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Three Ways to Reform the Public Lands Grazing Program |
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Monday, 16 June 2014 09:16 |
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Anderson writes: “The dust has settled on the Cliven Bundy debacle and the media has moved onto the next spectacle. The Obama Administration should take this opportunity to do a little housekeeping on its privately-grazed public lands.“
The North American desert tortoise. (photo: Jonathan S. Blair/National Geographic)
Three Ways to Reform the Public Lands Grazing Program
By Greta Anderson, The Wildlife News
16 June 14
 he dust has settled on the Cliven Bundy debacle and the media has moved onto the next spectacle. The Obama Administration should take this opportunity to do a little housekeeping on its privately-grazed public lands. The example of the Nevada scofflaw’s failure to pay his grazing fees and his refusal to adhere to environmental laws – as well as the Bureau of Land Management’s refusal to address the issue for twenty years– should serve as a wake-up call for a failing federal program that degrades the environment, costs the taxpayers a bundle, and enables a “tradition” that is no longer appropriate in the new West.
There are three steps that would provide vast public benefit:
1. Raise the grazing fee.
It should be abundantly clear that even if Mr. Bundy had paid up, he wouldn’t be paying enough for the privilege to graze on public lands. At $1.35 per month per cow/calf pair, this small fee pays for the livestock “unit” to eat about 1000 pounds of “forage,” also known as wildflowers, shrubs, grass, and wildlife habitat, drink about 30 gallons of water each day, and turn both into waste products that foul our creeks, our campgrounds, and our hiking trails. It’s a bargain for the rancher, but taxpayers subsidize the program upwards of $1.2 billion each decade.
The fee is low because it is calculated using a flawed formula. Efforts to revise the formula to ensure cost-recovery have been met with resistance from the Department of Interior and the Department of Agriculture. It is unclear why these agencies are comfortable operating at a substantial deficit for the grazing program while struggling to fund other essential federal programs, but it should stop. The President and the Secretaries should reform the fee program right away.
2. Allow for grazing retirement throughout the West.
When Clark County, Nevada sought to mitigate its impacts on desert tortoise habitat, buying conservation credit on the public lands around Gold Butte was one way of doing so. Clark County paid for the BLM grazing permits to be permanently retired, a win-win for the ranchers whose cows were increasingly in conflict with the native species. Mr. Bundy wasn’t entitled to avail himself of the payment since he wasn’t a legal permit holder in 1998, but had he been playing by the rules with the federal agency, there would have been no reason he couldn’t cash out on his cows.
Voluntary grazing retirement allows ranchers to get out of the business and the grazed lands a chance to recover and improve as habitat for imperiled species. Conservation groups and private foundations will pay the ranchers, but the federal government needs to allow it on all public lands. This can be accomplished through legislative action, a simple mandate to allow for permanent retirement of relinquished permits. There are ranchers itching to go in many places throughout the west, and the pen-stroke of Congress would solve their woes.
3. End the permit renewal riders
The federal agencies can’t keep up with processing grazing permits with complete environmental reviews and so Congress has been offering them a free pass to renew without review since 2004. This means thousands of permits are rubberstamped for ten-year terms without having their impacts even evaluated. Without any checks on the environmental impacts of livestock grazing, the damage to our natural and cultural resources is done long before the agencies notice. If the agencies had more money (see #1, above), perhaps they’d be able to keep up better with their workload. So Congress should stop giving them a way out and the American public should demand environmental accountability on our public lands. We simply cannot keep deferring appropriate management on public lands: these are the last strongholds of native species and functional ecosystems, and climate resilience depends on improving the ecological conditions across the west.
Now is the time to end the free rides, failed oversight, and fiscal nightmare of the public lands grazing program.
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The US Military's Campaign Against Media Freedom |
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Sunday, 15 June 2014 14:52 |
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Manning writes: “I believe that the current limits on press freedom and excessive government secrecy make it impossible for Americans to grasp fully what is happening in the wars we finance.”
A woman protesting voter fraud in Iraq’s general election. (photo: Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty Images)
The US Military's Campaign Against Media Freedom
By Chelsea Manning, The New York Times
15 June 14
 hen I chose to disclose classified information in 2010, I did so out of a love for my country and a sense of duty to others. I’m now serving a sentence of 35 years in prison for these unauthorized disclosures. I understand that my actions violated the law.
However, the concerns that motivated me have not been resolved. As Iraq erupts in civil war and America again contemplates intervention, that unfinished business should give new urgency to the question of how the United States military controlled the media coverage of its long involvement there and in Afghanistan. I believe that the current limits on press freedom and excessive government secrecy make it impossible for Americans to grasp fully what is happening in the wars we finance.
If you were following the news during the March 2010 elections in Iraq, you might remember that the American press was flooded with stories declaring the elections a success, complete with upbeat anecdotes and photographs of Iraqi women proudly displaying their ink-stained fingers. The subtext was that United States military operations had succeeded in creating a stable and democratic Iraq.
