since I moved here over 40 years ago.  So, just to check whether my own internal dictionary is accurate, I looked up the word at dictionary.com:

"verb (used without object)
1. to grow or develop quickly; flourish:
The town burgeoned into a city. He burgeoned into a fine actor.
2. to begin to grow, as a bud; put forth buds, shoots, etc., as a plant (often followed by out, forth)."

It's the quickly part that rings false here.  There's no real transition from one thing into another as in the first example.  Here are the stats from a study I found at the Alaska Travel Industry Association website:

This long term slow growth isn't exactly the way I understand the word 'burgeoning.'

Take Home:  If you use a thesaurus to find a different word to use, be sure to look it up in the dictionary before you actually use.  Most synonyms are exact substitutes for each other.

Money, Amygdala, Adults, Youth, Truth, Fiction, And Violence

We were talking about students from Parkland, Florida rising up in protest, and my daughter said, well, they've been reading books and watching movies that feature young heroes fighting against corrupt adult regimes.

A little later I saw this tweet:

adult fiction: I am riddled w ennui shall I cheat on my wife perhaps

YA fiction: overthrow govt and also kill its grasping maoist successor

— Anthony Oliveira (@meakoopa) December 18, 2016

Nothing can be boiled down to a simple answer, but it is worth playing with ideas to see where they lead.   This post is just thinking out loud.

Capitalism reduces everything to money.  The corporation's bottom line is all that matters.  The only way other values - family, morality, nature - matter in a corporate world is if they impact that bottom line.

Corporations have been by-passing reason and rationality for decades with ads that play directly to people's emotions.  They trigger buying by appealing to the amygdala, sometimes known as the reptilian brain, or primal brain.

'The primal brain is also in charge of, what are often referred to as, the four Fs: Feeding, Fighting, Fleeing, and… Reproduction' . . " (From Interaction Design Foundation.)

 From Brand Strategy company Tronviggroup:

"The reptilian brain first wants to know if the thing is threatening or desirable (edible, sexually attractive). It ascertains this from what it can see, smell, taste and touch, not what it can deduct by rational means. All these evaluations occur without recourse to the rational mind.

The limbic brain then responds emotionally and asks, “Is this my friend? Can I put my trust here?” This is the essential brand level stuff that generates loyalty, as discussed in The Difference Between Marketing and Branding."

So car companies, food companies, drug companies all get us to buy things not by logic, but by emotion.  And for entertainment companies, emotion is part of the product itself.  So Disney, Weinstein, Viacom, and others use violence and sex to sell movies. [From the Weinstein article cited below.]

". .  one entertainment marketer with 35 years of experience [said]: 'Abject violence has proven successful, and as long as it is, it will be produced because it’s profitable. It’s the accepted way of life rather than asking is this the right thing to do?'”

This is supported by studies that find a correlation between violence and film profit, though one study found that sex and nudity decreased profitability, but

"violence and frightening/tense scenes, were much more likely to predict financial success."

Then there's this interesting quote from Harvey Weinstein in 2014:

“He spoke about his own children and how he no longer wanted to feel like a hypocrite. “The change starts here,” the man who produced Quentin Tarantino’s violent Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs and D’jango Unchained told Morgan. “It has already. For me, I can’t do it. I can’t make one movie and say this is what I want for my kids and then just go out and be a hypocrite.” 

So if violence works for film makers, why shouldn't it work for news programs?

Entertainment corporations nowadays own companies that produce the news.  Disney owns ABC.  21st  Century Fox owns Fox News.   One wonders about the amount of time that the news shows spend covering school and other mass shootings.  Particularly compared to  other deaths - like car deaths or heart disease.

Are real life shootings just a form of entertainment for the news industry now?  Certainly were used to sell newspapers all along.

Clearly shootings are important news content to be covered.  But are they becoming the real life entertainment like that portrayed in The Hunger Games?

Perhaps the students see their tragedy as offered up for profit - certainly for the gun companies if not for the media.  And are the students responding to the youth fiction and superhero movies leading them to see themselves as the necessary saviors of humanity against a corrupt and unfair world created and controlled by adults?

‘We’re Children. You Guys Are the Adults.’

First the students said this, demanding the adults take action.  But seeing the adults squirm rather than act, the kids are seeing their own need to take action.

