Shortly after we came to radio station KSKA first began to broadcast All Things Considered and other NPR programs and that's when I first met Bede Trantina. Anchorage has changed a lot in those 30 plus years, but every Friday for most of that time, one thing has stayed the same. If you turn on KSKA at 9 am, you can hear Bede announce the last day of the week. Just click on the yellow box with the black arrow below.
So on Friday, November 13, KSKA had a party to celebrate Bede's 30 years at the station. A lot of good people were there to say thank you to Bede.
We got to the Arts building a bit early and Room 150 filled up pretty well. He came on stage after a brief introduction and started to read. Then he moved from the podium and talked until someone shouted out that he couldn't hear. So to be accommodating, Kanter, clearly feeling confined, chained himself behind the podium where it was harder to see him, but he was louder. (I hadn't had any problem hearing him before.)
(I agree the picture is kind of weird. One day these experiments might pay off, but until then, you'll just have to bear with me. And be assured, most of these don't escape the delete button.)
He read, he talked, he answered questions, he showed slides. I think he's a very unique person - having grown up in a white family, but living very remotely in a traditional Native lifestyle, at least in terms of housing, food, and transportation. In Ordinary Wolves, a novel based on his own life experiences, he writes about being white in a Native environment, but living 'more Native' than most of the Natives. I'm sure the idea of a white kid who maintained a dog sled when most Native kids were on snow machines was hard to deal with. Why was he 'playing Native' I'm sure went through some people's minds. And I'm sure his reverence for the land while many Native kids had lost theirs, must have spurred in others a sense of guilty resentment. His very existence messes with out stereotypes.
We're just lucky he also likes to write and gives us insights into a world few people on earth will ever experience. And makes us confront our own, mostly artificial, images of rural Alaska. So, I say, go read the books. Here are some pictures of the event.
The search schedule puts the final 3-5 candidates coming to Anchorage in November/December so an announcement about those finalists should be made any day now.
September/October 2009
Recruiting continues. In late October, initial screening/filtering of leads to selection of 8 to 12 semifinalists.
November 2009
PSC interviews semifinalists at neutral airport location, selecting 3 to 5 finalists. Background checks are conducted on all finalists.
November/December 2009
Finalists are announced and visit campus, meet with all constituencies, including Anchorage community, and undergo comprehensive interviews/Q&A with Board of Trustees.
December 10, 2009
Scheduled Board of Trustee meeting. Trustees select the top candidate, Chair leads contract negotiations.
January 2010
New President introduced to the APU community on campus and the wider public.
The search is being conducted by Witt/Kieffer a company that does things like executive searches. There's a 17 page brochure about the job and APU in pdf form. From page 10 I've gotten this list of the traits they are looking for.
Alaska Pacific University is dedicated to the service of Alaska Native populations. Its president must both embody and advocate for a university that is responsive to and supportive of a highly diverse community. A demonstrated track record of enhancing diversity is therefore required.
In addition, the ideal candidate will possess:
a commitment to active learning and to innovation in the academic program, including a working knowledge of non-traditional delivery systems (especially distance learning);
a deep understanding of and demonstrated commitment to both traditional and non- traditional students;
an accessible personal style that fits the intimate environment of the small university, combined with an unrelenting commitment to students as the centerpiece of the university;
exceptional financial skills as characterized by significant experience with both budgets and investments;
considerable and successful experience as a manager of people and programs with an emphasis on team building;
a commitment to and track record of supporting shared governance; a commitment to impacting the earth’s environment in a positive way;
an understanding of the role of private university education combined with an ability to articulate and advocate its continued importance and value; and
the core attributes of great leaders (in addition to those noted above): honesty, intelligence, energy, enthusiasm, optimism, adaptability, transparency, decisiveness, courage of convictions, tolerance for ambiguity, and a good sense of humor.
Finally, Alaska is a unique subset of the United States. Its people, culture, topography, and climate are truly different than what most in the “Lower 48” states experience. Alaska is one of APU’s most vital assets, and its people are among the university’s most important – and diverse – constituencies. Personal resonance with Alaska and Alaskans is critical to the president’s success. Both candidates and the APU community want to be confident that the new president (and his or her household) will thrive in this singular environment.
