Oil And Gas will "weaken your society in the long run unless they’re used to build schools and a culture of lifelong learning."

It's better to have nothing than to have oil according to a Tom Friedman article sent me by a friend the other day. 

Friedman writes: 

I always tell my friends in Taiwan: “You’re the luckiest people in the world. How did you get so lucky? You have no oil, no iron ore, no forests, no diamonds, no gold, just a few small deposits of coal and natural gas — and because of that you developed the habits and culture of honing your people’s skills, which turns out to be the most valuable and only truly renewable resource in the world today. How did you get so lucky?”

And later he adds this:

As the Bible notes, added Schleicher, “Moses arduously led the Jews for 40 years through the desert — just to bring them to the only country in the Middle East that had no oil. But Moses may have gotten it right, after all. Today, Israel has one of the most innovative economies, and its population enjoys a standard of living most of the oil-rich countries in the region are not able to offer.”

 
Most Alaskans probably wouldn't agree with this, but then most Alaskans arrived after oil was discovered and came, in part at least, because of the benefits of oil - jobs (not that many oil jobs and many who have them commute to Alaska, but the oil revenues pay for lots of State and non-profit jobs, and the oil companies and employees spend money in Alaska);  Permanent Fund Checks;  no state income or sales taxes; etc.

So, why does Friedman make this outrageous claim?

A team from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or O.E.C.D., has just come out with a fascinating little study mapping the correlation between performance on the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, exam — which every two years tests math, science and reading comprehension skills of 15-year-olds in 65 countries — and the total earnings on natural resources as a percentage of G.D.P. for each participating country. In short, how well do your high school kids do on math compared with how much oil you pump or how many diamonds you dig? 

The results indicated that there was a “a significant negative relationship between the money countries extract from national resources and the knowledge and skills of their high school population,” said Andreas Schleicher, who oversees the PISA exams for the O.E.C.D. “This is a global pattern that holds across 65 countries that took part in the latest PISA assessment.” Oil and PISA don’t mix. (See the data map at: http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/43/9/49881940.pdf.)

 What are some of the recent oil rich, PISA poor countries he lists?

Qatar	Kazakhstan	Saudi Arabia
Oman	Kuwait	Algeria
Iran	Bahrain	Syria

And the oil poor, PISA rich countries?

Singapore	Finland	South Korea
Hong Kong		Japan

Alaskans, are we doomed?  Not necessarily. 

Canada, Australia and Norway, also countries with high levels of natural resources, still score well on PISA, in large part, argues Schleicher, because all three countries have established deliberate policies of saving and investing these resource rents, and not just consuming them.

We have oil savings, though not nearly as much as Norway.  And while we may spend a lot per child, we have education challenges and I'd say the way we spend our education dollars is often ineffective.

The closing sentences caught my attention too:

In sum, says Schleicher, “knowledge and skills have become the global currency of 21st-century economies, but there is no central bank that prints this currency. Everyone has to decide on their own how much they will print.” Sure, it’s great to have oil, gas and diamonds; they can buy jobs. But they’ll weaken your society in the long run unless they’re used to build schools and a culture of lifelong learning. “The thing that will keep you moving forward,” says Schleicher, is always “what you bring to the table yourself.”

Now, they've paired oil and PISA scores, but that doesn't mean there's a cause and effect relationship.  There are other factors that could be at play.  The high PISA countries are all democracies and the low PISA countries range from absolute monarchies to democratic facade.  

But, the poorer education in resource rich undeveloped countries is not a new observation.  Johann Galtung, in probably the best article I read as a grad student and since, A Structural Theory of Imperialism, foretold this consequence.  The country that had its resources exploited would do worse than the country that exploited it, even if the exploiter were paying a fair price for the resource.  The reason?  The one that explains Friedman's point. 

The exploiting country has to work at a higher level of processing - it has to have the industrial, intellectual, economic, and educational infrastructures - to do the planning, exploring, financing, and processing of the resource.  It's forced to do these things.  The resource country gets its payment without having to do anything except allow the exploiter access to the resource.  It isn't forced to invest in these sorts of infrastructures.  And so it generally doesn't. 

The Galtung article, in my opinion, is brilliant in how it succinctly outlines a model of imperialist interactions which explained much of the world in the late 1960s when it came out.  It can also be used to find ways to break the relationship.  For example, he mapped out the strategy of resource producing countries to band together to demand a fair price for their resources which was precisely what OPEC eventually did.  It can also be used to explain so many of the interactions in the world.  Even though the world has shifted since he wrote it,  the model is so all-encompassing that it is still useful.  But it is very dense - in the sense that it is packed with content and requires are very careful reading.  The article is not for the intellectually timid. 

Why I Live Here - Anchorage Sunset

Looking out across Cook Inlet from downtown Anchorage 8:45 pm March 21, 2012.

Expanded view with Mt. Susitna on the right.

Susitna sunset reflected.

Anchorage Daily News' Big Boss - Gary Pruitt - Moving To AP

From the Sacramento Bee:

Gary Pruitt, chairman and chief executive of The McClatchy Co. of Sacramento during a period of growth and turmoil, announced today he's leaving the company to take the top job at the Associated Press.

