Printing a newspaper or magazine is expensive. These costs are covered by subscription fees or, in free publications, by advertising dollars. Because The Austin Cut is a relatively small operation, with the exception of some literary contributions, the entire project is run by Brandon and myself, and because the other 50% of our staff (Brandon) was busy doing research, designing a website, doing distribution and finding more writers – I took it upon myself to sell a couple ads. And while the plan was to keep anything I made over printing costs, this never happened, so I did this job for free. Here’s what made the job so challenging:

The Sell

Most times when you walk into a business, you can tell who the owner is, if they are even there. On the flipside they can smell when you are about to sell them something. See, business owners are hit up constantly for charity and services that they have no interest in. Knowing that you are one of these people makes them hate you pretty much instantly.

Sometimes people were nice to me. Not really even nice, just not plain rude – but this was rare. Most times people were fucking assholes, and honestly I can’t say that I blame them. I grew up in an environment where salespeople weren’t really people at all, and to this day I get annoyed when I am offered things I don’t want. (No, I don’t want to open a fucking Target credit card and save 10% off of my $5 purchase!) Even worse than the assholes are the really nice people that waste days of your time with the intention of buying jack shit. So, why aren’t business owners jumping at the chance for cheap marketing?

Competition

First off, there is a shit load of free publications in Austin. As a small paper we competed for advertising dollars with every single one of them. Not only are there a ton of options for print media, but most businesses don’t see the value in print advertising at all. I don’t blame them. If people spend money on advertising at all these days, it’s usually on radio ads, online ads, or social-networking deals like Groupon and LivingSocial. Of the few businesses still down with newsprint, many expected something in return for advertising. So many publications in Austin write stories about their advertisers or give them good reviews in exchange for contracts that it’s really hard to keep the actual content of the paper separate from the sponsorship. Not writing bullshit stories about potential advertisers really hurt our ability to sell anything in this town.

Collections

Despite the odds not being in my favor, I did manage to sell a couple of ads. Whether this was because our numbers were good, our paper was quality, or because I have breasts – I’m not sure, but I did get business owners to agree to buy some. After working minimum wage jobs my whole life, I’d go pick up a check for $200 and think “wow, that was the easiest money I ever made,” but realistically that $200 isn’t going in my pocket and probably took me over 35 hours to make. Selling ads entails talking face to face with an ad buyer probably a minimum of 5 times before actually getting a check. Now, factor in the 15 times you stopped by and the check writer either wasn’t there or couldn’t meet with you, and you’ve driven to this place almost 20 times to make one sale. Add the time spent on designing and redesigning their ad and the fact that if you’re lucky they might let you redesign it again next month, and you’ll quickly realize this is not an effective way to make a living.

Basically, selling ads for this paper is hard. At first I thought that I just sucked at it – other small papers in town seemed to have all kinds of advertisers that no matter what I did, I couldn’t get. Those papers didn’t stay around for long though, and if they’d been making any money I’m sure they would have. Ultimately, print media is dying. Papers all over the country are downsizing and going purely online. While there is an oversaturation of lifestyle and culture media here in Austin, there is no room for actual journalism because there’s nobody to fund it. Sorry y’all but we’re going the way of most other journalism based papers. Hopefully we’ll see ya in cyberspace.

Brandon Roberts will be on a panel March 2nd, at the 2013 National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting (NICAR) conference in Louisville, KY. You can read about the conference here, about the presentation here, and more about the data mining contest that led to this panel here.

Roberts was a finalist in the Kaggle “Follow the money” data science contest, put on by the Center for Investigative Reporting and Investigative Reporters & Editors, and will be presenting with a panel of other finalists. You can find his entry here:

With more money being spent on elections across the US than ever before, some important questions arise: who are these contributors and what do they expect to get in return? My proposal and related tools aim to help journalists and data miners answer those questions and explore the idea of powerful contributors influencing a politician’s actions. I accomplish this by taking occupation/employer word frequencies and sources of data that represent actions (Senate votes, council minutes, etc., see below) and using a decision tree learner to uncover patterns.

The ideas and tools presented here are as flexible as possible so that they can be used not only at the Federal level, but especially at the local level where all kinds of corruption goes on and sometimes goes unnoticed until it’s too late.