The choice of APU's President is one that should be of interest to all Anchorage residents. Universities play an important role in a community. The new president can energize the community by developing greater educational opportunities for Alaskans (and others), by working cooperatively with UAA, and by making the campus a center for research into Alaska issues. Or, if the new President isn't a great choice, we will lose the potential of this resource.
Seth Kantner's Ordinary Wolves is a remarkable book. I thought I wrote a post about it, but apparently not. I haven't read his new book Shopping for Porcupine.
7pm at the Arts Building* 150
There is a little bit buried in a longer post about Tony Hopfinger's article about Wales in the the Walrus. I'll excerpt a bit of here since it's too hard to find in the longer piece.
The Ethics of Outsiders Writing about Rural Alaska
An aside on language first. In cross-cultural discussions, it's important to clarify our words. I don't talk about 'white' writers here, because the issue is not restricted simply to 'whites.' It is really about non-Natives. But what about non-Natives who grew up in rural Alaska, like Seth Kantner who not only grew up in rural Alaska, but did so living a subsistence lifestyle using traditional tools? His book Ordinary Wolves [I didn't like any of the links I saw, and even this NPR piece starts out with the stereotypical "Ooooh eeeee. He grew up in a half buried arctic igloo made of sod. He had no electricity, no plumbing..." but you get to hear Kantner himself] writes about that life and about changes in rural Alaska. So, 'outsider', seems an appropriate term. I mean it to include people who have a different way of seeing the world from people who grew up in rural Alaska. It includes those who live in rural Alaska temporarily as government officials, teachers, medical personnel - people who get an intimate glimpse of rural Alaska life through their jobs, but with the glasses of an Outsider. Which is not to say some can't cross the line.
The Arts Building is on the far east of campus past the administration building. That whole part of campus is entirely changed since the woods were cut down and a new parking garage installed. Parking in the lot (don't know about the garage) should be free since it will be after 7pm. And the talk itself is free.
Shopping for Porcupine is also one of the two books that are being read this year in many different UAA classes. It should be worth coming to hear Kantner.
*This is the southside of the Art Building. The entrance is to the right and up the main road. Or you can park your bike at the end of this path on the left of the building.
I got to the Mountain View building about ten minutes early. (Yes, they did move into the part of town that probably has a higher percentage of clients of the non-profits they serve, putting their money and their jobs where their mouth is.) The parking lot was full and I saw the sign. New snow plays tricks. But at least I knew there was additional parking and the other side of the building was the most likely place.
The Foraker Group is an offshoot of the Anchorage United Way. From their website:
In 1998, the United Way of Anchorage surveyed its agencies to determine what services they needed and would be willing to use in a pooled organization. Their initial list was long, but the four highest demands were assistance in fundraising, planned giving, finance and technology. A model was developed based on a concept of sharing these four resources under one nonprofit umbrella, thereby helping other organizations afford these services which are often beyond their budgets. This model is The Foraker Group.
Today, The Foraker Group offers a wide range of services, training and educational opportunities that help assure the success of Alaska's nonprofit organizations. [I left out all the corporate logos they had up. An advantage of underwriting my own blog is I don't have to post any ads.]
The back of the building was in bright sunshine and made for a much better picture than the front. Avocado has long been out as a color for appliances. Maybe it's back now for buildings.
I'm on the steering committee of Healing Racism in Anchorage (HRA), which joined Foraker this year. Our steering committee chair and our part time staff person went to a meeting with Foraker and the whole steering committee went to a strategic planning meeting this summer.
So now Foraker is having focus groups with representatives of its member groups to see how they are doing and detect future needs. I was available yesterday, so HRA sent me.
I walked around to the front, cleaned the snow off the sign (both sides) and went in to the meeting.
Around the table were people from a diverse set of organizations - Volunteers of America, The Holy Rosary Academy, Friends of Alaska CASA, Kincaid Project Group, me, and the Sitka Music Festival.
We spent a short time going over Foraker's sustainability model for nonprofits. Basically it's about making sure that the money, the personnel, and the organizational purpose are all three healthy and working in a collaborative community.
We did some exercises to give Foraker feedback on how well they are serving their members.