Pruitt's role will be split. He will be replaced as CEO by the company's chief financial officer, Patrick Talamantes, who has been with the company for 11 years. Kevin McClatchy, a fifth-generation member of the family that controls the company, will assume the role of chairman.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/03/21/4356725/mcclatchy-president-gary-pruitt.html#storylink=cpy

All Calories Are Not Equal

After interviewing the authors of Why Calories Count, by Marion Nestle and Malden Neshein, New York Times writer, Mark Bittman, offers some interesting tidbits.

What is a calorie? - "a measure of the energy derived from a food source"

[Note:  Wikipedia is much more precise:

"Definitions of a calorie fall into two classes:

• The small calorie or gram calorie (symbol: cal)^[2] approximates the energy needed to increase the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 °C. This is about 4.2 joules.
• The large calorie, kilogram calorie, dietary calorie, or food calorie (symbol: Cal)^[2] approximates the energy needed to increase the temperature of 1 kilogram of water by 1 °C. This is exactly 1,000 small calories or about 4.2 kilojoules. It is also called the nutritionist's calorie."]

Which foods have more calories?  - "A gram of fat has been determined to have nine calories and a gram of protein or carbohydrate four calories; so for any given measure, fat has more than twice as many calories as protein or carbs. Those numbers are not perfectly accurate, but they’re good enough."

Can you lose weight by eating fewer calories?  -  In clinical settings where all food is weighed and measured, yes.  But there are some problems such as:

". . . no one lives under experimental conditions, and foods are complicated mixtures: fiber makes a difference and form makes a difference.” (Fiber is special because it’s not digested or digested incompletely. Most of its calories don’t get into the body, which is one reason why fruits and vegetables, which are high in fiber, help with weight loss.)"

How does the body fight dieters?  

"It’s hard to lose weight, because the body is set up to defend fat, so you don’t starve to death; the body doesn’t work as well to tell people to stop eating as when to tell them when to start.”

The question everyone has:

“'What can I eat to keep from putting on weight?' and here the answer turns out to be not only easy but also expected." 

For that answer you have to go check out the article or read their book.  This is not just some pop diet book.  The lead author has a PhD in molecular biology and the book is published by University of California Press. 

And it gets political too.

Alaska Redistricting Process - What Happens Next?

I've gone through the Supreme Court decision in detail in terms of what I think it means.  But what are the practical implications?  [I'm trying to keep this simple, but it might help to look at "A Guided tour Through The Supreme Court Redistricting Decision" post which has links to three "Redistricting for the Masses" posts that explain underlying concepts and terms.]

• The Board will have to make a new plan and that has lots of possibilities.
• What are the parts they have to change?
• Can they be fixed without messing with the rest of the districts?
• Do they start completely fresh or leave most of the existing plan intact?
• Are there any candidates obviously affected?
• What problem did the court have and could it have been prevented?

I think I'll address the first main bullet point, and sub-points, in this post and pick up the second one in a subsequent post.



What Parts Have to Change?

1.  The process.  Instead of focusing on complying with the Voting Rights Act (VRA), they have to first focus on creating a plan that complies with the Alaska Constitution

District 1 appendage into District 4

2.  House districts 1, 2, 37, and 38.  House District (HD) 1 is a compactness issue and involves an appendage going into HD 4.  Plaintiff's witness Leonard Lawson showed at the trial that the two districts can exchange a couple of census districts and clean that up.

Board Plan - Fairbanks area districts

 HD 2 is also a compactness issue but fixing it will affect other districts around it.  It stretches down along the highway going through several communities. 

Aleutian Districts 36 and 37

HD 37 is a contiguity issue - the splitting of the Aleutians - and will affect the other part of the Aleutians (HD 36) and probably have spillover effects into other districts.

HD 38

HD 38 is a socio-economic integration issue. The district combines Bering Sea villages with Fairbanks suburbs.  Taking Ester and Goldstream out of this district will force 38 to find population elsewhere and rearrange the Fairbanks districts.  But where that population will come from may well raise other questions.  The Supreme Court said they understood the need for high Native Voting Age Population (VAP) numbers in some districts because of Native concentration in geographically isolated areas, so they may be looking to rearrange 36, 37, and 38 and find other less urban population - rural road communities, for example - to make those three work.

3.  A single Senate seat for all of the City of Fairbanks.  The Supreme Court agreed with the plaintiff's argument that the City of Fairbanks was big enough (89% of the population of a Senate seat) to meet the 'proportionality'* standard.  While stating this principle, they deferred saying the City of Fairbanks had to have a single Senate seat, but I suspect the Board would have to have a very good reason not to.  A good reason might be that was the only way to get everything else constitutionally ok AND meet the VRA.  I think it unlikely they would come up with that situation. 

Do they start completely fresh or leave most of the existing plan intact?

The Supreme Court told the board that its 1994 ruling on Hickel v Southeast Conference requires redistricting boards to come up with a plan that meets the Alaska Constitutional Requirements of compactness, contiguity, and socio-economic integrity.  Basically that means the districts should be as small as possible, that all parts should be connected to each other (and given that we have lots of islands, water is ok if 'reasonable' - like a ferry or air connection), and the people in the district have relatively common interests.  I learned at the hearings that everyone in a political subdivision, for redistricting purposes, meets the socio-economic integrity test.  So, any district in the Municipality of Anchorage, even if it mixes a wealthy white area with a poor non-white area, would be considered socio-economically integrated.