To achieve this goal, I wrote a series of tools (a series of python 2.7 scripts and linux shell scripts: breakdown.py, transform.sh, combiner.py, pdfs2cleantxt.sh, txt2arff.sh, senatevotes2arff.py, and a few others, you can find them at the end of this text) that make it easy to see who is contributing, grouped by occupation or employer, once the contributor data is loaded into a database. With these scripts you can convert this data into an ARFF format, used by the WEKA data mining software. I’ve also included some tools that change data between formats (PDF-to-ARFF, for example) so that loading data into WEKA for analysis is easier.

First, I looked into which industries, as a whole, had the biggest impact on the last presidential election. To do this, I got the 2008 FEC Campaign Contribution data and loaded it into a MySQL database. Using the tools, I grouped each candidate’s contributors by their stated occupation (breakdown.py). Then I converted the occupation strings into word frequencies using WEKA’s StringToWordVector filter (transform.sh, or you can use WEKA explorer). This left us with a giant database of every occupation (hundreds) for every candidate. So I combined all the word frequencies into a single instance per candidate with a classification of whether the candidate won or lost. This was done using combiner.py. Then everything was ready for machine learning.

Using WEKA’s J48 decision-tree learner, I built a decision tree that found strong correlations between high frequencies of contributors who labeled themselves “owners,” “presidents,” “doctors” and “brokers” and candidates who won in 2008. Using models built from the decision tree, it is possible to predict the outcome of some of the 2012 races, based on these influential industries. The python script breakdown.py also has the capability to group contributors by employer information, which might not be as meaningful at the Federal level, but at the local level it could be a good predictor of powerful contributors. (Candidates: now you know who to ask for money!)

With these tools you can also look at a competitive race between a winner and a loser (in my example it was SNL’s Stuart-Smalley-gone-political Al Franken vs. Republican incumbent Norm Coleman. Franken won by a margin of about 300 votes.) to give us a view of how two candidates differ from each other and who is likely to support them financially.

First, I pulled employer, occupation, and dollar amount data on each contributor for each candidate. I normalized the inverse word frequencies from both the employer and contributor fields. Then, using a decision tree learner (I used REPTree because it wasn’t as CPU-intensive on this huge amount of data), I found what types of employers and occupations were most likely to contribute to who. This decision tree was based on words related to occupation/employer and contribution amount.

In the 2008 Franken / Coleman race I found:

1) Law firms heavily supported Coleman. The terms “LLP,” “DLA” (a MN-based law firm), “NATH” (another law firm) correlated with a strong vote for Coleman.

2) Teachers supported Franken. The words “teacher,” and “classroom,” meant a strong Franken vote. Also, “homemakers” voted Franken 2:1 and a longshoremen’s PAC was a major contributor.

You can run with this idea and, using the same tools, find relationships between candidates and number of PACs vs. independent contributors, raw amount of contribution dollars, etc. This method isn’t restricted to any level of government. I took Campaign Finance Reports from my city’s local mayoral election and loaded them into the database the same way I did with the FEC data (see examples bundled with the tool). I ran this through the J48 decision tree learner and found which employers were powerful contributors. (Hint: real estate lawyers!)

Matching contributors with election outcomes and candidates might be fun, but it doesn’t answer the more important question facing journalists: whether or not a politician’s actions are influenced by those contributors.

To explore this, I wrote an example tool (senatevotes2arff.py) that automatically downloads any Senator’s voting record and converts it to the data-mining-friendly ARFF format. The file contains a list of every vote the candidate made and the description of the bill. Using this tool, I got the first two sessions of Al Franken’s first Senate voting record. I turned the descriptions into word vectors, using the inverse frequency, and built a J48 decision tree that looked at what words correlated with a “Yea” or “Nay” vote in the Senate

There is nothing that unusual about Al Franken’s voting record in relation to his contributors. Also notice how the decision trees change with the time (note ACORN in the first session). As a liberal-type candidate he opposed bills containing the words “forces” (related to war) and voted for “funding” bills. Using this raw ARFF file and WEKA, you could explore this same data in a lot of other ways: like parsing the words using a dictionary that leaves us with only certain kinds of nouns and adjectives. Or by taking the frequent words found in the contributor decision tree, pulling senate voting records related to those terms, and building a decision tree to see how the politician voted on those bills. Correlations between a candidate’s voting habits and his/her contributors would become obvious to journalists using these methods.

