Anchorage protests against police brutality are planned for Saturday at least in a couple of locations in Alaska.
One group is meeting at Town Square Park in Anchorage, and the organizer has warned people not to bring children or the elderly, but to make sure you have a mask, in case there is tear gas:
Another protest is planned for the REI parking lot in the Midtown Mall, at the corner of Northern Lights and Denali, at 2 pm.
In Fairbanks, a similar protest is planned for 2 pm at Veterans Memorial Park.
Anchorage Police Chief Justin Doll issued a long statement today, decrying the recent apparent police brutality in Minneapolis, where a man died after having his neck sadistically crushed by an officer of the law. Police Chief Justin Doll issued this statement:
The events of this last week demonstrate there is still much to discuss about the relationships between communities and their police departments. I wanted to take this opportunity to reach out and connect with you about your police department.
First, I think it is important to state unequivocally that every law enforcement professional I know was left speechless by the event in Minneapolis. It is simply unfathomable conduct by a police officer. There are very real and complicated issues in the relationship between many police departments and their communities. The unrest that many cities are experiencing stems from a lack of trust in their police force, as a result of current and historical injustices that have occurred in those communities. Trust is not something that can be established overnight, it must be earned.
Community trust is something we talk about frequently at APD, at every level, and take very seriously. The relationship we have built with the community we serve has taken decades to earn, and we believe very strongly that it is our duty to maintain and improve it every day, on every call for service. APD has a clear track record of holding our officers accountable for misconduct, and being transparent about it. We have experienced officer misconduct in the past, and I cannot promise that we will never have a problem here again. What I can absolutely guarantee is that if we do, the department leadership will react swiftly to take the appropriate criminal and administrative steps to hold the involved officer accountable for his or her actions. We also take preemptive action by thoroughly training our officers.
We know that we all come from different backgrounds, walks of life, experiences, and places. It’s our responsibility to ensure our officers have the tools to navigate these differences. From the very beginning as recruits, and throughout their careers, APD officers are given extensive training in areas like:
Developing an awareness of personal bias and understanding hidden bias
Understanding how culture impacts behavior
How cultural awareness can actually help them do their jobs more effectively
Discussing the diverse and unique cultures found in our community
De-escalation techniques
These subjects and others are important tools for an officer to understand how to successfully interact with all members of our community. This personal interaction is the baseline of everything we do, so it is imperative that our officers become expert communicators in any situation.
APD conducts significant training in both de-escalation and cultural sensitivity. Even more importantly we train our people and have a fundamental expectation that every person we contact is treated with dignity and respect, regardless of their socioeconomic status, race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or any other group they may identify with. When you are committed to treating everyone with respect, you can overcome any implicit or unconscious bias you may have. It doesn’t matter if you are a victim, witness, or a suspect. You are all human beings and your lives matter to us. This is a cornerstone of our culture at APD – compassionate professionalism and respect in all that we do.
I hope that some of this information is useful and helps you understand how committed our police department is to serving every individual in our city while upholding the rule of law. Our relationship with you means everything to us, and we will continue to work hard to earn your trust every day. I am very thankful for the men and women serving at the Anchorage Police Department, and I hope you are as proud of them as I am. We are here for you, and we can accomplish anything when we work together.
The parent company for the Pebble Project got a big bump in its stock price on Thursday, after a letter from regulators noted that the schedule for the permit was being met and that issues were being satisfactorily resolved.
The 25 percent increase in stock value for Northern Dynasty occurred after a Thursday, May 28 letter was released from Chris Hladick, Region 10 administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency.
The letter was addressed to Colonel David Hibner, Alaska District Engineer for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Hladick noted that the working relationship between the EPA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had been productive: “The Corps has demonstrated its commitment to the spirit of the dispute resolution process pursuant to the 1992 Memorandum of Agreement between EPA and the Department of the Army regarding CWA Section 404(q) by the extensive engagement with the EPA over the recent months. The EPA appreciates the Corps’ recent commitment to continue this coordination into the future, outside of the formal dispute resolution process outlined in the MOA,” Hladick wrote.
While to most observers it was merely a cordial letter from one bureaucrats to another, to mining advocates it was a signal that the two agencies had not hit any impasses, and that the environmental impact statement could be on track for release this summer since everything was currently on track, according to the calendar of tasks that needed to be completed.