The plan they submitted focused on meeting both the constitutional criteria and the VRA criteria.  But while they tried to balance both, they made the decision to meet the VRA criteria first because, they said, they would be harder to meet and once they got the right number of Native districts, the rest of the districts, they figured, would fall into place.  They also knew that the federal standards trumped the state standards, so, in the end, it would be better to to have a plan that passed the VRA standards but not the state standards than the other way around.

Unlike a year ago (they got the Census Data March 15 and began meeting in earnest the next day) this time they've seen the data, they've played with it and the computer programs, and they have a better idea of what's possible.  I suspect they'll have a plan together a lot faster than last time.

So, to start, they need a redistricting plan that meets the Alaska constitutional requirements. They could probably ignore the VRA requirements and whip one out in a day.  But they'll still have to get from there to a plan that meets VRA too.  Some options:

1.  Use one of the plans that paired  Senator Hoffman with Senator Stevens.  That one, people agreed, met both the state requirements and got the right number of Native districts.  But the board felt the pairing of a Native Senator with a non-Native Senator would probably not get VRA approval.  The Superior Court and the Supreme Court both felt that this was speculative and not certain.   They could take that plan to the DOJ and test it.

2.  Start with the submitted plan and make it comply with the the Alaska Constitution.  They'd have to redo the districts that were declared unconstitutional - 1, 2, 37, and 38.  I imagine it would be helpful to put the Aleutians back together since splitting them was rejected  by the 1994 Hickel ruling, by Judge McConahy this year - who included a long quote from early Russians about the Aleutians - and by the Supreme Court.   Then get it to comply with the Voting Rights Act.  They are allowed to deviate from the Alaska constitutional requirements if they can show it was necessary to get in compliance with VRA.

3.  Start from scratch, but using what they have learned over this year, and come up with a new plan.  Some areas - like Anchorage - they could leave pretty much the same.  Fairbanks they will have to clean up.  In this project, they should do pretty much what the did the first time - consider the VRA and Constitutional requirements simultaneously - but this time give the constitution priority.  Then, once the map is done, tweak it as necessary to make it comply with the VRA too.  


Can they be fixed without messing with the rest of the districts?

Three of the four districts (1, 2, 38) that were ruled unconstitutional connect to Fairbanks.  The fourth one (37) is adjacent to 38.  It's possible the board can focus on Interior Alaska and Western Alaska and leave the rest of the state intact. 



Are there any candidates obviously affected?

This one is even vaguer than the others.

1.  House District 1. There were allegations that the finger into HD 4 would allow a former Fairbanks Mayor (and Republican) to run against Democratic Rep. Scott Kawasaki instead of another Republican.  It will depend on how they fix HD 1.  It also depends on how they fix HD 2 which is on the east side of HD 1.  I'm not sure how much wiggle room they have to play with the Fairbanks house districts or whether, because of the proportionality* argument about the Fairbanks Senate seat, they will be under pressure to have all of the City in two house districts.  Fairbanks' population is 89% of a Senate district (two house districts) so there will be the need to get 11% of the population from elsewhere in the borough.  And rework the nearby Senate districts.

2.  City of Fairbanks Senate Seat. This seemed to many observers - myself included - to be the most likely manipulation of the redistricting process.  By not combining the two Fairbanks house districts into one Senate seat, they were able to pair the two Democratic Senate incumbents.  There was nothing in their argument about how the VRA decisions had a ripple effect forcing this (and the appendage from HD 1 into HD 4) that was persuasive.  If the new plan still pairs Senators Paskvan and Thomas, it will be more than suspect.

3.  Senators Hoffman, Olsen, and Stevens.  The court cited a plan (I think it was one of the plans that Board executive director Taylor Bickford came up (Map 14 I believe) with as an exercise in which abandoned some of the assumptions the board made about how to divide up North and Northwest Alaska) that met the Alaska Constitutional requirements and kept the required number of Native districts.  But it paired Native Senator Hoffman from Bethel and Senate President Stevens from Kodiak.  (Another such plan, I believe paired Native Senator Olsen with Stevens.)  The Board got lots of negative feedback from the Native community over this pairing and the Board backed off.  They believed that pairing a Native incumbent this way, plus the opposition from Native groups would have doomed the plan when it went to the Department of Justice (DOJ) for VRA approval.  But the Superior Court ruled that it wasn't retrogressive (ie - it maintained the number of Native Districts) and they couldn't know for sure that it would be rejected by the  (DOJ).

At the Supreme Court, plaintiff's attorney, Michael Walleri, argued that if Hoffman or Olsen's districts were truly 'effective Native' districts, then the Native supported candidates would have won and there wasn't a threat to the Native candidate.  The justices apparently agreed. 

If the Board goes back to these plans, which are the only ones they produced that met both the state constitutional and VRA requirements, these senators would be impacted. 

