Redistricting Board Attorney Responds to Supreme Court Decision

The Alaska Supreme Court's main decision on the redistricting plan was that the plan had to go back for reworking because the Board drew its plans with a focus on complying with the Voting Rights Act, not with a focus on complying with the Alaska Supreme Court decision.  Each has standards the Board tried to comply with, but the Board's attorney, Michael White, told the Board, early on, that the federal Voting Rights Act took precedence over the Alaska Constitution.  So, while the Board kept the Constitutional requirements in mind, it decided to set up the necessary nine Native districts and then work out the rest of the state.

The Supreme Court (not to mention the plaintiffs) pointed out a section in the 1994 Supreme Court Case Hickel v. Southeast Conference that said

"[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"

On this basis, the Supreme Court said the Board had to go back and follow the court mandated process.

I couldn't help thinking that the Board's attorney surely had to know this.  Why didn't he direct the Board to do this?  Did he interpret it differently?  Did he think the Board was complying with it?  Did he think it wasn't relevant to this year's decision?

So I asked him after today's meeting.  I'm afraid I didn't have my camera out at the beginning.  He began by saying the key citation from the Hickel decision was completely off the radar.  As the video begins he's saying that the ruling essentially tells the board to ignore the federal law they have to comply with while they concentrate on meeting the state constitutional requirements.  You can hear the rest of his response on the video. 

If you want to see what the court said, you can see the text of the decision with my attempts to explain it here.  It's really not all that long. 

Redistricting Board Offers Three "Hickel" Plans

Member Green and Director Bickford, Torgerson and McConnochie in back

I still have to finish another 35 pages of Dirt Music for tonight's book club meeting, but let me post my quick overview of the board meeting.


They had  three "Hickel" plans.  This refers to the Supreme Court's citing of the 1994 Hickel v Southeast Conference decision which lays out a process for the Redistricting Board to follow and which was the basis for their sending the original plan back to be redrawn.

 
They started with a template that kept the parts of the state from their submitted plan that met the constitutional requirements (Southeast, Anchorage, Matsu, Kenai, and North Slope) intact. 

"Hickel" map template

They left blank the interior and Fairbanks districts and Western Alaska and Aleutians.  (see map)

When they tried to set up the missing rural districts they were about 7,000 people short* which they had to take from urban areas.

So starting from that template, they made three options.
Hickel 1 - reshapes the districts in the blank part and gets the 7,000 from Fairbanks.
Hickel 2.  does the same and gets the extra people from Matsu
Hickel 3.  does the same and gets the extra people from Anchorage. 

(The three Hickel maps are in the previous post.  Or you can get download them here.  But you can't see them large enough to see the details of what they do to the urban areas.)

Director Bickford and Member Brodie

It’s probably my imagination, but it almost seemed as though the meeting were scripted.  People asked the right questions - does it meet this or that constitutional requirement and if not why not - to show they had tried everything they had to try.  Board Chair Torgerson at one point actually said: 

"Just asking the same question ten times to get it on the record."

It seemed fairly reasonable as they went through Fairbanks.  This isn't easy to get all the various criteria to match.  It's like a Rubic's cube - as you turn it to get this side of the cube right, it messes up the numbers on another side.  Matsu was next.  But when they got to finding population in Anchorage (Hickel 3) to add to a district going out to the Bering Sea and Executive Director Bickford said:

"We picked up Kincaid, part of Lake Spenard, part of Inlet View precinct."

I just typed what I was thinking on my notes:  "This is so stupid."

Member Holm

My sense is that this was the point they were trying to make.  If the Supreme Court thinks we should try out pairings with other urban districts, let's show them what it would look like.  Even taking the more rural areas of Anchorage like Chugiak would have been as much of a stretch as Ester and Goldstream (suburbs of Fairbanks) were in the challenged plan.  But to pluck out pieces from neighborhoods in the urban areas of Anchorage was totally ridiculous.




I'll add more later, but thought I'd at least get this up now.







*"Short" means that they didn't have enough people to get within 5% of the needed 17,755 people per district.  They mentioned different numbers, but I think it came to still needing 9,000 to get enough for another district.