The Pebble Project is perhaps the most controversial development project in Alaska history, as it is in what environmentalists say are headwaters for the rich Bristol Bay salmon fishery. The project was blocked for years by lawsuits from environmentalists and by the EPA itself, which at one point slapped a preemptive denial of a permit on the company, not allowing it to even apply for a necessary permit.
Four members of the 14-member Senate Majority are in the doghouse with their Republican leadership because of their votes favoring a stimulus dividend during the final hours of the legislative session that ended last week.
Before the session came to a close in Juneau, Senators Mia Costello, Shelley Hughes, Mike Shower, and Lora Reinbold did not vote the way the Republican majority leadership wanted them to vote regarding a COVID-19 relief check for all Alaskans.
IN THE WEEDS: A VOTE ON THE STIMULUS DIVIDEND
It was a procedural vote and involved parliamentary maneuvers that most readers will skip over:
The votes came after Sen. Reinbold proposed four amendments to the COVID-19 relief money appropriation.
Senate President Cathy Giessel ruled those amendments out of order, and Reinbold objected and challenged the ruling of the chair.
Votes were then taken on whether Reinbold’s amendments could be voted on. Ten Republicans voted one way, but the four conservative Republicans were more varied in their votes on the amendments, voting for some but not others. They did not vote as a bloc.
In summary, Giessel prevented a vote on a dividend stimulus check.
Then, after she gaveled out, she punished the four Republican legislators who wanted the ability to vote their conscience.
NOW TO THE PUNISHMENT
The punishment for the four came after they were called to a private meeting with Senators Click Bishop and Bert Stedman in Anchorage this week. Bishop, who flew down from Fairbanks, and Stedman, who flew up from Sitka, told the four that there would be punishment for their rogue votes.
Sen. Mia Costello said her punishment is that she lost 21 “points,” the equivalent of one staff position. Today, she broke the news to the longest-serving legislative aide in Alaska history, Tom Wright, that he would be let go. Giessel was not allowing the four Republicans to divide up their remaining points so they could keep one person part time.
Sen. Mike Shower, Sen. Lora Reinbold, and Sen. Shelley Hughes had already lost staff due to previous votes that went against leadership, so punishing them was more difficult.
Giessel told them that they would no longer have access to the general legislative staff that serves the entire Republican Majority: Press Secretary Daniel McDonald, I.T. expert Peter Torkelson, Attorney Chad Hutchinson, and natural resource expert Rena Miller, who is no longer Giessel’s chief of staff but who is now staff to the Majority.
QUESTION:IS THERE ACTUALLY A REPUBLICAN MAJORITY LEFT IN THE SENATE?
The four senators who represent conservative strongholds in the state are now so marginalized by their Republican leadership team that they have no benefits left for staying in the Majority at all.
If the four decide to walk away from the Republican caucus, that majority would be reduced to 10 — not a majority. Giessel would have to turn to her allies on the Democrat Minority side — Sen. Tom Begich, Sen. Bill Wielechowski, and Sen. Lyman Hoffman. (Hoffman already serves Giessel as her majority leader and suffered no punishment from Giessel even after he broke ranks and voted against the budget.)
Forming a coalition with Democrats during an election year is tricky business for those Republicans up for election. But the punishment given to the four conservative Republicans will only burnish their own credentials in their districts. Up for election this year is Shelley Hughes, but also Cathy Giessel.
With the latest punishments, coming after the session gaveled out “sine die,” the Giessel-led majority has no more sticks to use to beat the Senate Republicans into submission.
According to Forbes, a venerable business publication, Alaska is hiding its nursing home deaths that are due to COVID-19, the deadly coronavirus that seems to have a special vengeance for the elderly and infirm.
Forbes said “the eleven states that thus far have refused to report COVID nursing home deaths—Alaska, Hawaii, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas, Missouri, Michigan, and Vermont—need to start reporting their death tolls in long-term care facilities. The federal government has instituted such a requirement for nursing home deaths occurring after May 5, but as Ohio teaches us, it is also important to get the data from the previous several months.
Only it’s not true.
Alaska isn’t reporting its nursing home deaths because none of the 10 who died from conditions related to COVID-19 were nursing home residents. MRAK contacted the State of Alaska and was told that the mistake may have resulted in a misunderstanding and they are reaching out to the publication for a correction.
The story, by columnist and medical analyst Avik Roy, points out that a majority of deaths from COVID-19 in the United States are in nursing or retirement homes.