4.  Wildcard.  By this I mean that once the Board goes back to the drawing board, the ripple effects of playing with boundaries in one district will spill over into neighboring districts and there is no telling what might happen.  They did pretty much protect incumbents in the original plan, but now there are non-incumbent candidates who have filed to run. 

Also, I've assumed that they could leave most of the state as it is and concentrate on Interior Alaska and the North and Northwest.  But Judge McConahy, as was pointed out by the Supreme Court, " expressed unease with the "influence" district created in the southeast and invited us to consider its validity sua sponte."  So it's possible that the Board will have revisit districts all over the state.

Conclusion
These are some of the things I think are significant from the Supreme Court decision, but I'm sure I missed some.  Minimally, it should help people who don't follow this closely to understand a bit more of what the court case was about and what happens next.

My next post on this will address the last question listed above:

• What problem did the court have and could it have been prevented?

My intent is not to lay blame, but to try to figure out where the Board got caught and ideally give some guidance to people who may be involved in ten years when the next redistricting occurs.  


 *Proportionality.  Ohhhh.  There are so many little complications.  As I understand this, it means that a political unit should, as much as possible, be put into a single district or get as many full districts as their population would justify.  This leads to the complaints in this case to the City of Fairbanks being split into two different Senate districts.  It also relates to the argument that since the North Star Fairbanks Borough has enough population for 5.5 house districts, the .5 should be in a single district.  Instead it was split up.

When It Comes To Gas Prices Republican Pres Candidates Believe in Government, Not Market

Gas prices are up and politicians are noticing.  Here's what three of the Republican presidential candidates are saying.  


Newt Gingrich will provide Americans with $2.50 gas if elected president.  (I think he's working on a time machine.)



Romney:

"When [Obama] ran for office he said he wanted to see gasoline prices go up," Romney said on Fox News Sunday.
Romney said Obama should fire the three top officials who oversee energy and environmental matters - Energy Secretary Stephen Chu, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson.
"This gas-hike trio has been doing the job over the last three and a half years and gas prices are up. The right course is they ought to be fired," the former Massachusetts governor said.

This comes from a Reuters article which follows this with:

Energy experts say that the price of gasoline is largely set by global markets, not government policies, and Obama has accused Republicans of pandering on the issue. Still, Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron have discussed releasing strategic oil reserves to ease gas prices

Rick Santorum's take:

"We went into a recession in 2008 because of gasoline prices. The bubble burst in housing because people couldn't pay their mortgages because they were looking at $4 a gallon gasoline."

"And look at what happened," Santorum continued. "Economic decline. Here we are again, trying to struggle out of a recession with Barack Obama and the federal government on the backs of business, not letting them grow. And now we have energy prices again, why? Because of government policy. Government policy is trampling the American spirit."

I know that if I mention that the Republican party is the champion of the private sector and the market system and they should be looking there for answers, not government, they would, of course, say that government regulations were stifling the private sector.   (They don't often talk about government subsidies to business disrupting the market, mainly it's regulations that keep them from polluting or mistreating their workers.)

Do I have more faith in the power of the market than the Republican presidential candidates?  It seems like the oil companies are doing quite well under these government regulations.  (Check out the 2011 profits for Exxon and Shell, for example.) 

The White House says the government can't do a lot, it's a world wide market.   

But as the President explained (again) today, more drilling is no quick fix or silver bullet. More drilling here in the United States isn’t enough to bring prices down or meet our energy needs, and here’s how we know:

First of all, we are drilling. Under President Obama’s Administration, America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years.We’re operating a record number of oil rigs, and the President has opened millions of acres for oil and gas exploration both on and offshore that will help bring even more of them online. But prices are still high.

Then there’s the issue of basic math. America consumes more than 20 percent of the oil the world uses each year. If we drilled every square inch of the country and tapped our entire supply, the most we could come up with would only total with about 2 percent of the world’s known oil reserves.

We won’t be fully in control of our energy future if our strategy consists of drilling for the 2 percent of oil we have but still buying 20 percent we use—especially if we have to buy that oil on a world market where prices --which are already subject to short-term spikes when political conflict or natural disaster affects supply--will only keep rising as global demand for oil explodes.

I'm guessing the Republican voters - especially those who drive a lot in low mileage vehicles - would rather blame Obama for the gas prices than their own fuel consumption behavior.

The most basic market principle is supply and demand.  We are only a relatively small portion of the world wide oil market, (though our consumption is disproportionately high.)  As the people in the rest of the world increase their oil consumption, prices will continue to go up.  So if Americans want to spend less on oil, they're going have to do more than elect pandering candidates.  They're going to have to apply market principles, like lowering their demand and finding alternatives to high energy use.

This may involve a brain workover for those stuck in old habits.  Here are some alternatives.

 
Biking and Walking

I've said it before, but biking and walking are forms of transportation that really are doable, even in the winter in Anchorage.  It does take a different mindset.  We have to stop our entitlement mentality - as Americans we are entitled to drive as much as we want.  It doesn't mean you bike or walk to work every day, but you can set targets, like, "Once a week in the summer."  Or "On sunny days in the summer."  Or "When I don't have to make three stops coming home."