I wanted journalists to be able to run with this idea at the local levels of government, too, so I came up with a few ideas on how to check council member’s or mayor’s contributors:

1) Use text classification on council agendas or minutes (downloaded automatically with a tool like httrack) and compare them with contributor decision trees.

2) Take closed caption logs from council meetings, break them up by agenda item, use WEKA’s string to word vector tool to transform what they said into word frequencies, and then using data mining to learn a decision tree based on sentiment (for more about this, see the work done with twitter sentiment). Matching this information could be useful in finding patterns between contributors and a politician’s actions.

3) Parse government contracts awarded to businesses, use text classification (awarded or not) and word frequencies to find correlations between contributors (or industries) and politicians in charge of the contracts.

To help journalists wanting to experiment with this, I wrote a couple scripts to help them transform PDF documents (the most common format that governments are using to digitalize everything) into an ARFF file: pdf2cleantxt.sh (this converts a directory full of PDFs to a clean text format) and txt2arff.sh (a program to turn those text files into a single, data mineable ARFF file).

It’s not always easy to see the connection between a contributor and a politician working in their interest. But by uncovering the structures behind who is contributing in relation to a politician’s actions, patterns about corruption or good public service work will reveal themselves. The question of who a politician really serves, their contributors or their constituency, is as crucial as ever, especially when you consider the insane amount of money being spent on elections at every level of government these days. Luckily for journalists, as much as we like to deny it, the things humans do usually result in obvious patterns. Politicians aren’t any different. Using these methods and tools, data mining can help journalists uncover these patterns.

You can download all the tools & example data here: Political Data Mining Tools (ZIP)

Edit, edit, edit.

Writing is hard work, but don’t worry because the criminally unpaid staff of Austin Cut is still going strong at it.

Anyone who might be holding out to submit that perfect article — forget that insanity and send it now! (There is no perfect.) To everyone else, thanks for the support and we’ll see you soon.

We at The Austin Cut are redefining our aim and are going to focus on in-depth journalism from a broad spectrum of topics concerning Austin. We believe there is a huge gap in local media and that there is a real need for honest investigative work that fights for the interests of regular citizens. That unfortunately means we will not be putting energy into music other “culture” reviews.

If this is a project you’d like to be involved in, there are a few ways you can do so:

1) We need journalists, writers, or people willing to try. It’s our opinion that all you really need to be a good journalist is drive, integrity, and some research skills. We also have a lot of information about potential stories (everything from local environmental to crime to inequality-issues and more) and just need passionate people to write them.

2) If you’re not really a writer, we also need a larger core of people who can help us with story ideas. We want to have a constant back-and-forth with people so we can stay current with what people think are important issues at any particular moment. There is no such thing as a bad story idea and we welcome you to throw ideas our way.

3) In an attempt to not be heavily bound by what articles advertisers want to see (a lot of advertisers won’t consider advertising until they get a favorable article written about their business … this is the standard that Austin media has encouraged), we are going to be doing a little fundraising to help pay for printing costs. If you’re good at networking or organizing, and believe in independent local media, we’d love to meet with you.

So if any of those things stick out to you, or if you have any other ideas, don’t hesitate to contact us at: *protected email*.

Thanks for your support,
Brandon Roberts & The Austin Cut Staff

We at The Austin Cut are trying to get a sense of what kinds of things our readers think are valuable in journalism and media. The following survey will only take a couple minutes of your time and would help us get a better picture of what’s important to you.

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This data was taken from a power point prepared by the City Demographer. (A link to the whole file is at the end of the article.) Blue areas are wealthier, redder areas are poorer. It’s pretty obvious how rich and poor are divided in Austin.

Nothing’s really changed in Austin’s government since the early 70s except for voter turnout has been swirling down the toilet. In 1971, more than half the city voted in the local election. These days we’re lucky if we get more than 10% of the city. Even crazier, in raw numbers, more people voted in ’71 than they did in 2009 even though Austin’s population is more than three times as big.