The Redistricting Board has three maps up on their website today (click documents) - Hickel 1, Hickel 2, and Hickel 3.  Presumably the staff was asked to come up with some options for the meeting that begins at 1pm.    You can click on the maps below to enlarge them.  Lots of details are missing.  But we can see that they've gone back to something that looks like the old District 6 [big yellow 37] that loops from near Valdez up along the Canadian border around Fairbanks.  That's got to be one of the Native districts and it looks like they set up another one to connect to it in Southeast [35.]  The other Native districts would be 40, 39, 38 and 36.  The other maps seem to be variations of this.
 

The question will be how big each district is and whether they're compact, contiguous, and socio-economically integrated.  And how they affect incumbents. 

We should find out more at the meeting.  You can also listen in online 

Live Stream: alaskalegislature.tv    at 1pm.

Here's the agenda:

CALL TO ORDER ROLL 

CALL APPROVAL OF AGENDA

 EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR’S REPORT 

LEGAL REVIEW OF SUPREME COURT DECISION
EXECUTIVE SESSION 

STAFF PRESENTATION OF DRAFT “HICKEL” PLANS 

ADJOURNMENT

Can Saudi Arabia Rescue Australia's Feral Camels?

I'm  on page 221 of Tim Winton's Dirt Music.  I have about 180 pages to read before tomorrow night's book club meeting.  So I can't write too much now.  This 2001 novel has been growing on me, but let me focus on just one tiny tangent. 

Georgie is having a recurring dream about Mrs. Jubail.  Just brief mentions until we finally get more explanation.  Much of the book comes to us this way - sort of like life comes to us - in brief snatches that don't make much sense at first until it moves from our subconcious to our conscious minds.  We'd also heard that Georgie had worked in Saudi Arabia.  And on page 141 things come together as we learn that in Saudi Arabia she was a nurse and took care of Mrs. Jubail who had a terminal illness.  At one point,

"She asked was it true the Arabs imported camels from [Australia].  Georgie told her of the wild herds in the north that were the legacy of the Afghan traders." 

I took this picture in India, not Australia

Is it true, I wondered.  Well, it sounds basically true, but the Afghans seem to have been camel handlers. 

Southaustraliahistory  tells us:

Without the Afghans much of the development of the outback would have been very difficult if not impossible. Whole communities, towns, mining establishments, pastoral properties and some well known explorations in the interior have been made successful because of their contributions.

With their camels, who received more publicity than their owners, these cameleers opened up the outback, helped with the construction of the Overland Telegraph Line and Railways, erected fences, acted as guides for several major expeditions, and supplied almost every inland mine or station with its goods and services. These 'pilots of the desert' made a vital contribution to Australia.

The Afghans came first in 1838 and the first camels in 1840 as we learn from camelaustralia:

The first camel in Australia was imported from the Canary Islands in 1840 by Horrock. The next major group of 24 camels came out in 1860 for the ill-fated Bourke and Wills expedition. The first time the explorer Giles used camels he travelled 220 miles in 8 days without giving water to the camels. He later went from Bunbury Downs to Queen Victoria Springs (WA), a distance of 325 miles in 17 days and gave one bucket of water to each camel after the twelfth day. . .

An estimated 10,000 to 12,000 camels, imported into Australia between 1860 and 1907, were used as draft and riding animals by people pioneering the dry interior.

Now it's estimated Australia has about 1 million feral camels and in 2010 the country proposed to spend about $19 million (US$19.80 = Aus $19) to cull the wild camels.  But Saudis have come to the rescue:

The Saudi campaign, which calls on the country's rich to airlift the camels to the safety of the Saudi desert, comes after the Australian government announced it would kill 6,000 camels in the Northern Territory next week using marksmen firing from helicopters. [The fact sheet quoted below puts the number at 650,000.]

The animals are viewed as a pest in Australia, but they are revered in the desert nation of Saudi Arabia.

 It's not clear what happened. There were several references to this in January 2010, I couldn't find any later news whether anything happened.  But over a year later, we learn that an Australian entrepreneur is taking on the government's culling plan and wants to turn the camels into a lucrative business.  Arabian Business reports March 30, 2011:

A Queensland businessman plans to take on the Australian government in a bid to redirect a multimillion-dollar camel cull into a plan to exporting camel produce to the Gulf.
Outback entrepreneur Paddy McHugh hopes to persuade Australia to capitalise on its wild camel population to create a lucrative business, selling milk and camels into the Gulf region.
“We want to turn it around from a negative and produce an industry for Australia to export meat and milk to the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait. It’s got huge potential,” he told Arabian Business. . .