Walking a three or four mile round trip isn't all that hard either and doesn't take all that long.  Count it as your exercise for the day. (You can reward yourself with a Big Mac.)  Google maps will show you how far each trip you make really is.  Under a mile?  Try to walk for sure.  Once you start thinking this way, walking and biking become an easy substitute for driving when the weather and riding surface are ok and you have enough time. 

The Bus

I suspect key reasons for not riding the bus are:

• total lack of information on how to ride and what the schedule is
• belief that buses are for the poor, and are dirty and dangerous (that, of course, would put people into that famous 'elitist' category - I'm too good to ride the bus)
• they take too long to get places

The first is easy to fix.  Most city bus systems have pretty good websites now.  The best ones, like Portland's, have trip planners where you can put where you are starting from and where you want to go and they'll give you some possible routes, with bus numbers, times, and how far you have to walk to get to and from the bus stop. And a map!  Here's "How to Ride" the Anchorage's People Mover.

Clearly, low income folks probably use public transportation more than high income folks.  Though in places with good systems - New York, DC,  and most European cities - public transportation is taken for granted.  You're probably thinking about what you give up and not what you gain.  People who commute by public transportation often see the same people on the bus every day and develop a community.  No parking fees.   If this is your reason for not riding, face your prejudice, take a bus, and find out it's perfectly fine.

The last reason is a particular problem with poorly developed systems - like Anchorage - where population density is low and bus frequency doesn't exist for most routes.  But with a schedule you can avoid the wait.  With a book you can use the bus for a break.  With a mobile phone, you can get things done.  And on some routes, you can get where you want nearly as fast as driving. 

And you can combine the bus with walking and biking.  Most bus systems allow for bikes these days. 






Don't Forget Other Ways To Save Energy

Have you had your home energy audit?

Hang up your laundry.  Dryers are one of the highest energy consuming appliances in the house and the alternative isn't that hard.  I think washing machines save enormous, time-consuming drudgery, but hanging up laundry is not a pain.  European homes are far less likely to have or use a clothes dryer than in the US.   And there are lots of air dry options.

And the Republican candidates are constantly talking about the good old days, so they should embrace clotheslines. 

The Republican primaries are showing how low attention span, lack of accurate factual knowledge, Fox News, fundamentalist religious beliefs, Citizens United, and poor reasoning skills (for starters) affect the candidates' rhetoric. 

Newt, while you're at it, how about pushing the clock back to 34¢ gasoline? 

Cooking Safety Tip

Here's a tip I learned through experience the other day.  If we all learned only by experience, there would be a lot fewer human beings on earth.  Since my blog gets a modest number of viewers, passing this tip along shouldn't affect the world's population much.


The Tip:  When using a potholder that has a cloth loop to hang it from, don't hold the pot (or in this case the pan) with the potholder loop toward the flame.

A Guided Tour Through the Alaska Supreme Court's Redistricting Ruling - Or Hickel Lives On

Remember, you get what you pay for.  This guide, me, is not an attorney.  But I did attend most of the Redistricting Board meetings in Anchorage and I listened in on the Fairbanks court case by phone.  So I'll try to walk you  through the case, offering my understanding and/or speculation of each section.    When I'm quoting the decision directly, I indent and use Trebuchet font.

I posted a quick, first look at the decision on Thursday.  This post will walk through each of the 14 sections of the decision.  For those needing a little background on this, I've posted earlier:

•  Alaska Redistricting for the Masses Part I - Looks at the background information needed to understand the process - the Voting Rights Act and Alaska Constitutional requirements particularly.

• Alaska Redistricting for the Masses Part 2:  The Board Process  - This post gives an overview of how the board carried out its task.

• Alaska Redistricting for the Masses Part 3: The Trial - The Disputed Districts  - This post looks at the disputed districts and the reasons they are disputed.  With maps.

Overview of the Court's decision.  You can see the original here. 


1.  Both petitions for review (one from the Alaska Redistricting Board and one from the plaintiffs who challenged the plan the board made) of the Superior Court decision were granted.

2.  "This case is REMANDED to the superior court with instructions to further remand to the Board to formulate a plan in accordance with this order."

The Board is given the plan  back and told to redo it following the guidelines of the court.


3.  The Board is commended for its hard work.

4.  The Superior Court judge is commended for handling the case quickly.

5.  In Hickel v. Southeast Conference, we considered a Proclamation Plan that, like the Plan in this case, "accorded minority voting strength priority above other factors, including the requirements of article VI, section 6 of the Alaska Constitution.' 3 We cautioned that while compliance with the Voting Rights Act takes precedence over compliance with the Alaska Constitution, "[t]he Voting Rights Act need not be elevated in stature so that the requirements of the Alaska Constitution are unnecessarily compromised.,,4 We then described the process the Board must follow to ensure that our constitutional redistricting principles are adhered to as closely as possible. After receiving the decennial census data, "[t]he Board must first design a reapportionment plan based on the requirements of the Alaska Constitution. That plan then must be tested against the Voting Rights Act. A reapportionment plan may minimize article VI, section 6 requirements when minimization is the only means available to satisfy Voting Rights Act requirements.,,5  [footnotes 3, 4, and 5 didn't copy right]

Basically, (5) references a 1994 case in which the redistricting board then did what the current board did now - focused on the Voting Rights Act (VRA) requirements rather than the Alaska Constitutional requirements.  The court decided that even though ultimately the VRA takes precedence over the Alaska Constitution, the board should have first created a plan that met the Constitutional requirements and then made whatever adjustments necessary to satisfy the VRA.