The only remotely definitive answer I’ve heard to the “why don’t people vote” question is, “nobody gives a shit.” Some of the theories floating around the Austin Cut East Riverside headquarters include people being too busy working at their dead-end jobs to register and later drive out to H-E-B in actual daylight to vote, people realizing that local politics is a rich man’s game and don’t feel compelled to participate, and the theory that young people (Austin’s biggest age group) think voting is too annoying because there’s no way to vote from our cell phones yet.

Earlier this year I wrote an article about mixed-use development and rising costs. It came out right before this past local election and it got me a lot of e-mail responses. Some people wanted to know who they should vote for. The only problem was that all of them asked me this way after the election. All of the incumbents had already been reelected.

Either way you look at it, it’s obvious that most people here don’t know anything about the local government and couldn’t really care less. But it’s this attitude that lets things get to the point we’re at now: we’ve got the highest rent out of the major Texas cities, our utilities are all on their way up, the roads are about to enter an ice age of gridlock, public transit is a joke, education isn’t a priority, and to top it all off, we’re poorer than the average Texan.

These problems need some serious work, but without the right leadership and some serious re-prioritization down at city hall, nothing’s going to change. Lucky for us, on this November’s presidential ballot, there are going to be some options for us to choose a new system of electing our local government. The two redistricting plans are Proposition 3, a.k.a. the Citizens Districting 10-1 plan (CD10-1), and Proposition 4’s 8-2-1 plan.

How We Do Things ‘Round Here, Boy

We’ve had the same system of local representation for 41 years. In 1971, the council was made up of six members plus a mayor. This was the first year that citizens voted for their mayor. Before that, city council chose. 1971 was also the beginning of the “gentleman’s agreement,” an unwritten rule where White Austin agreed to reserve one of the six council seats for a Black representative. A few years later, a second seat was reserved for a Latino candidate and little has changed since.

Our current system can be represented as 0-6-1: nobody is elected from geographic districts, six people are elected city-wide, and one mayor is elected city-wide. So while a council member in 1971 was supposed to listen to 250,000 people’s wishes, today’s council member is supposed to represent around 800,000 people from across the entire city. And even though Whites are still the city-wide majority in Austin, the Hispanic population now makes up over 30% of the city. The Asian-American community is growing too. They’re at about 6% of the total population. These populations are going to get bigger in the future.

Despite all of this, Latinos only get reserved one council seat (16% representation) and Asian-Americans have only been able to elect one council member ever: Jennifer Kim in 2005. Unfortunately, she got whipped in a reelection campaign by Randi Shade in 2008.

When you have to run at-large in a city the size of Austin, it basically means you’ve got to have a ton of cash on hand. Or you’ve got to go into debt like most candidates seem to do. Lee Leffingwell is still between twenty and fifty thousand dollars in debt after his 2012 mayoral reelection campaign. On top of the whole money thing, when you run at-large you have to appeal to the most average, middle voter. In Austin, that basically means White, rich (even though rich people aren’t the city’s majority, they make up the majority of voters), and from West Austin. Not surprisingly, over the past 40 years, that’s where most of Austin’s elected officials have come from.

The Austin Bulldog published an awesome map of every council member and mayor elected since ’71 and plotted where they lived. 88% of the mayors elected came from the 78703 or 78731 zip codes. 34% of all 100 council members went to people living in West Austin. The report went on to say that over half of the council members elected lived within three miles of City Hall, and that the further from City Hall you looked, the fewer people elected you’d find. Nobody has ever been elected from 78741, home of The Austin Cut (Roberts for Mayor 2015!) and the whole Southside has been extremely under represented (19%) despite being home to 40% of Austin.

Obviously I’m not the first person to realize that our current representation is unequal and this isn’t the first time that anyone has tried to change how people are elected. An option to change our system to a geographic or mixed (a system with at-large seats and geographic districts) representation has been put on the ballot six times in the past. All have failed.

The closest any geographic system has come to passing was an 8-0-1 (eight geographic districts, no at-large seats, one mayor) that included an independent commission to draw the district boundaries. It lost by 2% of the vote. The most recent redistricting proposition went on the ballot in 2002, when council pushed for an 8-2-1 plan (eight geographic districts, two at-large seats, and one mayor). It lost by 6%. November 2012 will be the second time 8-2-1 goes to vote.