The Right immediately cranked up a conspiracy campaign claiming the students were 'crisis actors' controlled by a left-wing conspiracy.  From the LA Times:

"The video suggested that he is actually a performer, paid by sinister left-wing forces to advocate repeal of the 2nd Amendment. . .

"Effective smear campaigns don't just tell you what you want to hear. They're also arousing. Unlike harassment and bullying, but like gory and pornographic images (or drugs like meth and cocaine), attack propaganda shoots straight to the limbic system where our baser nature resides: fear, anger, sex and the instinct to protect children.
The Hogg video hit the spot, stimulating viewers through the crude intoxication of fury. No need to feel sympathy for this survivor. He's a player in a vast conspiracy. . . 

"The video simply excited the hindbrain more than the demonstrations, and we couldn't get enough of it.
Indeed, the attack on Hogg created a taste for more of the same, or at least YouTube did. As Paul Lewis observed in the Guardian, YouTube with its "Up Next" algorithm rewards consumers of pornography with more pornography, and propaganda with more propaganda."

Twitter, Youtube, and Facebook are also businesses that profit by people being punched in the amygdala.

But I do hope that people with experience and expertise in administration and mobilization do come to assist these kids, because passion gets you started, but organization gets you to the finish line.


Extra:
This is related but seemed to distract from the topic, so let me play it out here.

I've been wondering about how much sex and nudity in movies is there simply because directors took advantage of their power over actors to get them to take off their clothes and simulate sex acts.  With the Weinstein aftermath, that seems a lot more likely.  And are those who gain power in the film industry necessarily Type A personalities, just to get into those positions?  And are they more inclined to make movies that are full of ways to kill people?  And would average people be as imaginative in how to use guns if they didn't have so many role models on television, video games, and movies?

"Whatever you eat, a $200 lunch or a $2 hot dog, the results are the same, toilet-wise" and Other Thought-Provoking Quotes

Artist  Maurizio Catelan, in article about the Guggenheim museum declining President Trump's request for a Van Gogh for the White House, but offering instead Catelan's solid gold toilet,

“Whatever you eat, a $200 lunch or a $2 hot dog, the results are the same, toilet-wise,” he has said.

From a paper called "The Economic Roots of the Rise of Trumpism" from the German Center for Economic Studies in Munich (CESifo) we see that many US children don't even get the $2 hotdogs:

 "Six million children are reported for maltreatment to U.S. agencies annually,33 and five children die daily due to abuse or neglect.34"

If you follow the links on the two footnotes, the six million figure is lower than the source, though it apparently covers a wide range of issues reported.  The figure from the second footnote is 1670 deaths per year, which divided by 365 days equals 4.57 which they rounded up to 5.  But it's still a shocking number.  If these numbers are accurate, then more kids in the US die from neglect or abuse by their parents than in school shootings.

This is a purely economic look that offers lots of interesting statistics that they use to explain Trump's election.  It doesn't seem to consider other contributing factors.


Jeremy Corbyn, Labour Leader in UK (From BBC) on what would change if he becomes Prime Minister:

"A Labour government, he said, 'will take decisive action to make finance the servant of industry, not the masters of us all'". 

Rachel Crooks quoted in a Washington Post article about how the forced kiss she got (when she was a 22 year old office worker) from Trump affected her life:

“It was one of the first real failures or defeats of my life, where the world wasn’t what I hoped it was going to be, and I started to really doubt myself,” she said.

“Nobody would touch you, especially not Trump. You look like a boy. A gun to your head would be good for our nation.”  (Annonymous email to Crooks) 

This next quote from ImperfectCognitions seems a perfect response to all the Trump supporters who deny the truth of her story, including friends and relatives:

"You’re arguing with someone – about politics, or a policy at work, or about whose turn it is to do the dishes – and they keep finding all kinds of self-serving justifications for their view. When one of their arguments is defeated, rather than rethinking their position they just leap to another argument, then maybe another. They’re rationalizing –coming up with convenient defenses for what they want to believe, rather than responding even-handedly to the points you're making. You try to point it out, but they deny it, and dig in more."

The article is well worth reading.  It goes on to say that those who think they are more rational and wouldn't let their biases affect their judgment are possibly more susceptible because they think they aren't.