6.    It is undisputed that the Board began redistricting in March and April of 2011 by focusing on complying with the Voting Rights Act, thereby ignoring the process we mandated in Hickel.    This focus resulted in the creation of five effective Native house districts, one "influence" house district, and three effective Native senate districts. The superior court found that two of these house districts violated the Alaska Constitution and were not necessary to achieve Voting Rights Act compliance. In his petition, Riley alleges other constitutional defects, including one related to the Board's use of excess population from the Fairbanks North Star Borough to complete one of these Native districts. And the superior court expressed unease with the "influence" district created in the southeast and invited us to consider its validity sua sponte.

Key points from 6:

• The Board ignored the process required in the 1994 Hickel decision
• They focused on meeting the VRA requirements of non-retrogression by creating the same number of Native districts as in the 2001 plan. [See Alaska Redistricting For The Masses Part 1 for background on the VRA and the concept of Native Districts.]
• The superior court ruled that two Native effective house districts (37 and 38) didn't need to violate the Constitution to meet the VRA requirements, but they do.
• The plaintiff (Riley) said that the Board took the left over population from the Fairbanks North Star Borough (FNSB) to make district 38. [Every district needs to be very close to 17,755 people so they are all equal and the one person one vote principle is upheld.  The FNSB had enough people for five districts with 8,700 left over.   5500 were added to district 38 and the remainder to district 6 so they would each be as close to 17,755 as possible. They did this on the grounds that it was necessary to configure district 38 this way to meet the VRA, but the superior court said this was not the case. And the plaintiffs argued the excess population should have stayed in one district. More on that later)
• The superior court asked the supreme court to review, sua sponte, the Native district in Southeast Alaska.   From the Legal Dictionary:

  sua sponte (sooh-uh-spahn-tay) adj. Latin for "of one's own will," meaning on one's own volition, usually referring to a judge's order made without a request by any party to the case. These include an order transferring a case to another judge due to a conflict of interest or the judge's determination that his/her court does not have jurisdiction over the case.

7. Because it did not follow the Hickel process, the Board cannot meaningfully demonstrate that the Proclamation Plan's Alaska constitutional deficiencies were necessitated by Voting Rights Act compliance, nor can we reliably decide that question. The Hickel process provides the Board with defined procedural steps that, when followed, ensure redistricting satisfies federal law without doing unnecessary violence to the Alaska Constitution. The Board must first design a plan focusing on compliance with the article VI, section 6 requirements of contiguity, compactness, and relative socioeconomic integration; it may consider local government boundaries and should use drainage and other geographic features in describing boundaries wherever possible. Once such a plan is drawn, the Board must determine whether it complies with the Voting Rights Act and, to the extent it is noncompliant, make revisions that deviate from the Alaska Constitution when deviation is "the only means available to satisfy Voting Rights Act requirements.,,6

Key points of 7:

• The Board didn't follow the process set out in the Hickel decision.  Therefore
• The Board can't show that they had to violate the constitution to meet the VRA
• Nor can the court decide without being able to compare the final plan (with constitutional problems) with a plan that met the constitutional requirements..
• The Board has to make a plan that [This is the crux of what the board must now do.]
• complies with the Constitutional requirements of compactness, contiguity, and socio-economic integration and then
• determine if it complies with VRA, and if not
• make deviations from the constitutional requirements only when they are necessary to meet VRA requirements

8.    The Hickel process assures compliance with the Alaska Constitution's requirements concerning redistricting to the greatest extent possible. The Hickel process also diminishes the potential for partisan gerrymandering and promotes trust in government. We have previously noted that the article VI, section 6 requirements were designed to prevent gerrymandering by ensuring "that the election district boundaries fall along natural or logical lines rather than political or other lines.'"    A redistricting plan that substantially deviates from these constitutional requirements undermines trust in the process.

(8) explains why the Hickel process is important and echoes an argument made by plaintiff's attorney about gerrymandering.  He argued that by requiring compactness, contiguity, and socio-economic integration, the constitution by-passes the need to prove intent to draw the maps for political advantage.  

9.    Cases decided by the United States Supreme Court subsequent to Hickel have made adherence to the Hickel process even more critical. In a series of cases, the Supreme Court has established that under the Voting Rights Act, a jurisdiction cannot unnecessarily depart from traditional redistricting principles8 to draw districts using race as "the predominant, overriding factor."· Following the Hickel process will facilitate  compliance with federal constitutional law by ensuring that traditional redistricting principles are not "subordinated to race.,,10

Again echoing the plaintiff's attorney who argued the Hickel decision (an Alaskan decision) has subsequently been used as a standard in the US Supreme Court making for an even stronger argument for compliance with the standard.