What I got most out of this meeting was the chance to talk with and hear from people from other nonprofits. It was interesting to hear their issues and experiences.
I also learned that while foundation and corporate donations were down, individual donations were holding relatively steady.
Dennis McMillian who is head of Foraker is seen by many folks as a man who walks on water. I know Dennis and I too think he has pretty extraordinary skills. It's been one of his goals to improve the nonprofit sector in Anchorage in part by fostering collaboration across organizations, professionalizing the way nonprofits are run, and encouraging greater philanthropy. But whenever a group is successful, some folks are likely to become disgruntled.
The collaboration of United Way, Foraker, and the Rasmussen Foundation in some ways has become the 400 pound nonprofit gorilla in Anchorage. I tend to be pretty much out of the gossip loop, so I can't tell how big a deal that is. I know that the people running the three organizations are very competent and pretty driven so I suspect they could seem pretty formidable to organizations outside the network. My sense though is that they acknowledge that not everyone wants to do it their way and that they wish them no ill will. But looking around on line, I can't find online about these organizations that isn't glowing. What I'm tiptoeing around is the notion that these organizations seem to have been treated by the media with kid gloves.
I'm pretty sure that what they are doing is basically for the benefit of Alaska and particularly Alaska's needy. I personally have no knowledge of anything negative. But I also think they are big enough players in town that the media ought to pay more critical attention to what they are doing. Just to make sure they keep doing the right things. Alaska media has had a tendency to be overly respectful of those in power, especially when they dole out money. I'm not in any way suggesting that there is anything untoward going on, but journalists should always have some healthy skepticism.
The name of this blog is What Do I Know? in part to call attention to the fact that we know things, often the same things, differently. The stories in our heads cause us to focus on different facts in the same situation and interpret the same situation differently. And to be totally blind to the what others see that conflicts with what we see.
Here are a couple of stories on Exxon/Mobile getting contracts for oil in Iraq. In respect for the sources, I'll just offer the beginning of each piece. You can click on the links to see the rest of each of these.
ExxonMobil wins $50bn contract to develop West Qurna oilfield
The American energy giant ExxonMobil today won the right to develop one of the world's most prized untapped oil reserves, in a $50bn (£30bn) deal that will entrench the company as one of the largest players in postwar Iraq.
Exxon was awarded a contract to extract oil from the West Qurna reservoir near Basra in Iraq's south during an extended tender process that has seen the Iraqi government partner foreign firms in a bid to get its reserves of oil out of the ground as cheaply and quickly as possible.
West Qurna was considered the jewel in the nine Iraqi oil and gas fields up for grabs, with verified reserves of 15bn barrels and a strong chance that exploration will reveal significantly more.
Iraqi oil minister Hussain Shahristani said the contract stipulated a $25bn investment and $25bn more in operating fees. It is also expected to yield up to 100,000 jobs in the impoverished deep south of the country that was heavily blighted by insurgency throughout the past five years.
"Iraq will get great benefits from developing the sector and providing services for the people," said Shahristani in Baghdad's oil ministry. "After decades of oppression and tyranny, Iraq is getting back its riches for this generation and for the next."
The awarding of development rights over the huge West Qurna oilfield in southern Iraq to Exxon-Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell last Thursday once again underscores the criminal character of the continuing US-led occupation. As the direct result of the Iraq war, major American and other transnational energy conglomerates are now gaining control over some the largest oilfields in the world.
West Qurna has proven reserves of 8.7 billion barrels of oil. Iraq’s total reserves are currently put at 115 billion barrels, though dozens of potential fields have not been explored adequately. Before the US invasion in 2003, rights over West Qurna had been awarded by the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein to the Russian oil firm, Lukoil. The pro-US puppet regime in Baghdad has torn up all pre-war contracts.
Exxon-Mobil is the first US-based oil giant to benefit. Under the terms of a 20-year contract, Exxon-Mobil and Shell plan to boost daily production at West Qurna from less than 300,000 barrels to 2.3 million barrels per day over the next six years. As well as the Iraqi government compensating the companies for the cost of upgrading the field—which may run as high as $50 billion—they will be paid $1.90 for each barrel extracted, or some $1.5 billion per year. Exxon-Mobil holds an 80 percent stake and Shell the remaining 20 percent.