"Institutionalized Conflict of Interest" - If You Know The Name Manafort, But Not A Whole Lot More

Then you need to read this Atlantic article, The Plot Against America.  The sleaziness of Paul Manafort is breathtaking, and the story fills in gaps in lots of other stories you probably know.

Early dirty work with Roger Stone and Lee Atwater.

Changing the DC lobby culture.

Profiting off of arms dealers and lobbying Congress for the most repressive regimes in the world.

The only way Trump couldn't know about Manafort was if he willfully ignored what everyone around him knew.

Some brief excerpts:

"Manafort had profited from the sort of excesses that make a country ripe for revolution. And in the early months of 2014, protesters gathered on the Maidan, Kiev’s Independence Square, and swept his patron from power. Fearing for his life, Yanukovych sought protective shelter in Russia. Manafort avoided any harm by keeping a careful distance from the enflamed city. But in his Kiev office, he’d left behind a safe filled with papers that he would not have wanted to fall into public view or the wrong hands."

There's a lot of personal info on Manafort because his daughter's phone was hacked.

"Nine months after the Ukrainian revolution, Manafort’s family life also went into crisis. The nature of his home life can be observed in detail because Andrea’s text messages were obtained last year by a “hacktivist collective”—most likely Ukrainians furious with Manafort’s meddling in their country—which posted the purloined material on the dark web. The texts extend over four years (2012–16) and 6 million words. Manafort has previously confirmed that his daughter’s phone was hacked and acknowledged the authenticity of some texts quoted by Politico and The New York Times."

"When Manafort had arrived in Washington in the 1970s, the place reveled in its shabby glories, most notably a self-satisfied sense of high duty. Wealth came in the form of Georgetown mansions, with their antique imperfections and worn rugs projecting power so certain of itself, it needn’t shout. But that old boarding-school establishment wasn’t Manafort’s style. As he made a name for himself, he began to dress differently than the Brooks Brothers crowd on K Street, more European, with funky, colorful blazers and collarless shirts. If he entertained the notion, say, of moving his backyard swimming pool a few feet, nothing stopped him from the expense. Colleagues, amused by his sartorial quirks and his cosmopolitan lifestyle, referred to him as 'the Count of Monte Cristo.'”

"His acts of rebellion were not merely aesthetic. Manafort rewrote the rules of his adopted city. In the early ’80s, he created a consulting firm that ignored the conventions that had previously governed lobbying. When it came to taking on new clients, he was uninhibited by moral limits. In 2016, his friends might not have known the specifics of his Cyprus accounts, all the alleged off-the-books payments to him captured in Cyrillic ledgers in Kiev. But they knew enough to believe that he could never sustain the exposure that comes with running a presidential campaign in the age of opposition research and aggressive media. “The risks couldn’t have been more obvious,” one friend who attempted to dissuade him from the job told me. But in his frayed state, these warnings failed to register."

"Whereas other firms had operated in specialized niches—lobbying, consulting, public relations—Black, Manafort and Stone bundled all those services under one roof, a deceptively simple move that would eventually help transform Washington. Time magazine deemed the operation “the ultimate supermarket of influence peddling.” Fred Wertheimer, a good-government advocate, described this expansive approach as 'institutionalized conflict of interest.'” 

"All of the money Congress began spending on anti-communist proxies represented a vast opportunity. Iron-fisted dictators and scruffy commandants around the world hoped for a share of the largesse. To get it, they needed help refining their image, so that Congress wouldn’t look too hard at their less-than-liberal tendencies. Other lobbyists sought out authoritarian clients, but none did so with the focused intensity of Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly. The firm would arrange for image-buffing interviews on American news programs; it would enlist allies in Congress to unleash money. Back home, it would help regimes acquire the whiff of democratic legitimacy that would bolster their standing in Washington."

There's a lot more in the article itself. 

Video Economics Primer Offers Four Ways To Reduce Long Term Deficit

Someone sent me a link to this video that explains the economy. I'm always skeptical about people explaining the economy. Why? Because economists tell us the economy is doing well, all signs are positive. But we hear

• about the people struggling to get by, (and probably know some of them too.)   
• that US income inequality hasn't been so high for a century. 
• (and see) a lot of homeless folks all over.  
• that to keep the economy growing we have to destroy the environment. (Well they don't word it quite like that.)  

