News Week Round Up [April 28, 2917]

Shaolin Monk [More Images]

Legislature rejects Walker’s call to act on nominees

KTOO by Andrew Kitchenman

Five minutes after starting a joint session, the Legislature voted along caucus lines, 32-26, to adjourn without holding a vote.

Senate President Pete Kelly said he plans to hold votes on the nominees before the legislative session ends. The deadline to end the session is May 17.

Kelly said the Legislature should focus on the budget and a plan to draw from the Permanent Fund to balance the budget. While some nominees have been controversial, Kelly denied that was a factor in the delay.

Kelly and other Republican lawmakers have raised questions about Attorney General Jahna Lindemuth, Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission member Hollis French and Human Rights Commission member Drew Phoenix.

They and another 100 nominees will continue to act in their positions until either a vote or the end of the session. If there’s no vote, all of the nominees must leave their positions.

House Speaker Bryce Edgmon said the Legislature should act on the nominees and then move on to other business. [Full Story]

Prices for halibut quota shares continue to increase, top $70/lb in Southeast AK

by Laine Welch

Halibut quota share values continue to soar in Alaska’s major fishing areas. Get ready for this jaw dropper:
“They’re in the $70 per pound range in Southeast, the $60 range in 3A, approaching the $45 mark for 3B – and then as you work further west, the values taper off – $30-$32 a pound for 4Aand down in the teens for Bering Sea regions. “

The halibut IFQ prices have gone up about $5 a year for the past several years as the fish stocks have appeared to stabilize and increased slightly. Dock prices for halibut also have remained high, in the $6 to $7 per pound range at major ports.

The quota share prices for black cod, or sablefish, also are on an upswing. Large sized fish over seven pounds are fetching up to $10 a pound for fishermen.
Sales prices for quota in the Central Gulf are now at $29 per pound, up eight dollars from last year. Black cod quota in Southeast has jumped to $35 a pound. [Read the full Article]

Wrangell’s Happy Cannabis given go-ahead, but its doors will remain closed

Alaska Public Media by Aaron Bolton

The Wrangell Borough Assembly approved Happy Cannabis for both cultivation and retail Tuesday. The Marijuana Control Board approved owner Kelsey Martinsen’s plan earlier this month, but there is some uncertainty whether local residents will be able buy marijuana.

Martinsen is weighing the burden of a new excise tax implemented by the borough.

Earlier this month, the assembly approved a $10-per-ounce excise tax for cultivators and $2 per ounce for plant remains. That’s on top of the state’s charges, $50 per ounce for marijuana and $15 per ounce for leftovers.

Martinsen planned to produce about 16 pounds of marijuana per week and estimates the local tax could equate to about $200,000 annually. At that quantity, Martinsen would also be paying the state about $650,000 per year for the buds he’s growing. [Source ]

Biomass-Heated Greenhouse Handbook Helps Turn Dream into Reality

by Bethany Goodrich

On a warm, bluebird day in April, Southeast Island School District and the Sustainable Southeast Partnership led a 25 person tour to Coffman Cove, Thorne Bay and Kasaan on Prince of Wales Island to see their biomass and greenhouse projects in person. Tour participants from Hoonah, Kake, Hydaburg, Klawock, Petersburg, Tenakee Springs, Ontario and the Yukon each had in hand a Biomass Heated Greenhouse Handbook. This comprehensive handbook outlines how to turn these inspiring greenhouses from dream to reality. It was unveiled a day prior at the Alaska Wood Energy Conference in Ketchikan and is a free resource available to schools and anybody who is interested in building a Biomass Heated Greenhouse locally. The USDA Forest Service and the Alaska Energy Authority commissioned the Handbook, in part to share successes and lessons learned from the Southeast Island School District and help streamline the process for future projects. Nobody wants to re-invent the wheel, and handbooks like these provide the tools so that interested local leaders don’t need to! [Support local writers, read the rest on their site]

Alaska City to Get Giant Egg-Shaped Aircraft by 2019

PRL Logistics first announced plans to base an airship at its facility along the Kenai River last year. Founder and CEO of the Anchorage-based transportation and contracting company Ron Hyde updated the Kenai City Council on the project last week, The Peninsula Clarion reported (http://bit.ly/2qe8dSF).

The egg-shaped aircraft is under construction in California and is expected to be ready for use in 2019.

Hyde said his company has been working with ExxonMobil to add modular liquefied natural gas tanks on the airship that could be used to deliver North Slope gas to Alaska's isolated communities.

The airship can land on snow, ice, gravel and water and has space for 47,000 pounds of cargo. It generates lift from its aerodynamic shape and a helium-filled envelope. The aircraft can take off and land vertically, allowing it to deliver cargo in places without runways. [Source]

The United States of Work

BY MIYA TOKUMITSU

Work no longer works. “You need to acquire more skills,” we tell young job seekers whose résumés at 22 are already longer than their parents’ were at 32. “Work will give you meaning,” we encourage people to tell themselves, so that they put in 60 hours or more per week on the job, removing them from other sources of meaning, such as daydreaming or social life. “Work will give you satisfaction,” we insist, even though it requires abiding by employers’ rules, and the unwritten rules of the market, for most of our waking hours. At the very least, work is supposed to be a means to earning an income. But if it’s possible to work full time and still live in poverty, what’s the point?

