Magpie

Saturday, November 15, 2003

The haves and the have-nots.

We're embarassed not to have noticed this story, given that it involves the state next door to where Magpie lives, so we're really glad that the UK blog also not found in nature casts such a wide net.

The San Juan Islands are an island chain lying between the mainland of Washington State and BC's Vancouver Island. They're one of the most beautiful places we've ever seen and (obviously) a very desirable place to live. That desirability has led to an influx of extremely well-to-do residents has driven up the cost of land and housing. Coupled with the typical prevalence of low-wage jobs in a largely tourism-based economy, many long-term residents are barely getting by, and some find themselves with no choice but to leave for the mainland.

Anti-poverty activists see a national trend playing out under a microscope in San Juan County: The rich get richer; the poor poorer; and the middle class continues to shrink.

The contrasts are stark.

Fourteen percent of San Juan County's children live below the poverty level -- with their parents working full time.

Public schools on the islands report growing numbers of students in subsidized lunch programs, including about 40 percent to 45 percent on Lopez Island. Almost half the babies in the county are born on Medicaid.

But even as lines at food banks lengthen, a new class of megarich install helicopter pads and computer-controlled trout streams, build $1 million caretaker homes for caretakers and manse-sized garages to house collections of Ferraris and Audis.

One islander describes how he was hired by a Microsoft Corp. executive to mow the lawn 24 hours a day, just because his client hated to get his feet wet.

Via Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:54 PM | Get permalink

We interrupt this weblog...

... to bring you up to date on what's going on with Magpie.

We're suffering from a bad case of blogger's fatigue, complicated by our need to make a living and our hopes that we'll finish our MA thesis sometime this century. We've been having trouble mustering up the energy to post, and we realize that the real problem is that we're not sure anymore what we're trying to say with Magpie.

Lately, it seems like we've turned into a clipping service, just pointing to stuff on the web, rather than adding any real comments of our own or doing much to help make sense of the overload of information that we've all subjected to. Being a clipping service isn't necessarily bad, but we don't feel we're even doing a reliable job of that. We know that whenever we have the time to go really deep into a subject, Magpie's readership goes up ... but lately we haven't been able to spend the time that this sort of post requires ... We notice that lack, and from the dropping number of people visiting Magpie, it's obvious that many of you do too.

It seems like there are several things we could do now.

-- We could just shut Magpie down and go on with our life, on the theory that there are plenty of blogs that do at least as good a job as we do.

-- We could shut Magpie down, and become a contributor to someone else's blog, on the theory that we do have something to contribute to the blogosphere ... just not enough to warrant a blog of our own.

-- We could bring one or more other voices to Magpie, so that we can post more stuff more often, and (hopefully) broaden the scope of the blog some.

-- We could keep going on the way we are, and hope that our we have more time for Magpie soon, and that our feeling of being overloaded eases off.

With this last option especially, we need to hear from regular Magpie readers about why you keep coming back: What do you think this blog does well? What sucks? What would you like to see more/less of?

And you bloggers who read us (we know there are quite a few of you), have you faced what we're dealing with right now? How did you solve the problems?

We'd really like to make this a conversation between us & you, so while we'll certainly read any private email we get on this, we'd appreciate it if comments are made using the link at the bottom of this (and every) post.

Thanks a lot for listening. We return you to the normal Magpie fare.

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:39 PM | Get permalink

The Mad Prophet.

One of our favorite blogs, is back from hiatus, and seems to be as pissed off about stuff as ever.

Welcome back.

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:21 PM | Get permalink

Thursday, November 13, 2003

Magpie reader makes good.

She had a piece she wrote picked to be one of today's reader commentaries at BuzzFlash.

Good going, Kathleen!

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:15 PM | Get permalink

Why Magpie didn't blog today.

We went to hear Cape Breton fiddler Natalie MacMaster and her band. The show was pretty slick, and the jazz number left us cold. But even the problems with the sound (her poor sound man had walking pneumonia) couldn't hide the fact that MacMaster really knows her way around a violin. Her version of the Scots tune 'Blue Bonnets Over the Border' was stunning.

If Natalie MacMaster is coming to your town, don't miss her.