BAGHDAD—The Iraqi Oil Ministry on Thursday said it has awarded a consortium led by Exxon Mobil Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell PLC the right to develop the West Qurna-1 oil field, representing the first American-led team gaining access to the country's oil patch.
The pact is the latest in a series of deals Iraq has recently signed or initialed with some of the world's biggest oil companies. Earlier this week, Iraqi officials completed a final agreement with BP PLC and China National Petroleum Corp. and an initial agreement with a consortium led by Italy's Eni SpA. U.S. oil company Occidental Petroleum Corp. participated as a junior partner in the Eni-led team.
The Exxon-Shell team, combining two of the world's biggest publicly listed oil companies, had been seen as the favorite to win the contract, which calls for the consortium to boost production at the already-pumping field in southern Iraq in exchange for a per-barrel fee. Among the three competitors, it offered the highest production target for the field, the Oil Ministry said.
An initial pact is expected to be signed on Thursday. The deal will then go to the Iraqi cabinet for approval before a final agreement can be signed, Oil Ministry spokesman Assem Jihad said.
01/15/04: Forget for a moment about quagmire, the growing heaps of U.S. and Iraqi dead, and the rebellious population. George Bush, Paul Bremer, and gang have pulled off the biggest heist in history. They and no one else own 100 billion barrels of crude oil—a windfall of at least $3 trillion—along with the entire assets and resources of Iraq.
Since March 2003, a series of executive orders by Bush, UN documents, and regulations and orders issued by Iraqi Proconsol Paul Bremer have put the U.S. in absolute control of the state of Iraq, its oil industry and monies, all while lifting barriers to repatriating profits.
In the name of reconstruction and security, the Bush administration has essentially granted itself the power to use the wealth of the Iraqi people as it sees fit. Never mind that the new “fiscal matrix” in Iraq violates international law: a fact of little concern to the White House when the war was illegal to begin with.
The largest contracts have gone to corporations like Halliburton, Bechtel, and Fluor, which are big contributors to the Republicans and now enjoy oversight of their Iraq activities by former executives who now sit in the Bush administration. Furthermore, Bush has given the corporate victors the ultimate protection: indemnifying them from liability for any and all activities related to Iraqi oil.
To top it all off, the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq is using money from oil sales to help pay for the counterinsurgency campaign. So not only are U.S. corporations reaping billions off the conflict in sweetheart deals with legal impunity, but Iraqis are being forced to pay for the very war being waged against them.
The story begins in February 2003 when the U.S. Agency for International Development secretly asked six companies to bid on a reconstruction contract worth, at minimum, $900 million. The six—Bechtel, Fluor, Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root, Louis Berger Group, Parsons, and Washington Group International—were all generous supporters of the Republicans, having given them a combined $2.3 million between 1999 and 2002. . .
We tend to interpret the world in ways that justify our advantages and show that our problems are someone else's fault. But it's only true some of the time.
We saw the movie Crude: The Real Price of Petroleum last night at the Bear Tooth Theater Pub. It starts out with the woman in the picture singing a song of the death that oil meant to her Equadorian environment - death to people in her family, to the river, to their way of life.
There is a problem inherent in commenting on a documentary film. While a film reviewer should first be reviewing the quality of the film as film, you can't help but be drawn into subject of the film as well.
The dilemma for me was this. Part of me is outraged. I know that this is not an isolated situation. Anyone who was in Alaska in 1989 when the Exxon Valdez fouled Prince William Sound and stayed around to see how Exxon has dragged this case out for 20 years until a number of the plaintiffs have died, can't help but recognize Chevron's tactics in Ecuador. And I've read enough to know that multi-national corporations ultimately are about making money, and while there may be people who consider themselves moral who work for these companies, that morality is compartmentalized so they can justify their continued work there, and ultimately, collectively, the corporations are totally amoral if not immoral. Confessions of an Economic Hitman spells this all out. The author even writes about going into the jungles of the Amazon to convince the indigenous peoples that the oil company would do them good. So my basic reaction is to believe that - despite gaps in the arguments - ultimately this movie tells us what is basically the 'right' interpretation of events.