My reaction is that if these things are happening in a 'good' economy,  then the economists aren't measuring the economy right.

But this video is a great start to learn how economist think about the economy,  some of  the jargon, and our options for debt reduction beyond the Republican mantras of no new taxes and spending cuts.

In fact, near the end of the video, Dalio explains why spending cuts alone exacerbate the debt problems.

And who is Ray Dialo?  Wikipedia tells us:

"Raymond Dalio (born August 1, 1949) is an American investor, hedge fund manager, and philanthropist.[3] Dalio is the founder of investment firm Bridgewater Associates, one of the world's largest hedge funds.[4] He is one of the world’s 100 wealthiest people, according to Bloomberg.[5]"

So, when he says at the end, that this 'template' has helped him, I'm assuming it means it has helped him to time and direct his investments.



Crib Sheet

This video is content rich.  He has reduced his presentation to the essentials.  Every word is important.  I couldn't listen to this while doing something else.  In fact, I had to stop it repeatedly so I could take notes.  But by doing that, I understood his conclusion.

Basically, he's saying:

The economy works in a simple, mechanical way.

• A few simple parts
• A lot of simple transactions, that are repeated over and over again.
• These transactions are driven by human nature and create 3 main forces that drive the economy
• productivity growth
• the short term debt cycle
• the long term debt cycle

He explains these three forces and uses the three visually superimposed on each other - productivity growth, short term debt cycle, and the long term debt cycle - to explain what people have to do to keep the cycles going in our favor.  

He starts by talking about transactions (people exchanging goods and services for money and credit) and shows how these can lead to cycles of increasing and decreasing productivity and debt.  

He puts CREDIT in the center of this model - as a critical means to increasing productivity and living standards  (He points out there is $50 trillion in credit in the US, but only about $3 trillion in cash.)

You can agree or disagree with his presentation (I have a few questions and quibbles) but it does a great job of spelling out the basics of mainstream economics.  

He tells us at the end that the short term debt cycles can be fixed by the central bank (The Fed in the US) decreasing interest rates.  But each time it does this and restimulates the economy and productivity growth, it increases the long term debt until the long term debt cycle gets us to a depression.

He offers four solutions at that point. (Lowering interest doesn't work because it is already at 0% at this point):

1. Cut spending
2. Restructure the debt
3. Income redistribution
4. Print more money

He argues that cutting spending increases the problem, and the ultimate solution is a combination of all four, which, if done well (balancing inflationary and deflationary ways to deleverage) it is 'beautiful' and gets us balanced again with the least disruption.  

I promise if you watch this carefully and take some notes, all this will make perfect sense.  

This is useful to gather jargon and understanding for when you talk to your Republican congress members who only want to cut spending and taxes.  

And, of course, economists don't agree amongst themselves, so take this all with a grain of salt.  Consider it a starting point for finding out more.

[UPDATE 5:45pm:  I've added the word 'video' into the title after seeing how relatively few people have looked at this post so far today.  LA Rain got more hits faster.  People apparently don't want to deal with the hard topics.  The video is really well done, and maybe by adding video to the title more people will stake a look.  Just musing here on blogging and people's interests.  I do recognize that I too get overloaded and skip things I should read.]

Protestantism Began 500 Years Ago Today (Tuesday)

I don't have much to say - meaning, I guess, I have way too much to say - so I'll just mark this event with a few quotes.  First  from Christianity Today:

"Sometime during October 31, 1517, the day before the Feast of All Saints, the 33-year-old Martin Luther posted theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. The door functioned as a bulletin board for various announcements related to academic and church affairs. The theses were written in Latin and printed on a folio sheet by the printer John Gruenenberg, one of the many entrepreneurs in the new print medium first used in Germany about 1450. Luther was calling for a "disputation on the power and efficacy of indulgences out of love and zeal for truth and the desire to bring it to light." He did so as a faithful monk and priest who had been appointed professor of biblical theology at the University of Wittenberg, a small, virtually unknown institution in a small town."