“Americans are vigorously debating the merits of continuing to lock down the U.S. economy to prevent the spread of COVID-19. A single statistic may hold the key to resolving this debate: the astounding share of deaths occurring in nursing homes and assisted living facilities,” Roy writes in Forbes.
COVID-19 cases in Alaska took a big one-day jump with 13 new cases reported, the most since late March.
Seven of the new cases were diagnosed on the Kenai Peninsula, while Anchorage had four cases, Juneau and the North Slope each had one new case.
The jump followed several days when only one or two cases were reported each day.
There have been a total of 425 cases in the state, with 366 of those now recovered.
No additional deaths were reported; 10 Alaskans have died of conditions related to COVID-19.
There are 10 people currently hospitalized who have the infection, but there are no Alaskans on ventilators, according to the state’s reporting.
The State’s Chief Medical Officer Anne Zink advised last week that as the state opened up the economy again there would be clusters of the coronavirus that medical professionals and epidemiologists would have to investigate and try to contain.
THE DISTRICT NEEDS TO ALIGN ITS POLICIES WITH STATE LAW
The Mat-Su School Board put a controversial decision about several controversy-inspiring books on hold for now, while it asks district administrators and staff to take a look at their process for bringing curriculum decisions to the board, and get back to the board later this year.
Earlier this year, the school board made national news by removing a handful of books from the high school required reading list for some English courses.
Some board members said the books are controversial enough that in this litigious age, any parent could end up suing over them, claiming discrimination.
But from the Left came organizations such as the ACLU, which claimed the Valley school board was stomping on the First Amendment and “banning books.”
The decision to take the books off the regular reading list for the high school curriculum happened during the height of the COVID-19 shutdown, and some members of the public found that too convenient, and said that the public process had been skirted.
But in fact, it was really the district’s own procedures that had been skipped, said Tom Bergey, who is president of the Mat-Su School Board. He’s on board for getting the job done right, even if it means the reading list won’t be approved — or disapproved — for many weeks.
Bergey said that his research shows that State law says parents have the right to direct their own children’s education, and school districts must have policies and procedures in place to ensure that parents are making informed “opt in” as well as “opt out” choices for controversial subjects. When the district administrators brought the reading list to the board, that policy-and-procedure part had been skipped. The parents were never considered.
In fact, the Mat-Su district policy states that if a parent complains about the curriculum, they will have to accept the decision of the superintendent or the superintendent’s designee as final.
Bergey says that the district’s policy and the state’s policy are at odds, and that the district will need to revise how it allows parental choice before the board takes a vote on any specific reading curriculum.
The five books in question have been litigated all over the country for years:
“The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien
“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou
“Catch-22” by Joseph Heller
“Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison
“The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald
All of them have issues of controversy — mostly graphic depictions of a sexual nature, rape, violence, or racist stereotyping.
Defenders of the books in question say that teachers are able to give students context before they read the books, and that teachers themselves, not the elected representatives on the school board, should be making the decision about the curriculum.
The Mat-Su School Board has hired a new superintendent, but he won’t be on board for a few weeks. Bergey plans to ask the new superintendent to analyze the district’s policies and procedures for reading curriculum, and to bring forward solutions to the school board for its consideration later this year. He doesn’t know how long that will take, but Superintendent Randy Trani starts on July 1.
Meanwhile, in recent weeks while the decision about the books raged in the mainstream media, the school board and district have received thousands of emails from people saying they want those books in the curriculum for high school students. Most of the emails were from outside the district, and also outside Alaska.
Some, however, were from superintendents or school board members from around the country who gave sage advice on how to make decisions about books that are, in the views of some, not appropriate for children.
“We’re not running a book barbecue here,” said Jim Hart, Vice President of the school board. “You can get a list of hundreds or thousands of titles, rated X all the way to rated G. When we get aligned with state law, we may go back and take out the same texts, or maybe even different texts. “
Whatever the decision is, he said, it should not be emotional, but about helping students achieve academically. That, Hart said, was the reason he ran for school board in the first place — to improve academic performance throughout the borough.
HE CRITICIZES THE WORKER VISA PROGRAM, BUT SERIOUSLY…
Conservative television host Tucker Carlson sees nine Republican senators who need to be removed during their next primary. On the list are Alaska Senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan.
Alaska’s senators and seven others signed a letter addressed to President Donald Trump, asking him to protect seasonal guest worker visa programs.