The feral animals are often labelled a nuisance, competing with cattle and sheep for food and crushing vegetation. In the Middle East, however, the desert animals are an integral part of life, used for food, drink and racing.
“The potential is huge and I just find it absurd that we want to shoot these animals,” McHugh said. “It’s a waste of phenomenal proportions. We believe there is an industry there that will compliment the Australian cattle and sheep industry and make another great export industry.”
Interest in camel produce is growing due to its reported health benefits. Advocates claim the milk contains up to five times more vitamin C than cow milk, less fat and less lactose while its meat is said to be low in cholesterol and high in protein.

The impact of camels on the environment, particularly during droughts, is apparently significant according to the Australian Department of Sustainability, Envornment, Water, Population and Community  fact sheet (updated March 2012):

In central Australia, serious and widespread negative impacts on vegetation have been recorded where camels occur at densities of more than two animals/km², though damage to highly palatable species occurs at much lower densities. In more arid country near Lake Eyre, significant negative impacts on vegetation have been recorded where camels occur at densities of more than one animals/km². Camels already occur at localised densities more than two animals/km² over much of their current range.
The impact of feral camels on native plants and drinkable water is most pronounced during drought, when areas close to remote waterholes become refuges that are critical to the survival of a range of native animals and plants. Feral camels can quickly degrade these areas during a drought to the point where they may no longer provide any refuge for native plants and animals, perhaps leading to the local extinction of these species. The Action Plan for Australian Marsupials and Monotremes recommends that feral camel numbers be reduced at specific areas to help protect the habitat of threatened animals such as the ampurta (Dasycercus hillieri).
Many water places are sacred sites to Aboriginal people, so the negative impacts of camels on waterholes, rockholes, soaks and springs can be culturally significant. Recent periods of drought have resulted in feral camels entering remote communities in search of water, and extensively damaging water infrastructure such as laundries, bathrooms, bores, taps and tanks.

There are tidbits like this throughout the book.  Just passing comments where I say, "I need to look this up."  I'm sure I'll write more on this book. 

Breakup Biking and Moose

It's been gloriously sunny, enough to melt snow and ice enough for it to freeze over into sheets at night.  That made for interesting biking yesterday when I went to meet a friend for brunch.  But the bike stayed upright and my helmet was never near the ground.

Coming home after we talked into the afternoon and I stopped by the library to see a few TEDx talks, was a different challenge.  It was another sunny and slightly warmer day and things were wet.

 
There is something primordial to the way snow and ice convert to water and air.  There are cracks and fissures and rivulets taking the warmed ice down gravity's path. That brown ribbon moving to the lower left was an inch or two deep water transfer from the parking lot to the street.

The cross walk had a couple of inches of water in it.

And soon the sidewalk itself was submerged and cars were offering muddy showers to pedestrians and cyclists.  I finally decided to just ride through it and it wasn't as bad as it looked. 

So as soon as I could, I slipped off the main street and onto a side street whose snow pack was still relatively solid.  And as I was biking by, suddenly noticed I was not alone.  A moose had found a comfortable spot in front of someone's house to lie down and chew its cud.  It wasn't much more than 15 feet away from me if that much and not at all disturbed that I was stopped to take a picture.

When I got home my tire had captured some of the street surface. 

For those of you making snide comments about Alaskans now, I would point out it's 8:02pm as I write this and the sun is still comfortably above the horizon and pinking the snow on the mountains. 

When Robert Bales' Attorney, John Henry Browne, Represented Vic Kohring

John Henry Browne, the attorney now representing Robert Bales, the soldier accused of massacring 17 Afghan civilians, spent several weeks in Anchorage in 2007, representing the third state legislator to go on trial for corruption here, Vic Kohring.  I blogged that trial and so I got to watch him in action.  Of the three trials, he was the only attorney who seemed to attract almost as much attention as his client. 