If the word indulgences didn't pop out at you in that paragraph, let's try again.  From Crosswalk:

"Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses were particularly focused on the practice (and corruption) associated with indulgences. Specifically, indulgences were being sold for financial gain, as well as giving people a false assurance of salvation. It is not surprising that Luther posted his theses on October 31st, the eve of All Saints’ and All Souls’ Day, a time which emphasized the distinction between the souls of “saints” and the souls of everyone else, as well as revealed widespread misunderstanding about the power of indulgences (and the afterlife in general).

About a year after the wall came down in Berlin and between East and West Germany, I had an opportunity to visit Wittenberg and the famous church.  I wanted to put up my own picture of the church door in Wittenberg, but I haven't found it.

But this is a good time to ponder what actions stick and what actions disappear into nothingness.  Many were upset with the corruption of the Catholic bureaucracy in those days.  Why did Luther's actions make such a big difference?  I'm not going to answer that question because this isn't something I know all that much about.  But I'm sure he was helped by things that had happened before him.  I'm sure his own personality and skills played a role.  And I'm sure timing was a large part of this.

And we can ponder too, whether his 'solution' has made the world a better or worse place overall.  I don't know the answer to that, but the most interesting take that I've read on the impact of Protestantism was Max Weber's The Protestantism Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

You can read the whole book at this link.  Here's a bit from the 1976 introduction by Anthony Giddens.  It's hard boiling a complex work into a short summery, so consider this only a few notes of of a symphony.  I'll warn you that academic German writing can be hard and the translations are often even harder.  But the content is worth the effor

"What explains this historically peculiar circumstance of a drive to the accumulation of wealth conjoined to an absence of interest in the worldly pleasures which it can purchase? It would certainly be mistaken, Weber argues, to suppose that it derives from the relaxation of traditional moralities: this novel outlook is a distinctively moral one, demanding in fact unusual self- discipline. The entrepreneurs associated with the development of rational capitalism combine the impulse to accumulation with a positively frugal life-style. Weber finds the answer in the ‘this-worldly asceticism’ of Puritanism, as focused through the concept of the ‘calling’. The notion of the calling, according to Weber, did not exist either in Antiquity or in Catholic theology; it was introduced by the Reformation. It refers basically to the idea that the highest form of moral obligation of the individual is to fulfil his duty in worldly affairs. This projects religious behaviour into the day-to-day world, and stands in contrast to the Catholic ideal of the monastic life, whose object is to tran- scend the demands of mundane existence. Moreover, the moral responsibility of the Protestant is cumulative: the cycle of sin, repentance and forgiveness, renewed throughout the life of the Catholic, is absent in Protestantism. 

Although the idea of the calling was already present in Luther’s doctrines, Weber argues, it became more rigorously developed in the various Puritan sects: Calvinism, Methodism, Pietism and Baptism. Much of Weber’s discussion is in fact concentrated upon the first of these, although he is interested not just in Calvin’s doctrines as such but in their later evolution within the Calvinist movement. Of the elements in Calvinism that Weber singles out for special attention, perhaps the most important, for his thesis, is the doctrine of predestination: that only some human beings are chosen to be saved from damnation, the choice being predetermined by God. Calvin himself may have been sure of his own salvation, as the instrument of Divine prophecy; but none of his followers could be. ‘In its extreme inhumanity’, Weber comments, ‘this doctrine must above all have had one consequence for the life of a generation which surrendered to its magnificent consistency . . . A feeling of unprecedented inner loneliness’ (p. 60). From this torment, Weber holds, the capitalist spirit was born. On the pastoral level, two developments occurred: it became obligatory to regard oneself as chosen, lack of certainty being indicative of insufficient faith; and the performance of ‘good works’ in worldly activity became accepted as the medium whereby such surety could be demonstrated. Hence success in a calling eventually came to be regarded as a ‘sign’ – never a means – of being one of the elect. The accumulation of wealth was morally sanctioned in so far as it was combined with a sober, industrious career; wealth was condemned only if employed to support a life of idle luxury or self-indulgence." (pp. xi-xiii) (emphasis added)

Lots to think about there.

When Will Corporations Get The Right To Vote?