10.    We recognize that the Board is faced with a difficult task in attempting to harmonize the requirements of the Alaska Constitution and the Voting Rights Act. We have previously characterized the redistricting process in Alaska as "a task of 'Herculean proportions,' ,,11 and we do not diminish the considerable efforts made by the Board in this case. But these difficulties do not limit the Board's responsibility to create a constitutionally compliant redistricting plan, nor do they "absolve this court of its duty to independently measure each district against constitutional standards."12
Moreover, advances in computer software appear to have streamlined the redistricting process and reduced the burden felt by the Board in past cycles.13    The Hickel process is designed to "ensure that the requirements of article VI, section 6 of the Alaska Constitution are not unnecessarily compromised by the Voting Rights Act"14; it may not be disregarded for reasons of expediency when drafting a permanent plan.

In (10) the Court seems to be saying:  Yes, we know this is really hard to do, but you have to follow the path laid out by previous Supreme Court decisions.  Besides, you've got better computer programs these days.  
My comment:  I watched them work the computers.  The computer programs give all the numbers, but a person still has to draw the lines.  You can't just give the computer instructions and let it do the drawing itself.  It certainly is easier than before, but it's still laborious.  And I suspect that better tools have raised the bar of what they are expected to perform in a given time period.

11.    On remand, the Board must follow the Hickel process. If deviation from the Alaska Constitution is the only means available to satisfy the Voting Rights Act's requirements, the Board must endeavor to adopt a redistricting plan that includes the least deviation reasonably necessary to satisfy the Act, thereby preserving the mandates of the Alaska Constitution to the greatest extent possible.

 By now this should be self explanatory.  It repeats, more succinctly, what was said above in (7).

12.    Because the new plan eventually formulated by the Board may moot the claims raised in this case, we decline to decide them at this time with the exceptions set out in the following paragraphs. If the Board is unable to draft a plan that complies with this order in time for the 2012 elections, it may petition this court for an order that the 2012 elections be conducted using the Proclamation Plan as an interim plan.16    But legislative districts for subsequent elections will be defined by the plan ultimately arrived at by the Board after following the Hickel process.

(12) says that

• since the Board is coming up with a new plan, the problems raised about the first plan may no longer exist, so
• we'll hold off on deciding them now.  And
• If the Board can't do this in time for the 2012 elections (the filing deadline is June 1, 2012, leaving 2.5 months to draw the plan and get it approved), let us know and we can let the original plan stand for this election only.   

13.    We address one legal question raised by Riley: whether the superior court erred in ruling that "the anti-dilution rule cannot be violated if the City [of Fairbanks] cannot support a senate district based on its population." It is undisputed that the population of the City of Fairbanks makes up 89 percent of an ideal senate district. That fact does not preclude Riley's voter dilution claim. Indeed, in Kenai Peninsula Borough v. State, we allowed a group of Anchorage voters making up only 51 percent of an ideal senate district to bring a similar voter dilution claim, indicating that seat underrepresentation .. . tends toward disproportionality.,,17    The superior court's legal ruling was therefore error [sic], and, based on this incorrect premise, the superior court did not proceed to evaluate the merits of Riley's voter dilution claim. Depending on how the districts are redrawn on remand, this issue may or may not recur. But if it does, and a similar challenge is raised, the superior court will need to make findings on the elements of a voter dilution claim, including whether a politically salient class of voters existed and whether the Board intentionally discriminated against that class.18

I don't want to get too mired down in the details of this one.  Basically, as I understand this, the court is saying that the superior court erred in its ruling on Riley's argument that the City of Fairbanks' size (89% of one Senate seat - two house seats combined, thus 35,510 people) entitles them to a single Senate seat.  (The Board's plan split the two City of Fairbanks house districts into two separate Senate seats and created a situation where the two Democratic Senators from Fairbanks were competing in the same district.)  So, the court is saying that if the same situation should arise (I think that means if the City of Fairbanks is split into two different Senate districts) in the new plan, this will be an issue.  In the trial, the Board's attorney argued that this idea of a city not being split had never come up.  The precedent was for a borough, but not a city.  The plaintiff's attorney countered that the City of Fairbanks had always had just one Senate seat and it had never come up because the other two larger cities - Anchorage and Juneau - are in merged boroughs.  That is the city and the borough are the same.  But Fairbanks has both and the City of Fairbanks is in the Fairbanks North Star Borough.

14.    We also address one legal question raised by the Board: whether the superior court erred in ruling that House Districts 37 and 38 did not comply with the Alaska Constitution based on the rationale that "all five of the [Native] effective House Districts have more Native VAP [voting age population] than necessary." Given the under-population of the five Native effective house districts, this particular rationale does not justify concluding that Districts 37 and 38 were not necessary under the Voting Rights Act because, as the superior court elsewhere concluded, "[i]t was not a matter of whether excess population needed to be added to rural Native districts but only a matter of where to access this excess urban population ...."

 The Board's attorney had asked for some instructions should the court not allow districts 37 and 38 to stand.  There were several arguments against the two districts.

• That 38 - by joining the urban population of Fairbanks with the rural population of the Northwest coastal villages -  was not socio-economically integrated as required by the constitution.
• That these Native districts had a higher Native Voting Age Population (VAP) than needed to meet the requirements of the VRA.  Packing is a way to gerrymander, by putting all of a political party in one district (and thus getting them out of a nearby district.)