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:59 PM | Get permalink

Wednesday, November 12, 2003

Yes, things are worse than we think.

That's the overwhelming impression Magpie went away with after reading a wide-ranging interview that economist Paul Krugman gave to Terrence McNally of KPFK radio in Los Angeles.

Krugman talks about how a middle-of-the-road economist who supported free trade (and was attacked for it by some of the left) became one of the strongest voices against Dubya's from the left, due to the obvious contradictions and dangers of Dubya's policies. He spends a good part of the interview elaborating on a point that that many people find hard to believe: With Dubya's administration, the US is dealing with a group of right-wing revolutionaries who don't believe 'in the rules of the game, the legitimacy of the system.'

Krugman warns that, once the administration has targeted a program or institution, it's fruitless to believe that making concessions will be productive. Instead, he says, compromise only makes it easier for Dubya and his right-wing allies to go on to destroy another program or institution. All of this, Krugman maintains, is in support of the administration's ultimate goal of of rolling the country back to what it was like before the New Deal of the 1930s — before there was any such thing as a 'safety net' for the average citizen of the US. As evidence of the administration's ruthlessness in pursuing this end, Krugman points to how Dubya has used the need to respond to the 9/11 attacks as a smokescreen for implementing a right-wing agenda at home and abroad.

This is one of the best interviews with Krugman that Magpie has seen. We suggest going over to AlterNet and reading the whole thing.

McNally: What I haven't heard quite yet is the point which you make very strongly in the book, that the purpose behind the tax cuts is to bankrupt the government, to undermine social programs, so that no one who comes into office after them will have an easy time restoring them.

Krugman: I'm not making that up. That's exactly what the lobbyists and the others behind these people say. The program that the Administration is following looks as if it was designed to implement their ideas. I think it is.

McNally: What would you do? And let me ask it two ways. What would Paul Krugman's solution be? And then, if Paul Krugman were Howard Dean or Wesley Clark or John Kerry – if he were running for office, what would his solution be?

Krugman: Okay. First off, you have to have a plan to get the budget back into balance. It's not possible to have a plan that doesn't include phasing out the bulk, if not all, of the Bush tax cuts. Not all in the first year, we're still in a recession. But a gradual plan to eliminate those tax cuts, bring the tax system back to about where it was in 2000. This would get us most, though not all, of the way to a balanced budget. You could talk about other things on the side, but that would have to be the core of it.

Meanwhile, we need to get the economy moving. To do that, you have to do the things that governments always do during recessions, but this government hasn't. Aid to state and local governments so they aren't laying off schoolteachers and firemen just when the economy is slumping. Public works programs. As it happens, we have a whole backlog of homeland security spending: ports and so on that we should be doing that the government is nickel-and-diming away.

McNally: And a huge amount of federal infrastructure that we just ignore completely.

Krugman: That's right. Just go and do these things which we need done anyway and particularly now. They would also help create jobs. Maybe on top of that we need another round of rebates, but rebates that are fully refundable and go to the people most likely to spend the money.

Is that guaranteed to work? I don't know. But it's certainly has a good chance of working and we haven't tried any of these obvious things.

McNally: How much of that do you think a candidate could say and get away with?

Krugman: I think a candidate has to be fairly forthright. We can argue about whether the whole Bush tax cut or just the upper brackets need to go. But at least they have to say that the upper brackets must go.

And look, I don't know that we'll win. I don't know what tricks the Administration will come up with to divert people's attention, but I think that unless a candidate is really prepared to come out swinging, to say these people are doing the wrong thing by the country, there's no chance. Saying "I'm like Bush only less so" is not going to win this election.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:33 PM | Get permalink

Secret surveillance on the upswing in the US.

PATRIOTWatch noticed a telling paragraph in a USA Today story about the FBI's need for linguists. In explaining that the agency needs translators to deal with material from the increasing number of wiretaps and other surveiallance activities, we find out this:

A senior FBI official says that in the past year, a secret federal court has granted about 2,000 requests by government agents to conduct electronic eavesdropping. In fiscal 2002, the court approved 1,228 similar requests under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

As PATRIOTWatch points out, 2003 has already seen a 63% increase in FISA warrants over 2002, and there are still almost two months left in the year.