I was talking to a friend who's active in the Move to Amend group.  They're working on getting support from the Anchorage Assembly and others to support a Constitutional Amendment already in Congress that would define the word 'people' in the Constitution as referring to individual humans, NOT corporations.  Here's the whole amendment:

House Joint Resolution 48 introduced January 30, 2017
Click here for most up to date list of co-sponsors

Section 1. [Artificial Entities Such as Corporations Do Not Have Constitutional Rights]

The rights protected by the Constitution of the United States are the rights of natural persons only.

Artificial entities established by the laws of any State, the United States, or any foreign state shall have no rights under this Constitution and are subject to regulation by the People, through Federal, State, or local law.

The privileges of artificial entities shall be determined by the People, through Federal, State, or local law, and shall not be construed to be inherent or inalienable.

Section 2. [Money is Not Free Speech]

Federal, State, and local government shall regulate, limit, or prohibit contributions and expenditures, including a candidate's own contributions and expenditures, to ensure that all citizens, regardless of their economic status, have access to the political process, and that no person gains, as a result of their money, substantially more access or ability to influence in any way the election of any candidate for public office or any ballot measure.

Federal, State, and local government shall require that any permissible contributions and expenditures be publicly disclosed.

The judiciary shall not construe the spending of money to influence elections to be speech under the First Amendment.

The key arguments I've heard against this motion is that there are some situations where corporations should have rights that the constitution protects - like free speech.  The response I hear from supporters of the amendments that individual states that set up the laws for corporations can legislate those rights (like lobbying Congress, etc.).

The genesis of the amendment was the Supreme Court case Citizens United which upturned campaign finance laws and allowed corporations and others to contribute huge sums of money.

But you're better off checking their arguments on their website.   There are other attempts to counter act Citizens United.  

Is Corporate Voting Next?

So as I was thinking about this, I thought well, perhaps the corporations, since they are now considered persons, will be asking for the right to vote.  They already have lots of shell corporations for this and that.  Just think how many they could create if there were a tight election.  Would the corporation have to be 18 years old or older?  

By-Lines Alaska Dispatch Readers Won't See Anymore At The ADN [UPDATED AGAIN]

[UPDATE 9/24/17:  Charles Wohlforth has filled in a lot more information in his column this morning at the ADN - personal comments on colleagues he's worked with.]

The Alaska Dispatch News had a story Thursday (Sept 21, 2017) about layoffs at their newspaper.  We all know that the paper has been going through bankruptcy and is struggling to survive and that the new owners are trying to keep it going.  So, we were expecting some cuts and that hard decisions would have to be made - as the article says.

Two things struck me about the article:

1.  The new owners wouldn't say how many people were let go

A "significant" number of employees have been laid off at Alaska Dispatch News as part of a restructuring under the company's new owners.
Every department in the company — the newsroom, advertising, circulation, production and finance — was affected. The job reductions began last week and continued through Wednesday. Layoffs in the newsroom included editors, reporters and others.
"It's a significant change in the size of the newspaper," said Ryan Binkley, one of the new owners of ADN. He would not say how many people in total were let go.

The Binkley family, who bought the ADN, are more experienced in business than running newspapers so I understand going with their business instincts to keep things close to the vest.  But newspapers report on other businesses all the time and when there are layoffs, they push for a number or at least a percentage of people being laid off.  It's a matter of public interest to know how something like this is going to affect the local economy.  Newspapers should be models of transparency.  After all, other companies can now point to the ADN example when they decline to give ADN reporters this sort of information.

And how much is a reporter going to push her new boss to get more information, especially when the boss has just laid off a 'significant number' of her colleagues.  She doesn't want to get to the point where he says, "I told you 'no' now back off or I'll add you to the list."

Binkleys:  Bite the bullet and be good newspaper owners and set the example for other companies that your paper will be covering.  The information is going to come out eventually anyway - especially if you are a media organization.



2.  They didn't tell us which reporters', photographers' and others' by-lines we won't see any more were.

Publishing the names of people laid off may be a sensitive issue.  Shouldn't the employees involved have the right to let people know on their own terms?  Generally, I'd agree.  But in this case, we're talking about people whose names appear on by-lines every day in the newspaper (and, of course, online.)

Should readers just start guessing when names stop appearing?  "Oh, maybe this guy got laid off."