I have comments about Browne throughout the Kohring posts, but I've pulled out a few here that may give some insight into this attorney.  Or not.

On my first encounter in court October 22, 2007:

John Henry Browne

For me the big unknown was the defense attorney. When I walked in, I saw him from behind and thought he was younger until he turned and faced the gallery. He was wearing what looked like an expensive light grey suit with just a touch of green. His shirt was just barely pink. The prosecutors, in comparison, were in dark, dark grey to black suits with white shirts, except for Mr. Goeke who had a beige shirt. Even Agent Mary Beth Kepner [Thanks, Steve, I was getting tired when I did that] had on a grey suit. And Mr. Browne's hair also looked expensive - basically brown with what would have been called surfer blond streaks where I grew up near Venice Beach. OK, I know what some of you are thinking. But this is not intended as a fashion evaluation of the attorneys. I do think, however, that the dress does tell us something about people. Browne very definitely pays attention to how he looks. He also has trouble talking without moving. If his arms aren't moving, or his hands, then his fingers are moving. A few times I could even see the muscles in his back moving through his jacket. And this was just very low key questions to the jury.

His voice is radio quality deep and his intonation is precise, more articulated than most American speakers naturally talk. Perhaps he's done some acting or had other voice coaching.

When he asked questions of the jurors, or even when he didn't, he would say, "Good morning" in the same exact tone which sounded warm and interested the first time, but after hearing it repeated precisely many times, it began to sound canned. For two jurors, he said something like, "Your comments were much more extensive than the other jurors" which I thought sounded like calculated flattery, and which caused Prosecutor Botinni [Bottini] to object to the "unnecessary editorial comments" about juror performance. The judge concurred.

He also addressed the court twice, between jurors, with two questions that I thought seemed inappropriate. The first time he wanted to know about jurors who came from outside of Anchorage - who paid for them? (The court pays their airfare and hotel, but they don't go back for weekends the judge replied.) The second question was whether the jurors came from all of Alaska. The judge explained that they only came from the Anchorage district, which was a large district, stretching from Cordova to the Aleutians. It just seemed to me that these were curiosity items, that I would have written down and checked on later. Or, as the Outside defense attorney, I would have found out before the trial. And being an Outside attorney - the local attorney Wayne Anthony Ross was not there today [and I don't think ever was in court] - he wouldn't understand the implications of what local talk show hosts the jurors said they listened to.

Overall, his behavior reinforced the impression I've gotten in the pretrial press coverage. This is the Seattle attorney who is coming to the boondocks to try a case. If that really is the way he's thinking, I suspect he's in for a big surprise.  Judge Sedwick has run very tight, but fair, trials. His excusing of the full time student today is an example of his practical understanding of what makes sense and what doesn't. The prosecution has done an overwhelming amount of work and have been extremely well prepared. The teams at the previous two trials were one local attorney and one from the DC based Public Integrity Section. These guys do their homework. The pairing for this trial is Joe Botinni [Bottini], who's been in the Anchorage US Attorney Office for many years, and Edward P. Sullivan from DC. On the other hand, it does seem that the taped evidence is likely to be not as damaging as in the other cases, and that Kohring might appear to have been less calculating than Kott or Anderson in working out ways to get paid. We will see.

By the next day, I'd figured out who Browne reminded me of.  I wrote a post titled, Is John Henry Browne Really Eddie Haskell 50 Years Later? 

 For those of you who didn't watch tv in the 50's and 60's, here's what Wikipedia says about Haskell:

Even today, the phrase "Eddie Haskell" is known to refer to an insincere brown-noser. . .He was known for his neat grooming—hiding his shallow and sneaky character. Typically, Eddie would greet his friends' parents with overdone, good manners and often a compliment such as, "That's a lovely dress you're wearing, Mrs. Cleaver."

Here's a video I made of John Henry Browne after trial on October 30, 2007 with Vic Kohring.





I'd note that the two attorneys he opposed in the Kohring case, Bottini and Sullivan, were among the attorneys found to have concealed evidence from the defense in the Ted Stevens trial.  Was the fact that Browne lost the Kohring case Browne's fault or was it because information was held from him too?  Given the evidence the Prosecutors had, did Kohring ever have a chance?  There were ongoing investigations the prosecutors didn't want made public - Ted Stevens, Jim Clark, and another redacted name (see below).  Then there were the allegations that the Prosecutors' key witness, Bill Allen, had been having sex with an underage girl. 