FISA warrants are issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a secret US court that authorizes wiretap and search warrants used to investigate people believed to be working as agents of foreign powers. If you want to know more about this court and FISA warrants, Laura Poyneer had this excellent article recently at Open Source Politics.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:09 AM | Get permalink

WD-40.

Susan at Suburban Guerrilla has found many uses for this ubiquitous product.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:00 AM | Get permalink

Tuesday, November 11, 2003

Happy birthday!

To Wampum, which is one year old today.

MB is one of the most articulate and thoughtful bloggers around, and her work on Wampum is one of the main inspirations for this blog. Magpie hopes to see Wampum around for many years to come.

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:28 PM | Get permalink

No welcome mat here.

The Washington Post has a pair of excellent stories today about how post-9/11 visa restrictions are making many potential visitors to the US decide not to come. The first story looks at the broad outlines of the problem:

Because of the new regulations, American universities have lost students and scholars; corporations have suffered production delays, friction with customers and personnel problems; and foreign tourists and conventioneers have decided by the thousands to take their business elsewhere. [...]

Bush administration officials defend the new rules, saying they are keeping terrorists from entering the country. "In the post-9/11 environment, we do not believe that the issues at stake allow us the luxury of erring on the side of expeditious processing," Janice L. Jacobs, deputy assistant secretary of state for visa services, told a congressional committee earlier this year.

But many critics caution that by requiring foreigners to wait weeks or months for visas, Washington is damaging its efforts at public diplomacy. They say the United States is sending a hostile message to the world at a time that the Iraq war and other U.S. policies have blackened perceptions of the United States.

"Our commercial, research and academic institutions have always benefited from the open exchange of people, knowledge and ideas," said Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.). "We need to protect ourselves. But we don't want to go too far and lose the rewards of an open society." [...]

The most significant [of the new visa rules] include a requirement for face-to-face interviews for hundreds of thousands of visa-seekers who previously were excused from such interviews, and the withholding of visas for certain categories of people until the FBI runs name checks to determine that they do not appear to be a threat. That process can take months.

The second report looks at the story of Canadian professor Muzaffar Iqbal, who was to come to the US last December to help plan a conference at Georgetown University. Although born in Pakistan, Iqbal has lived in Canada for almost 25 years.

Iqbal never even got on his plane to the US — he was pulled aside by US immigration officials who were screening passengers at Toronto's Pearson Airport.

The agent took Iqbal's passport. "You are a Pakistani citizen," the agent said, according to Iqbal.

"I said, 'No, I'm a Canadian citizen. You are holding my Canadian passport in your hand.' "

"Yes, but you were born in Pakistan." The agent looked at his passport and said, "You've been to Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan."

"Yes."

"What were you doing there?"

"Research," began Iqbal, who founded the Center for Islam and Science in Canada and had done postdoctoral work at the Montreal Neurological Institute of McGill University. He recalled telling the agent that he had traveled to those countries as part of efforts to help develop scientific institutions in Muslim countries.

The agent took Iqbal to a smaller room and said he had to register. He gave him forms and started asking questions about his background. "Then I realized," Iqbal said, that "this was the famous NSEERS," the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, "and I would have to be fingerprinted and photographed. And I realized if you go to the United States, you are supposed to report every move."

He asked an agent: "Do you think I'm a security threat to your country?"

The reply was: "I'm just doing my job. If I don't do it, I will be fired."

"I said, 'I don't want to go to your country,' " Iqbal recalled. "I took my passport and I just left quickly." Iqbal said he has decided to stay away from the United States "until they remove this condition."

| | Posted by Magpie at 7:15 PM | Get permalink

Reading the economic tea leaves.

The Economic Policy Institute knows how to read the US economy's tea leaves better than just about anyone. This progressive economic think-tank has just put out a new paper about the current 'jobless recovery' in the US, and the paper is a welcome counterbalance to all of the economic boosterism coming out of Washington (and echoed in the press).