So, when I got a chance to talk to someone who worked at the ADN yesterday, I asked.  The person gave me a list of names, including some involved in less visible positions, like copy editors.  I didn't post yesterday because I wanted to get confirmation from another source.  I did that today.  For all but two of the names.  I got through to one, who confirmed, but not the other.  But he had on his Twitter account that he was a "former reporter."  I was told that Lisa Demer has posted on her Facebook account (not her public one so I couldn't confirm it) that a total of 17 were let go. [UPDATED 9/22/17 5pm - Lisa let me see her post.  In part (she goes on to pay tribute to all the people who were laid off) she wrote:

"One-third of the newsroom was cut — 17 newsroom positions gone — and the rest of ADN experienced something similar."

So here's a list of some of the people I know about, whose work appeared regularly in the ADN, some very prominently and frequently, others not so much.  I'm leaving out copy editors and advertising people who aren't directly responsible for telling us what is happening in our state. I must acknowledge though, that while their names aren't common knowledge, copy editors certainly influence how we see and read the stories.

Below is a list of people who work(ed) for the ADN.  You might have noticed these lists aren't showing up in current editions of the ADN in print or online.  I was able to find an old one online.  (It says 2012 and updated 2016, scroll down past the gibberish.) Then I went through ADN online bylines to get as many current folks as I could.  If you click on someone's by-line you get all their articles and a brief description of the reporter.  That's where I got my descriptions.  I put the folks laid off on top and bolded their names.

I'm also putting up the whole list (that I could gather, I may have missed some people) so you have a sense of the large impact of the layoffs.  These are the people whose names appear on articles or photos or illustrations only.

Those Laid Off:  

*Rich Mauer - Pulitzer Prize winning reporter and more recently a news editor [Updated: Sorry, I lost this name as I was reformatting the original list.]

*Columnist Dermot Cole, who lives in Fairbanks, has been a reporter, editor and author. For 40 years, he has written extensively about Alaska politics and history. 

*Yereth Rosen has been a journalist in Alaska since 1987. For most of that time, she was the sole Alaska-based reporter for Reuters. She has been reporting on energy issues, the environment, politics and all things Alaska  from oil spills to sled-dog races. She enjoys running, skiing and other outdoors pursuits. She lives in Anchorage with her family. 

*Erik Hill has been with ADN since December of 1984. Before that, he worked at The Kansas City Star following stops in Jacksonville, Florida, and Charleston, West Virginia. Originally from Oregon, Hill earned degrees at Stanford University and Ohio University. Memorable assignments have included the Exxon Valdez oil spill and several Iditarods. 

*Pamela Dunlap-Shohl - [couldn't find her description, but she does most of the charts that graphically help tell the stories hidden in numbers.]  

[UPDATE Sept 25, 2017 - I'm told now that Bob Hallinan was NOT laid off so I'm moving him down to the other list]  *Bob Hallinen has been a photojournalist in Alaska since the 1980s and has traveled extensively around the state. 

*Jerzy Shedlock is a reporter. A graduate of the University of Alaska Anchorage, he worked at the Peninsula Clarion before coming to Alaska Dispatch News. [I couldn't get a second confirmation on this one, but his twitter account says "former reporter."] 

*Rugile Kaladyte is a visual journalist for Alaska Dispatch News. 

*Doyle Woody grew up in East Anchorage and is in his fourth decade at the ADN. He's been covering hockey since the Ice Age 

*Jeannette Lee Falsey joined Alaska Dispatch News as a business reporter in 2015. She has worked as a staff writer for The Associated Press and as a researcher for the federal government's Alaska gasline office in Anchorage and Washington, D.C..

Some of these folks were getting ready to retire.  I know that one volunteered to be laid off.  But most were not ready and I wish them a gentle landing and hope that the jolt ignites lots of new opportunities and ways of telling the stories they tell.


People Who Apparently Are Still On the ADN Staff 

Alex DeMarban is a longtime Alaska journalist who covers the oil and gas industries and general assignments for Alaska Dispatch News 

Michelle Theriault Boots is a reporter for Alaska Dispatch News. 

Marc Lester is a multimedia journalist for Alaska Dispatch News. 

Charles Wohlforth's column appears three times weekly. A lifelong Anchorage resident, he is the author of more than 10 books, and hosts radio shows on Alaska Public Media. More at wohlforth.com. 