But as I blog, I recognize that people who have different world views from mine, may read this. Since I don't have knowledge beyond the film about this particular situation (though I do in general) I feel a need to be able to justify however I come down on the film. And there were parts of the film that made me groan.
The duck lying on its back, its feet quivering in what look like death throes, as the narrator talks about the water killing the villagers' animals just looked way too staged. The point was probably true and they may well have seen this duck, but it was over the top for me. And the kid holding the two dead chickens by the feet and then taking them into the brush and tossing them because they were contaminated - well in my mind I could hear the director creating the scene and telling the kid, "OK, that's far enough, now toss them." Yes, you use these kinds of visuals to make your points, but these just looked too staged for me. (Hey, maybe they weren't staged at all, but they looked like it.)
The director as an advocate rather than an objective observer isn't bad. As an advocate, the film makers did offer the voices of 'the other side' as well as the voices they were supporting. And I'd note that the short oil industry produced videos featured within the film were far more one sided than Crude.
I was particularly struck by one Chevron scientist in Houston who, in her very nice green dress, kept telling us there was no evidence that linked the illnesses to Texaco oil, that Texaco had cleaned up its sites before turning things over to the Ecuadorian petroleum company, and that if there had been any evidence of wrong doing, she would have let her bosses know immediately because she had the phone number of one of the key vice presidents. In terms of scientific data, the film makers never disputed what she said. But in terms of visuals and testimonials of villagers, one couldn't imagine that this scientist was anything but a shill for Chevron. They never - in the film - asked her if she had ever been to the villages. She didn't look like she had. Did they cut out the parts where she talked about visiting the villages and seeing the leftover oil damage?
The film raises important questions about how a party 'proves' damage. As one Chevron spokesperson said, there's no tool for dating whether this oil is from the time of Texaco or from the time of the Ecuadorian oil consortium. What happens when there is no scientifically definitive way to prove something? On the other hand, the film offers a great deal of anecdotal data to connect Texaco to the damage. But the almost total lack of numbers supporting the villagers' case raises questions about whether these numbers exist. Did they feel the numbers were too complicated to present in a film? Do the numbers simply not exist? (For example, they say the rate of cancer has increased greatly since the oil. Chevron disputes this and says, in any case it's not the oil that's causing it. Probably in this remote region there wasn't much data on the incidence of cancer, certainly not before oil. But nobody says even this.)
Winning in court isn't necessarily about justice. It's about how good your lawyers are. It's about how provable your side of the case is. It's about the political environment. For many years, government officials could be manipulated (and still can be) by multinational corporations backed by the World Bank's criteria for granting loans, and ultimately, by the CIA. (Read Economic Hitman.) Raising the hopes of the plaintiffs was the election of President Rafael Correa, who became the first president of Ecuador to visit the oil disaster area.
So my evaluation of the film really does hinge on how convincingly Berlinger made the argument. He definitely made the case that damage had been done and that the indigenous villagers individual lives and probably way of life had been destroyed. But the question is not totally convincing - to the skeptical viewer - that Texaco (and thus current owner Chevron) is the responsible party.
The film focused on the plaintiff's attorneys, a New Yorker and a local Ecuadorian, as they worked to build their case, raise money, and get publicity, including a spread in Vanity Fair and enlisting Sting and his wife Trudie Styler - who visited the villages - to raise money and awareness for them.
Perhaps the lack of Hollywood slickness in the film redeems its faults. After all, this was clearly made in passionate belief in the cause, much in contrast to the cold, calculating style of the attorneys and other spokespersons for Chevron. Chevron focuses on legal and scientific technicalities. Berlinger presents personal local witnesses along with the visual evidence of the damage done. You know, as you watch, that each Chevron spokesperson's annual income is more than all the villagers have made in their lifetimes and that they spend enough on one or two nights' hotel bills to pay the $500 cancer treatments a mother and daughter in the film get after an 18 hour bus ride each way to the clinic.
You can get a sense of what I'm talking about in the official trailer:
So, I've been mulling this around. I didn't feel satisfied at the end of the movie. This wasn't a high budget Hollywood movie. Even Michael Moore surely had far more money for his latest few movies. You can't compare this movie to one that cost 10 or 20 times as much. But I haven't been able to find any mention of the cost of the movie.