According to EPI, the current slump in the labor market has been underestimated because analysts tend to focus on the official unemployment rate and gains in real hourly wages. EPI warns that the slump is 'setting records for severity in terms of sustained loss of jobs, the increase in labor market slack, and the decline in aggregate wage and salary income.' In other words, people keep losing jobs, unemployed workers are getting discouraged and dropping out of the labor force, and the number of actual jobs (as well as the number of hours worked per job) is continuing to drop.

The paper does an excellent job of making difficult economic data understandable even to Magpie, whose brain tends to hurt when confronted with too many statistics. While we learned many things about the current economic mess, this here especially caught our attention:

The effect of the "missing" labor market on the unemployment rate — The unusually prolonged loss of jobs has caused an unprecedented number of people to refrain from actively looking for work, and therefore to be excluded from the unemployment measurement. Had the labor force grown more in line with the population—as it has in past labor slumps—another 2.3 million people would have been in the labor force in October 2003. This "missing" labor force is significant because the unemployment rate would have been 7.4% had the 2.3 million "missing" workers been considered as unemployed. The 7.4% unemployment figure provides a better measure of current slack in the labor market than the actual unemployment rate of 6.0%. The 1.4 percentage-point difference reflects the people pushed to the sidelines of the labor market who can be expected to seek work again once job prospects improve. As a result, the official unemployment rate should not be expected to fall very much when the employment picture actually begins to improve.

When Magpie worked as a reporter, one of the rules of thumb we used when writing about unemployment was that the actual unemployment rate was at least 25 percent higher than the official rate from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We can't say that we're particularly happy to see that this rule of thumb still applies.

| | Posted by Magpie at 6:29 PM | Get permalink

Bad apples in Magpie's family tree.

In Magpie's continuing efforts to bring you the best corvid news in the blogosphere, sometimes we have to bring you stories we're not proud of. In this case, it appears that our black-feathered kin in east Africa are behaving very badly.

According to the BBC, crows in Tanzania are killing off the native birds as they multiply and spread across the country. Birds such as the paradise flycatcher have been reduced to a fraction of their former numbers in areas where crows are common. Things are apparently the worst in Tazania's capital, Dar-es-Salaam, where there may be as many as a half-million crows. There have been successful efforts in the past to keep crow numbers under control, but those efforts have lapsed, much to the detriment of the native birds.

Sadly, the fact that there are crows at all in Tanzania is a consequence of Western colonialism. The birds were first introduced to Zanzibar (now part of Tanzania) in 1891, on the order of the British governor. He had crows imported from India (then another British colony) so that they would eat the debris and litter in the streets of Dar-es-Salaam.

Crows are amongst the most intelligent birds and their hunting skills are finely tuned, according to Ms [Fiona] Reid [author of Birds of Dar es Salaam]. "Crows often work as a team. One will chase a bird away from its nest by swooping aggressively at it, leaving the way open for the second bird to steal the egg," she said.

This entrepreneurial flare [sic] is taking its toll on the indigenous bird life of East Africa, driving many species from their natural habitats.

"The effect on indigenous birds has been drastic," Fiona Reid told BBC News Online. "Numerous species, such as the African paradise flycatcher and many sunbirds, have virtually disappeared from Dar es Salaam gardens."

The situation is worsening rapidly. Crows are working their way further inland, feeding off the rubbish that East Africa's growing human population is producing.

| | Posted by Magpie at 5:50 PM | Get permalink

Putting his money where is mouth is.

Billionaire financier George Soros has dropped another US $5 million into the pockets of Dubya's domestic opponents, this time to MoveOn.org. This donation follows another US $10 million that Soros has recently given to other groups on the left, in much the same way as he has spent more than US $5 billion to bankroll efforts to form open societies in more than 50 countries, including those in the former Soviet bloc.

Soros believes that a "supremacist ideology" guides this White House. He hears echoes in its rhetoric of his childhood in occupied Hungary. "When I hear Bush say, 'You're either with us or against us,' it reminds me of the Germans." It conjures up memories, he said, of Nazi slogans on the walls, Der Feind Hort mit ("The enemy is listening"). "My experiences under Nazi and Soviet rule have sensitized me," he said in a soft Hungarian accent. [...]

Asked whether he would trade his $7 billion fortune to unseat Bush, Soros opened his mouth. Then he closed it. The proposal hung in the air: Would he become poor to beat Bush?