The Schuelke Report on the Ted Stevens trial shows us the transcript of a sealed hearing among the judge, prosecutors and Browne on October 25, three days after the above post, which shows that Browne was aware of the issues about Allen and Bambi Tyree.  [I'd note that whoever edited the Schuelke report assumed Browne was spelled without the 'e'.  When the Alaska transcript has the 'e' they add [sic].  I can't believe they didn't look it up.  They just assumed, I guess, the Alaska record was wrong.]

During the sealed hearing, Mr. Bottini identified the ongoing investigations of Senator Stevens,❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚ and Jim Clark, the Chief of Staff to Governor Murkowski, as three areas where the cross-examination of Mr. Allen and Mr. Smith by Mr. Brown, the lawyer for Mr. Kohring, should be limited.

.,Transcript of
Sealed Hearing on Plaintiff’s Sealed Motion in Limine
, dated Oct.25, 2007, at 7-8 (DOJ Bates nos. CRM127882-923). During the hearing, Mr.Bottini added another subject, Mr. Allen’s relationship with the “Tyree family”:MR. BOTTINI:. . . The last thing I wanted to say, Your Honor, is that we’re also concerned about whether Mr. Brown is planning on exploring on cross examination any aspect of Mr. Allen’s relationship with certain people. And primarily what we’re concerned about is whether he’s going to try and cross examine Mr. Allen about his relationship with any member of the Tyree family. This is an issue that we keep hearing, you know, rumors about. And I want to - -
THE COURT:But how would that tie into the concern for compromising an on-going investigation?
MR. BOTTINI:Well, it’s sort of a different area and I think it’s - - it would be totally improper cross examination under Rule608(b).
THE COURT:It might be and I - - while I have to hear from Mr.Brown, but I don’t think that’s something we need to hear on a sealed record, is it?
MR. BOTTINI:I think it is something that we need to talk about on a sealed record because what we’re concerned about is that Mr. Browne [sic] may be planning to cross examine Mr.Allen about a relationship that he allegedly had with someone who was a juvenile at the time, and I think Ms.Tyree’s got, you know, certain issues and rights to not have that discussed on an open record.
THE COURT:All right, so your concerns are the ❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚, the ❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚ and Ms. Tyree?
MR. BOTTINI:Yes . . .* * *
THE COURT:All right. Mr. Browne [sic], I’d like to hear from you, sir, regarding whether you had anticipated or feel you have any need to cross examine these individuals regarding any of those three areas.
MR. BROWNE [sic]:. . . I will, more because of the gentleman, I suppose, than anything else, I’m not going to go into anything about juvenile relationships - -
THE COURT:All right, so the - -
MR. BROWNE [sic]:- - to me that’s completely - -
THE COURT:- - the type - - MR. BROWNE [sic]:- - that’s - - to me, whether that’s true or not I have no idea, and, two, it’s amazingly tacky and I would not do that.THE COURT:All right, well, enough said, and I don’t think it would advance Mr. Kohring’s interests in any event.

People in Anchorage were not much impressed with Browne.   It was hard for people to understand how Kohring was paying for this out-of-town celebrity attorney.  The bill was, rumor had it, at least $100,000 and testimony showed Kohring broke.  We knew Browne liked high profile cases.  He'd defended Ted Bundy and would go on to defend the Barefoot Bandit.


Just before the Kohring case went to trial, Kohring was injured in an accident when John Henry Browne ran a stop sign.   At the time I was wondering whether there wasn't some sort of conflict of interest here.  He's being represented by a man who potentially owes him damages for the accident.  How's that going to play out?  In 2009, Kohring sued Brown over the accident and Browne withdrew as his attorney. 

 

One of the interesting aspects of blogging is how old posts sometimes gain new relevance, such as the material on Browne.    The other day I got a lot of hits on a post I did in 2008 about a speech on the future of newspapers given in Anchorage by McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt who has just become the head of Associated Press (AP).  (McClatchy owns the Anchorage Daily News.)   Media blogger Jim Romenesko found my post and linked to it on his early announcement of the AP appointment.