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=30004"><span class="small">Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight</span></a>
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Sunday, 15 June 2014 14:51 |
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Silver writes: “If you were at a dinner party and the woman seated across from you was a wealthy, white, well-educated, liberal-to-moderate Democrat, it would be fairly safe for you to assume she supported gay marriage. But if that woman were Hillary Clinton, you’d have been wrong — at least until March 2013”
Hillary Clinton. (photo: Reuters)
Most Women Like Hillary Clinton ‘Evolved’ on Gay Marriage Years Ago
By Nate Silver, Five Thirty Eight
15 June 14
 f you were at a dinner party and the woman seated across from you was a wealthy, white, well-educated, liberal-to-moderate Democrat, it would be fairly safe for you to assume she supported gay marriage.
But if that woman were Hillary Clinton, you’d have been wrong — at least until March 2013, when Clinton publicly announced her support for gay marriage. At least, Clinton would like us to believe she hadn’t supported gay marriage before. In an interview with Clinton on Thursday, NPR’s Terry Gross repeatedly asked the former secretary of state when and how her views on gay marriage had “evolved.” Did Clinton privately support gay marriage for years but wait to express that view until she perceived the politics favored it? Or did her personal view change only recently? Clinton told Gross that, like many Americans, she had rethought the issue, and resisted the implication that her personal beliefs on gay marriage had differed from her publicly stated views.
Rather than trying to read Clinton’s mind, we can look at the views of the Americans who are most like her. No woman, of course, is exactly like Hillary Clinton — no other woman has been a secretary of state, a U.S. senator and a first lady. But those private citizens who share the most in common with Clinton were well ahead of the curve on gay marriage. I estimate that somewhere between 75 percent and 90 percent of them supported gay marriage as of 2008.
The way I came up with these figures was to look at individual-level voter data from the 2008 exit polls, specifically from the three states — California, Arizona and Florida — that voted on gay marriage ballot initiatives that year. This data allows us to understand, with quite a bit of detail and precision, what demographic and political characteristics predict a voter’s likelihood of supporting gay marriage. (In the past I’ve used this technique to estimate support for gay marriage in every state.) In the output below, from a logistic regression analysis on this data, positive coefficients are associated with an increased likelihood of supporting gay marriage, and negative coefficients with a reduced one.
The results should be pretty intuitive. The probability of supporting gay marriage rises if a voter:
- is Democratic
- is liberal
- is white
- is young
- is female (although the effect of gender is very minor once other categories are accounted for)
- is more highly-educated
- comes from a higher-income household
- lives in an urban area
- is atheist or reports having no religious affiliation
- if religious, is a non-evangelical Protestant, rather than an evangelical, Mormon or Catholic.
Almost all Clinton’s characteristics would predict a higher likelihood of supporting gay marriage: She is Democratic, female, a non-evangelical Protestant and in the exit polls’ top categories for household income and education. The only factor that would negatively predict support for gay marriage is her age: Clinton turned 60 in late 2007.
Two other characteristics are a bit ambiguous. First, is Clinton liberal or moderate? “Liberal” might seem like the obvious answer. Clinton was slightly to the left of the average Democratic member of Congress based on her voting record in the Senate. The average Democratic member of Congress is pretty liberal to begin with. (Members of Congress are more consistent in taking liberal or conservative positions than members of the public, who have more heterodox views.)
But a voter’s ideology in the exit polls is based on how she chooses to define herself — and Clinton has sometimes avoided describing herself as a liberal (instead, she called herself a “modern progressive” during a 2007 debate). Would she say “liberal” or “moderate” if asked privately in an exit poll where “progressive” is not an option?
Whether Clinton’s residence is urban or suburban is also up for question. Before Bill Clinton’s presidential run, the Clintons lived in the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock, Arkansas, which would be considered urban. While he was president, the White House in Washington, D.C., was their sole residence until 1999, when they purchased a home in Chappaqua, New York, in suburban Westchester County, and began filing their taxes from there. The Clintons have also maintained a home in Washington, however.
So we’ll run the numbers two ways: First, for women who are liberal and urban, and second, for women who are moderate and suburban — with both groups matching Clinton’s demographic profile in all other respects.
The regression model estimates that about 90 percent of liberal, urban women like Clinton supported gay marriage as of 2008. Meanwhile, about 75 percent of moderate, suburban women like Clinton did so then.
We can also make some estimates of how these numbers have changed over time. (Gory details: I accomplish this by varying the constant term in the regression, calibrating the model such that overall support for gay marriage matches the trend line from national opinion polls from the year in question. This implicitly assumes that the rising tide toward gay marriage has lifted support levels among all demographic groups over time — a reasonable but not perfect assumption.)