He said: "If someone guaranteed it."

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:01 AM | Get permalink

Are you for US or against US?

Find out whether you are a patriot, courtesy of cartoonist Mark Fiore and Mother Jones.

Magpie would have made this a longer post, but we have to head off to see the federal prosecutor. It seems they want to ask us some questions because of our test result.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:46 AM | Get permalink

Monday, November 10, 2003

Dissecting the success of the US right.

Economist/columnist Paul Krugman looks at new books by Molly Ivins/Lou Dubose and Joe Conason in the New York Review of Books. As tends to be the case with reviews for this particular publication, Krugman's article is as much a showcase for his own views as it is a review of the two books at hand.

The most striking feature of these stories is the rawness of it all. Never mind all that stuff you've read in the past about how political contributions buy "access," which allows interest groups to influence policy. The companies now riding high don't just contribute to Republican campaigns, they contribute directly to the personal wealth of future (and in some cases current) public officials. And they don't influence policy: they write it, directly.

The big question, of course, is "Why is this happening?" Not why they are doing this—greed springs eternal—but why they are able to get away with it. What happened to the outrage the press and the public are supposed to feel when government ceases to be run for their interests? [...]

Money is surely part of the story. Recent statistics confirm that income inequality in the United States has returned to Gilded Age levels; maybe, then, our newly empowered rich are in a position to buy themselves a return to Gilded Age politics. Religion is also part of the story: in effect, the religious right—a majority of whose adherents are very much losers in the new economic order—seems to have made a deal to support low taxes for the rich and weak regulation in return for a more Bible-friendly government. And 9/11 was, of course, the best gift the right could have wished for—a perfect occasion to shift politics to a permanent war footing, in which criticism of our leaders could be shouted down as unpatriotic. But the success of today's right, despite its manifest greediness and irresponsibility, remains a puzzle. And it's a puzzle we'd better solve soon, if we want to preserve the America we grew up in.

Via AlterNet.

| | Posted by Magpie at 4:51 PM | Get permalink

Another huge surprise.

The same California public officials who backed a move to fund electronic voting machines for the state's counties are now working for the companies that make the machines.

Out of the tumultuous 2000 presidential election has come a national initiative to replace punch-card voting devices with modern optical-scanning and touch-screen systems. And in California, where 54 counties are expected to buy about $400 million in new equipment, some voting machine makers are hiring former government officials such as Jones to supply prestige, entre or expertise for a competitive edge.

There is no prohibition against former officials working for election machine companies, unless they lobby their old agency within a year of leaving. And elections officials and vendors defend their close relationships, saying that they improve election systems and benefit the public.

But Kim Alexander, president of the nonprofit California Voter Foundation, said, "The regulators and the regulated are so closely intertwined that the regulators go almost exclusively to [the vendors] for information and answers to questions."

Several major voting machine companies do more than provide technical expertise and guidance on new regulations. They spend thousands of dollars on major conferences of election officials from coast to coast. They pay for booths to display their wares. They foot the bill for hospitality suites and, sometimes, banquets, pool parties and boat outings — even a Maine lobster bake.

Via LA Times.

[Free reg. req'd.]

| | Posted by Magpie at 4:48 PM | Get permalink

Sunday, November 9, 2003

McWhining.

It seems that McDonald's is unhappy that Merriam-Webster has included the word 'McJobs' in its most recent dictionary update. In the update, a McJob is defined as 'low paying and dead-end work.'

In an open letter to Merriam-Webster, McDonald's CEO Jim Cantalupo said the term is "an inaccurate description of restaurant employment" and "a slap in the face to the 12 million men and women" who work in the restaurant industry.

Magpie suggests that if McDonalds and other fast-food and service industry employers paid decent wages and gave decent benefits (or even any benefits in some cases), the word 'McJobs' wouldn't exist. We'd suggest further that the real 'slap in the face' is the alleged paychecks that low-wage workers receive for what is usually very hard labor.

Note for non-US readers: Merriam-Webster publishes one of the authoritative dictionaries of US English (equivalent to Australia's Macqaurie, for example).

Via AP.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:12 AM | Get permalink