Some critics say that guest workers compete with Americans for scarce jobs during a time when unemployment has reached 25 percent nationwide. Carlson is one of those critics, saying white collar jobs are going to foreign workers, and should be reserved for Americans.
But in Alaska, guest workers are employed in fish processing plants in remote locations, sometimes at sea. Finding enough Americans who will work the long and extremely hard hours for the short fishing season in Bristol Bay and Dutch Harbor is nearly impossible for fish processors. They recruit Americans year round, aggressively seeking workers at job fairs in the Lower 48.
But for the short, intense fish processing season, they have to fill in with workers from overseas. Not enough Americans have applied for these jobs in recent decades. These have always been jobs that were filled with foreign workers. It’s how the Alaska commercial catch gets to the world.
Thus, the guest worker visa program, a vital support for the high-quality protein that Alaska supplies the world, and that America needs more than ever during times of national meat shortages.
A search for seafood processing jobs comes up with dozens upon dozens of available jobs, but the work conditions are more like warnings; these jobs are clearly not for every worker. They are tough jobs in rough conditions. Being an able-bodied young person who has no health condition to manage is key. Being able to stand in wet, cold, and dangerous conditions, wearing rain gear, rubber gloves, and face masks, and working quickly around sharp knives and equipment, are other requirements. You’d better not have a back condition or need a shot of insulin. Seafood processing has no time for that — you’re lucky to get a bathroom break.
“This job requires working constantly with hands, some heavy lifting, and standing for long periods of time. Employee must work quickly in order to meet production deadlines and shall have the ability to understand and follow instructions and safety rules. The work environment can be very wet, and cold,” is how one seafood processor describes the general work conditions.
Anyone who has ever worked a slime line will tell you that summary is an understatement. You’ll be taking Advil the rest of your life after a few summers of this work.
“Seafood processors perform a variety of tasks that can include anything from sorting, cutting and cleaning, grading, packing salmon roe to cleanup. Most of the work is repetitive and tedious. Some work can be very strenuous such as stacking 50 lb cases of frozen product, pushing freezer racks or carts of salmon. Working conditions vary with the assignment, but are generally wet, cold and noisy,” the job description continues.
“Working in a processing plant is not an experience for everyone, and everyone should understand their limitations. If you have any doubts at all, it is in your best interest not to apply for this type of work. People with back or wrist problems should consider employment in another industry,” the company warns.
The conditions that these workers endure are grueling and can run more than 16 hours a day. It’s not the white-collar job that Carlson is seeking to protect — these are not the doctors and dentists. They’re not jobs that mothers hope their children will aspire to. They are summer jobs for a very limited group of workers during a very brief period of their lives.
“You must be ready and able to work all hours assigned. Meal periods and breaks must be taken as scheduled. Our Seafood processing locations are very remote areas in Alaska. Housing is dormitory style. There are no health care options nearby. Communication is very limited,” the company says, adding that room and board in dormitories are provided, as is transportation to and from the point of hire.
Tucker Carlson believes there are enough Americans to do these jobs, but decades of experience of seafood processors tells otherwise. Only a small slice of the workforce can endure the conditions of seafood processing operations in Alaska. For those who can, they can’t even make enough money in one summer to guarantee that they can live on that sum the rest of the year in the United States. The money might last them a year in the Philippines.
Carlson also ignores the fact that Americans are now getting an extra $600 a week to sit at home. There’s no way those Americans are going to consider the slime line as an alternative. Sen. Dan Sullivan fought to tie employment insurance more closely to workers’ previous wages instead of awarding all workers the $600, giving some workers more money on unemployment than they would make returning to work. The Sen. Sasse amendment failed 48-48.
The nine senators who wrote to Trump include Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, John Cornyn of Texas, Mike Crapo and James Risch of Idaho, Michael Rounds of South Dakota, Todd Young of Indiana, and James Lankford of Oklahoma. Carlson has called for their removal during the next primary.
For Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, that won’t come for two more years, but Sen. Dan Sullivan is up for election this year. He has a challenger from the far left of the political spectrum, and now he has Tucker Carlson biting at him from the right over something about which Carlson has just enough information to be dangerous.
Carlson is usually a proponent of federalism — allowing states to determine what it is they need. Each state is different and has its unique needs. The slime line in Alaska is a place few Americans will go. But it may be a place that Carlson needs to put on his bucket list and visit.