Michael Carey is an Alaska Dispatch News columnist and the former editorial page editor of the Anchorage Daily News. 

Erica Martinson is Alaska Dispatch News' Washington, DC reporter, and she covers the legislation, regulation and litigation that impact the Last Frontier. Erica came to ADN after years as a reporter covering energy at POLITICO. Before that, she covered environmental policy at a DC trade publication.    

[UPDATE Sept 25 - told today that Bob was not laid off so moving him down to this list.  Bob Hallinen has been a photojournalist in Alaska since the 1980s and has traveled extensively around the state. ]

Annie Zak covers business and general assignments for Alaska Dispatch News. She previously wrote for the Puget Sound Business Journal and the Orange County Register. 

Tegan Hanlon covers education and general assignments. She also covered the 2016 and 2017 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. Reach her at 907-257-4589 or Bob Hallinen has been a photojournalist in Alaska since the 1980s and has traveled extensively around the state.thanlon@alaskadispatch.com. 

Devin Kelly covers Anchorage city government and general assignments. 

Beth Bragg is Alaska Dispatch News sports editor. 

Zaz Hollander is based in Wasilla and covers the Mat-Su region for the ADN. 

Lisa Demer is based in Bethel and covers rural Alaska stories. She has been a reporter more than three decades. Reach her at 907-543-3555. 

Nathaniel Herz covers politics and general assignments. 

Kelsey Lindsey is a 2017 graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and is covering Arctic-related issues as part of an Alaska Dispatch News-Columbia fellowship. 

Laurel Andrews was born in Bethel and grew up in Fairbanks. She covers cannabis and general assignments. Reach her at laurel@alaskadispatch.com or 907-257-4382. 

Stephan Wiebe writes about all things Alaska sports. 

Who's The Average Person?

A letter in Tuesday's Alaska Dispatch News says:

"I refer to the phenomenon of the disappearance of affordable homes.  The average person is no longer able to afford a home."

The US Census Bureau data says that 60% of people in Anchorage lived in owner occupied homes between 2011 and 2015.

The same Census chart shows the median household income in Anchorage for that same period was $78,326.  (I'd note that median is the number in the very middle from highest to lowest.  There should be as many people above the median as below it.  It's not an average where a small number of very rich people could offset a lot of very poor people to have a misleading 'average income'.)

The per capita income was $36,920.  They define that to be the mean income of every man, woman, and child.  So, this number is the 'average' and is not the 'middle' number.  Obviously, adults earn a lot more than do children, though in Alaska, Permanent Fund Dividend checks mean the average child here probably earns more than they do in other states.

I'm guessing the letter writer thinks of herself (and maybe the people she knows) as 'average persons.'  But the way I read this, the average person is the typical person, the one that is like most of the others.  So 60% living in owner owned homes means to me that the average person can afford a house.  I realize that the people in the homes include children and spouses.  And if we simple look at adults, the percent living in owner occupied homes is probably lower.  But more than half of all people in Anchorage, during that recent time period, did live in owner occupied housing.

The same chart listed 8.7% of people in Anchorage as living in poverty.

This is not to say that working for a living is what it used to be.  It's not.  It used to be pretty easy - if you were white and male - to earn a good living, live decently, and afford things like buying a house. But a lot of people who start off with very little - many immigrant families for example - are willing to work very hard, live frugally, and save money to buy a home.  A lot of people who grew up comfortably seem not willing to give up the life style they've grown up with, but aren't earning enough money to maintain that lifestyle.  It's a shock when they find that not only aren't they keeping up, they are falling into debt.

Part of the problem is that more and more of the income of businesses is going to the higher levels of management and less and less is going to the workers.  Statista.com offers this chart comparing the US gap to other countries:

Click on Chart to enlarge and focus or go to Statista

And here's a Seattle Times article on the subject.  The subtitle of the article is:

"The average CEO earned 20 times the average worker pay in 1965. Now S&P 500 CEOs make 335 times the pay of their average employee."

 So while it appears to me that 'the average person' in Anchorage can afford to buy a house (or at least lives in an owner occupied house) it's also true that the hefty PFD cut Alaskans got will impact the 'average Alaskan' worker much more than it will the oil and other large corporate executives.