Most reviews online seem to be uncritically supportive of the cause. The most 'establishment' comments I could find were in an interview of the director Joe Berlinger in Foreign Policy, a journal that doesn't normally review movies. He said he originally didn't notify Chevron because he was working in a very lawless area near the Columbian border, and while he didn't think Chevron would hire a hit man, there were other locals with an interest in their Chevron salaries who might.
[Since I contacted Chevron,] our relationship has been interesting. Initially, they did not believe [I was trying] to do a fair and balanced film.
I tried to get them to let me do other things like sit in on their meetings. I said, "Hey, take me on the toxi-tour" -- everyone calls it the toxi-tour, including Chevron -- "from the Chevron perspective and I would love to be on the ground with you at these sites, and you explain to me whose responsibility this is and how this happened." They denied that. Literally up until the [eleventh] hour they were friendly but not granting any interviews.
[The Sundance Film Festival deadline] motivated them, and [Chevron] agreed to do interviews. It was their idea to provide me with Ricardo Raez Vega, the legal architect of this case, and provide me with Sarah MacMillan [Chevron's chief environmental scientist].(brackets in the original)
He goes on to say that when he did the interviews, a Chevron film crew showed up to film him doing the interviews. Another quote from the Foreign Policy interview caught my eye:
The filmmaker saw a chance to tell a story he thinks addresses a "moral responsibility" that transcends even the best legal argument.
That was, actually the sense I had. And I kept on looking for other things to help me out here. One could say that if I need to get all this background information, the movie itself didn't work on its own. As a piece of film I think it had its share of imperfections, but as a piece of advocacy, it imprinted memorable images in people's minds that will stick and will reshape what they think when they see the Chevron logo.
But what ultimately convinced me was hearing Joe Berlinger talk about the film on the Alex Jones show. (There are four YouTube videos. I took short clips for the audio from 2/4 and 3/4.) You can hear in his voice that this project was one he felt compelled to do because of a great injustice he saw. And he acknowledges that he doesn't know for sure all the legal technicalities, but says this is such an enormous moral issue, that the story had to be publicized. I really think the film would have been stronger had he inserted himself into either the beginning or the end of the film and said what he says on this clip. (Click on the yellow button with the black arrow.)
I'm not smart enough to figure out whether Chevron should win or lose the trial, you know, as you'll see in the film they've wrapped themselves up in enough legal arguments that who knows if the justice system can prevail, but from a moral standpoint it's just astounding that they would go into the backyard of these people and foul the place up. And you walk around these indigenous villages and it breaks your heart. [At this point he gets interrupted for a station break. The theme gets picked up later in the interview and I've added that after the break but didn't transcribe it.]
For me this helps explain what I saw as holes in the movie. He wasn't arguing this legally, that would happen in the courts. What he's doing is making the moral case that what Texaco/Chevron did is wrong and that they need to make amends, even if their lawyers were able to get Ecuadorian officials to sign off on their future liability.
In a post last Friday about the resignation letter of an American State Department employee in Afghanistan, I listed helping Afghan women as one of the goals of our presence in Afghanistan.
In a piece in Countercurrents, Cage Wagenvoort looks at American policy in Afghanistan and challenges that reason for being there. He argues that we in the West have regularly gone into other cultures under the banner of noble ideals. Unfortunately, he writes,
Ideals have the habit of coalescing into absolutes, and absolutes have a habit of shedding blood when one nation attempts to impose them on another. . .
We now see this same missionary zeal at work in Afghanistan where we are told that ours is an effort to liberate Afghan women from the yoke of oppression that has been placed on their shoulders by a misogynist regime. It has appeal because in truth, women in that country are treated as if they’re chattel.
The paradox, here, is that women’s rights will never ride into Afghanistan astride a drone. In Vietnam we destroyed villages to save them; in Afghanistan, we destroy wedding parties to free them.
You can read the whole piece here. (The "blind spot in the progressive vision" in the title of this post comes from the last sentence of Wagenvoord's piece.)
How is it that Americans feel outraged when non-Americans tell us what to do (remember how French fries and toast were banned after 9/11?), or tell us what is right and wrong, yet we can't understand why other cultures respond the same way when we tell them how to live?