I understand 14 to be saying that the Court accepts the Board's argument that because so many Native people live in these rural areas, it is hard to find enough non-Native people to reduce the Native VAP in some of these districts.  So while the Court isn't saying they will accept any level of VAP, they are saying they understand the argument for the high Native VAP in these districts and the difficulty of finding excess non-Native population to lower it. 

By the way, the Redistricting Board has posted that they will be meeting March 26 - 31 in Anchorage to work on this.

St. Patrick's Early History

I wish all my friends with Irish hearts a very happy St. Patrick's Day.

I found this video at StPatricksday.com   Trust me.  Just start the video. I promise you it will tickle your heart.  I can promise that, because, I can't imagine that a person who comes to this blog wouldn't like this video. (Note:  this video allows for closed captions, but they are no match for this Irish accent.)

If you need something more detailed, you can try the bio at  Catholic Encyclopedia version that fills in some of the gaps in the video.  Here's a sampling.

In his sixteenth year, Patrick was carried off into captivity by Irish marauders and was sold as a slave to a chieftan named Milchu in Dalriada, a territory of the present county of Antrim in Ireland, where for six years he tended his master's flocks in the valley of the Braid and on the slopes of Slemish, near the modern town of Ballymena. He relates in his "Confessio" that during his captivity while tending the flocks he prayed many times in the day: "the love of God", he added,

and His fear increased in me more and more, and the faith grew in me, and the spirit was roused, so that, in a single day, I have said as many as a hundred prayers, and in the night nearly the same, so that whilst in the woods and on the mountain, even before the dawn, I was roused to prayer and felt no hurt from it, whether there was snow or ice or rain; nor was there any slothfulness in me, such as I see now, because the spirit was then fervent within me.

In the ways of a benign Providence the six years of Patrick's captivity became a remote preparation for his future apostolate. He acquired a perfect knowledge of the Celtic tongue in which he would one day announce the glad tidings of Redemption, and, as his master Milchu was a druidical high priest, he became familiar with all the details of Druidism from whose bondage he was destined to liberate the Irish race.

US Justice and Personal Responsibility: Three Fatal Events, Three Outcomes

Here are three cases that have gotten some publicity in the last month.



Case 1: Mine operators ignore safety regulations,  two mine cave-ins kill nine miners.  No individuals responsible.  (See Washington Post article for details.)

Nine people die in mine collapse.  Company had various violations of safety issues and including not carrying out required actions.  Company pleads guilty to two misdemeanors and was fined $500,000.  No officers of the company face any charges.


There were some other settlements to the families.  The article has all the details.  I'm looking at a broader idea in this post.


Case 2: Rutgers student who secretly videotaped his roommate having gay sex and broadcast it to others, leading his roommate to commit suicide, faces up to ten years in prison. (Boston Globe)





Case 3:  Architect who intentionally put outdoor fire places inside mansion after building, against regulations and after inspectors checked the site, which led to a fire in which two firefighters died, faces involuntary manslaughter charges. (Los Angeles Times)




No cases is simple and there are lots of details that the links offer to the cases.  But common to them all is that people died due to someone else's actions (or inactions.)  In the mine and fire cases, the responsible parties appear to have knowingly violated a law they were responsible to uphold.  They were also people in positions of professional responsibility who stood to profit from their illegal actions, ignoring the danger they were causing others. 


In the student case, it's unclear that the videotaper knew he was violating the law, but he surely was pushing the limits of interpersonal decency and privacy. 


There are lots of questions around these cases:

• How have lobbyists for the mining industry helped to shape laws that shield owners and officers of mining companies from personal liability?
• Are there factors we use to evaluate unintentional death due to another's carelessness?  
• How much could someone, because of education/training, position, legal obligations, should be aware of his actions put others in risk?
• Whether someone has done something (or not done something) against legal orders that caused the death (or injuries)?
• Whether someone has taken action which a 'reasonable' person would assume could lead to serious consequences including death or (in the case of the students) could lead the victim to respond drastically?  
• To what extent can we be responsible for how people 
  
•  How do we deal with the way that modern technology to magnify what in prior times would have had less drastic consequences?  (As in the student's ability to broadcast live his roommate's tryst.)
• How does the political notion of personal responsibility - often bandied about by politicians talking about poor people and petty criminals - actually play out when people's lives are seriously disrupted or ended by carelessness and/or callousness?

Life is complicated.  Laws are written incrementally, without all of them being compared for fairness against all other laws.  And even if there were a commission charged to review all laws relating to people who cause death, the  imbalance  of political and economic power in the US would probably mean those with power would make sure their interests were looked after. 


And how do we deal with structural causes of death - such as when soldiers are sent to war despite their mental instability?  Or medical errors in hospitals?  Or when one nation's economy benefits from another's misery - such as rich countries getting cheap goods from weak labor and environmental laws in poor countries?   When does collective culpability become individual responsibility and vice versa?


Or from people ignoring all these issues because they can?  Until it affects them?  Like the architect and the mine owners and the Rutgers student who suddenly find themselves in the spotlight?  Though the brightness of the spotlights vary greatly.