The majority of women with this profile supported gay marriage long ago. I estimate, for instance, that about 75 percent of liberal, urban, Democratic women who otherwise match Clinton’s demographic characteristics did so even in 1992. And support among moderate, suburban Democratic women like Clinton rose above 50 percent shortly after her husband took office in 1993. Those figures might seem high. But there were some people who supported gay marriage in the early 1990s — about 25 percent of the U.S. population, based on the trend from national opinion polls. These were just the sort of people likely to be among that 25 percent.
But perhaps Clinton should be compared to other politicians and not to private citizens. President Obama was also slow to announce his support for gay marriage. So were most Democrats in the U.S. Senate.
As the Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf points out, politicians who changed their position on gay marriage risk being criticized however they explain the shift. Either they look like they weren’t willing to stand behind their convictions or they admit to holding a position, until very recently, that many Democratic voters now regard as wrongheaded and even bigoted. A third option, also fraught with complications, might be to embrace a distinction between private views and public positions for elected officials in a representative democracy.
Nonetheless, it’s fair to be suspicious of politicians like Clinton who imply that they were just regular Americans going along with the tide. The median American came to support gay marriage only recently — but the Americans most like Clinton did so a long while ago.
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The Problem With Philanthropy |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=28610"><span class="small">David Sirota, In These Times</span></a>
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Sunday, 15 June 2014 14:49 |
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Sirota writes: “Inequality and democracy are the kind of topics you may expect to hear about at a political convention, but not necessarily at a tech industry conference. And so former Vice President Al Gore’s discussion at Nashville's tech-focused Southland Conference this week could be viewed in context as a jeremiad spotlighting taboo truths about tech culture and philanthropic traditions.”
Al Gore. (photo: Getty Images)
The Problem With Philanthropy
By David Sirota, In These Times
15 June 14
The occasional $120 million check doesn’t offset tech billionaires’ erosion of the public sector.
nequality and democracy are the kind of topics you may expect to hear about at a political convention, but not necessarily at a tech industry conference. And so former Vice President Al Gore’s discussion at Nashville's tech-focused Southland Conference this week could be viewed in context as a jeremiad spotlighting taboo truths about tech culture and philanthropic traditions.
Discussing the economy, Gore lamented that “we have rising levels of inequality and chronic underinvestment” in public programs. He reminded the crowd that when “95 percent of all the additional national income in the U.S., since the recovery began in ’09, goes to the top 1%, that’s not an Occupy Wall Street slogan, that’s a fact.”
Gore may have been alluding to the tech economy becoming a significant driver of that inequality.
As Princeton economist Alan Blinder noted in a January Wall Street Journal op-ed, technology is “clearly the major villain” in rising economic inequality, as “e-commerce eliminated many ‘ordinary’ jobs (while) enhanc(ing) the opportunities and rewards for some ‘extraordinary’ jobs.” One way to see this is in the app economy, which often rewards billions to companies with a relatively few employees, thus concentrating wealth in fewer hands.
Later in his discussion, Gore said that “democracy has been hacked” by moneyed interests. Then, in response to a question about tech billionaires spending big on allegedly philanthropic enterprises, he said: “That’s a good thing, as long as the rest of us don’t ever fall prey to the illusion that charity is going to do the job of what democracy needs to do.”
Those latter comments come only a few weeks after Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg announced a $120 million donation to San Francisco-area schools. That donation came only a few years after California considered a ballot measure to increase funding for its schools. Zuckerberg was notably absent from the campaign to pass the measure.
That detail is germane to Gore’s point about charity and democracy. Indeed, there seems to be a trend of billionaires and tech firms making private donations to public institutions ostensibly with the goal of improving public services. Yet, many of these billionaires are absent from efforts to raise public resources for those same institutions. Zuckerberg is only one example.
For instance, hedge funders make big donations to charter schools. Yet, the hedge fund industry lobbies against higher taxes that would generate new revenue for education.
Likewise, there are the Koch Brothers, who simultaneously finance the nationwide anti-tax movement while making huge donations to public institutions.
Meanwhile, Microsoft boasts about making donations to schools, while the company has opposed proposals to increase taxes to fund those schools.
To understand the conflict between democracy and this kind of philanthropy, remember that private donations typically come with conditions about how the money must be allocated. In education, those conditions can be about anything from curriculum to testing standards to school structure. No matter what the conditions are, though, they effectively circumvent the democratic process and dictate policy to public institutions. While those institutions can reject a private donor's money, they are often desperate for resources.
In this, we see a vicious cycle that undermines democratic control. Big money interests use anti-democratic campaign finance laws to fund anti-tax policies that deprive public institutions of resources. Those policies make public institutions desperate for private resources. When philanthropists offer those resources, they often make the money contingent on public officials relinquishing democratic control and acceding to ideological demands.
Disruption theory is usually the defense of all this—the hypothesis being that billionaire cash is the only way to force public institutions to do what they supposedly need to do. But whether or not you believe that theory, Gore is correct: It isn't democratic. In fact, it is quite the opposite.
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