And now John Henry Browne is back in the news defending Robert Bales.   

"can crazy people vote in alaska?" - More Interesting Google Searches

One of the 'problems' of this blog is that it's not focused, at least in the same sense as a bike blog, a political blog, or an art blog. But it is focused in a much broader topic - how we know what we know. Which means I can tie in lots of diverse topics. (And sometimes I don't tie them in too well, but if I do it right, at least some of the people who see any given post will see something that makes them rethink what they know or learn something new.)

It's nice, then, to see google hits for some very specific things on a wide range of topics which get to a post that really does address what they were looking for. Here are some examples from the last couple of months:

rice huller traditionally used by hill-tribes in thailand - And I've got two different rice-hullers at a Thai hill tribe village we visited here.

skeena bakery hazelton - As we were driving from the Cassiar Highway in British Columbia to Prince George on the Yellowhead Highway (16) we stopped in Hazelton and asked where we could get free wifi.  That got us to the wonderful Skeena Bakery which I posted about here.


road to child's glacier - got to a post that showed the bridge that is failing which has caused the Department of Transportation to close the road for the next few years. 


taut zehlendorf house - this got to a post about housing in Berlin's Zehlendorf neighborhood designed by architect Bruno Taut in the 1920s as part of a progressive move to build decent housing for working class folks. 


kalanchoe pronounce - a post on how to pronounce the name of this common houseplant. 

how much are polar bears worth - Yes, there's a post that addresses this by taking Alaska's governor's estimation of what it would cost to save the polar bear and showing what else costs about the same.  Is saving the polar bear worth the pizza crusts that get thrown away in the US each year?

strassenbahnhaltestelle joseph beuys -  Joseph Beuys is an artist whose work we saw in Berlin.  One piece was called Strassenbahnhaltestelle (streetcarstop).  And this person got to the post about the Beuys exhibit with three photos of the Strassenbahnhaltestelle piece.  The whole exhibit at the Hamurger Bahnhof Museum in Berlin captured me completely when we were there in April 2010.  I couldn't explain to you why (This is NOT Norman Rockwell!), but I knew this was something special. I didn't buy the huge book on Beuys they had and CS commented that she had it and I could borrow it.  I have it now.  CS is no longer with us.  Joe, I'm keeping it safe for you.  Meanwhile, here's a description of the exhibit from the Independent from August 2011


how do you say hello in karen language - Bingo!  This person gets a video of a Karen teaching me how to say hello in Karen.  But I have to say there are several dialects, and I don't know how different they are in the greeting.

how to find blood volume of a shrew  -  Yes, I have it in this post which has the answer in the title:  "If a 2 g shrew has a reasonable volume of blood to support its metabolism, say 0.1 g, a 2 ton elephant will require 100 tons of blood, an obvious impossibility."
It was from a paper by a Dr. Melanie Moses who gave a talk through the University of Alaska Anchorage Complex Systems Group on how size determines the growth and behavior of organisms and societies.. 

how to tell the gender of a butterfly - I didn't even know I had this one.  But there it was in a past google search post with links to pages that help you figure out if you should call your butterfly he or she.

Then there are those that apparently google doesn't know what to do with and they end up here because I have a post or page with some of the terms the person was looking for. 

can crazy people vote in alaska? - Yes, and they can run for office.  And they win too.  This searcher got a post about the last US Senate race.  A commenter talked about crazy Alaskan voters.  

aliens causing electrical problems -  Extraterrestrial visitors?  The person got to America's Wealth of Fact Free Political Opinion, which seemed a good choice.  But why?  It looked at nonsense about illegal aliens. 



doctor have baby factory in polyps in colon what would life span be - Here's another google search phrase that holds at least a short story.  They got to a post on colonoscopies.


racial bloc analysis of redistricting with vacation homes  - OK, I get 'racial bloc analysis of redistricting.'   There are posts that mention that.  This searcher got to Redistricting Court Challenge: Dr. Arrington's Voter Rights Analysis Primer but how did the vacation homes get into this?  I'm sure there's an interesting story, especially since the searcher is from a Department of Justice computer.

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