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. As corporations have worked methodically to amass sweeping powers over their employees, they have held aloft the beguiling principle of individual freedom, claiming that only unregulated markets can guarantee personal liberty. Instead, operating under relatively few regulations themselves, these companies have succeeded at imposing all manner of regulation on their employees. That is to say, they use the language of individual liberty to claim that corporations require freedom to treat workers as they like.

Anderson sets out to discredit such arguments by tracing them back to their historical origins. The notion that personal freedom is rooted in free markets, for instance, originated with the Levellers in seventeenth-century England, when working conditions differed substantially from today’s. The Levellers believed that a market society was essential to liberate individuals from the remnants of feudal hierarchies; their vision of utopia was a world in which men could meet and interact on terms of equality and dignity. Their ideas echoed through the writing and politics of later figures like John Locke, Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, and Abraham Lincoln, all of whom believed that open markets could provide the essential infrastructure for individuals to shape their own destiny.

For Anderson, the latter point is essential; the notion of lifelong employment under a boss was anathema to these earlier visions of personal freedom. Writing in the 1770s, Smith assumes that independent actors in his market society will be self-employed, and uses butchers and bakers as his exemplars; his “pin factory,” meant to illustrate division of labor, employs only ten people. These thinkers could not envision a world in which most workers spend most of their lives performing wage labor under a single employer. In an address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society in 1859, Lincoln stated, “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself, then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him.” In other words, even well into the nineteenth century, defenders of an unregulated market society viewed wage labor as a temporary stage on the way to becoming a proprietor.

Lincoln’s scenario does not reflect the way most people work today. Yet the “small business owner” endures as an American stock character, conjured by politicians to push through deregulatory measures that benefit large corporations. In reality, thanks to a lack of guaranteed, nationalized health care and threadbare welfare benefits, setting up a small business is simply too risky a venture for many Americans, who must rely on their employers for health insurance and income. These conditions render long-term employment more palatable than a precarious existence of freelance gigs, which further gives companies license to oppress their employees. [I disagree somewhat towards the 'solutions' presented but a good read none the less]

I'll eat the livers of Isis fighters with salt and vinegar, vows Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte

Duterte has repeatedly threatened drug suspects with death, but he raised his shock rhetoric to a new level as president when he said in a speech during the opening of a national sports tournament what he could do to terrorists who have staged beheadings and other gruesome attacks.

Duterte ordered troops to kill fleeing Muslim militants behind a foiled attack in the central resort province of Bohol and not bring them to him alive, calling the extremists “animals.”

“If you want me to be an animal, I'm also used to that. We're just the same,” Duterte said. “I can dish out, go down what you can 50 times over.”

The foul-mouthed president said that if a terrorist was presented to him when he's in a foul mood, “give me salt and vinegar and I'll eat his liver.”

The crowd broke into laughter, but Duterte cut in, “It's true, if you make me angry.” [Source]

I love the editorializing--"foul-mouthed President", yet clearly his people love him. Can he really be 'foul-mouthed' if his people actually agree with what he says?

What the Destruction of "Science" Looks Like. I Bet You Can't Watch the Whole Thing:

Cherokee Nation sues drug firms, retailers for flooding communities with opioids

Lawyers for the Cherokee Nation opened a new line of attack against the pharmaceutical industry Thursday, filing a lawsuit in tribal court that accuses the nation’s six top drug distributors and pharmacies of flooding communities in Oklahoma with hundreds of millions of highly addictive pain pills.

The suit alleges that the companies violated sovereign Cherokee laws by failing to prevent the diversion of pain pills to the black market, profiting from the growing opioid epidemic and decimating communities across the nation’s 14 counties in the state.

“Defendants turned a blind eye to the problem of opioid diversion and profited from the sale of prescription opioids to the citizens of the Cherokee Nation in quantities that far exceeded the number of prescriptions that could reasonably have been used for legitimate medical purposes,” the suit says.

By filing the suit in tribal court, lawyers for the Cherokee Nation said they hope to gain quicker access to internal corporate records that could show what the companies knew about the diversion of pain pills on Indian lands in northeastern Oklahoma. It is the first time an Indian nation has filed suit against companies for the damage done by powerful pain pills such as oxycodone and hydrocodone.

“Today, we are facing another challenge, a plague that has been set upon the Cherokee people by these corporations,” said Todd Hembree, attorney general for the Cherokees. “Their main goal is profit, and this scourge has cost lives and the Cherokee Nation millions.” [Full Story]

Revolution Always Comes at the Worst Time

Revolution always comes at the worst times

Read More: News Week Round Up [April 21, 2017]

Read More: The Color Run Fundraiser May 6th, 2017


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