In the years since 2002, the council has entertained the idea of giving geographic representation another go. They created a Charter Revision Commission (CRC), a team of 15 people they handpicked themselves, who were supposed to be representative of the city. The CRC was supposed to explore all sorts of different plans and ideas, and make a recommendation on whether or not Austin should even attempt geographic representation, what plan would be best, and who should be in charge of drawing the geographic districts.

The issue of redistricting might seem like an obscure technicality to a lot of people, but the best way to control the outcome of an election is to control the way that votes are counted. Let’s say there’s a neighborhood that is going to vote for candidate X and official Y doesn’t like X. Let’s also say that official Y is in control of drawing the district maps. A normal, fair map would make one district out of the neighborhood in question and candidate X would get elected. But since official Y wants to get rid of candidate X, Y divides the X-supporting neighborhood into a bunch of different districts with candidate Y-supporters outnumbering X-supporters in each. Now candidate X will lose. This is the basic way that Democratic voters are “gerrymandered” at the Texas state level. These techniques have been used against all kinds of minority groups in the past, and this is the main reason why people are calling for an independent redistricting committee.

After months of meetings, discussion, and some disagreement, the CRC voted on three different issues: on the issue of putting a system of geographic representation on the ballot, the CRC voted “yes” 14-1. In an 8-7 vote, the CRC specifically recommended the 10-1 plan (ten-geographic districts, no at-large seats, and one mayor). All but two people voted “yes” on recommending an independent redistricting committee. The two men against, David Butts (a political consultant who’s been behind the campaigns of many elected council members and mayors) and Dr. Fred McGhee, along with the others who voted against recommending the 10-1 plan, would go on to form Austin Community for Change (AC4C), the group promoting this year’s 8-2-1 plan.

For some reason, the council decided to ignore their hand-picked CRC and voted to put the 8-2-1 plan on the November ballot instead. Supporters of the 10-1 plan accused the council of voting in their own self-interest, wanting to keep the power to draw their own district lines.

Austinites for Geographic Representation (AGR), the group that formed from the CRC around the 10-1 plan, must have seen this coming, because the whole time they’d been out collecting signatures for their CD10-1 proposition. CD10-1 is short for “Citizens Districting” 10-1, a ten-geographic district, no at-large, and one mayor plan with an independent citizens districting committee. They ended up collecting 33,000 signatures. After sorting through them, they’d gathered 22,435 valid signatures. According to the law, any petition with over 20,000 goes on the ballot. Now, both the 10-1 and 8-2-1 plans are set to appear on November’s 2012 presidential ballot right next to each other.

During my interviews with both AGR and AC4C, it became clear that during the CRC process some serious shit went down and both sides started to hate each other. Hilariously bitter and rude comments were the highlight of conversations with almost everyone I interviewed.

Members of AGR accused the council of trying to kill the CD10-1 plan by putting this “competing” 8-2-1 next to it, confusing voters, and “Ralph Nadering” the redistricting proposal. AC4C supporters accused 10-1 folks of straight up refusing to look at any research on the topic and name-calling.

Now that you understand that “people are fighting,” as someone from AC4C summarized an Austin Chronicle article on redistricting, I’m going to break down each of these propositions, so you’ll be ready to make an informed decision in November.

Remember that you’re allowed to vote for both propositions. If both pass (more “yes” votes than “no”), then the one with more “yes” votes becomes law. In this case, any change will be better than keeping things the way they are.

This map shows the distribution of elected council members and mayors since 1971. The darker the zip code, the more representation the region has received. 78703 has dominated Austin politics for the past 40 years. Combined with ‘31 and ‘59, over half of all representation has gone to West Austin. (Thanks to The Austin Bulldog for the statistics.)

Council Draws the Lines: 8-2-1

The 8-2-1 plan calls for Austin to be split into eight districts, with one council member elected from each. Two at-large council members and the mayor will be voted on by the whole city. The eight district lines will be drawn by the council members themselves.

The AC4C website hosts a document written by Julio Gonzalez Altamirano called “Fair Today Fair Tomorrow: Why a hybrid city council is the unifying choice for Austin.” (Altamirano also runs a blog called “Keep Austin Wonky,” where he analyzes Austin politics and policy from a fairly scientific point-of-view. On the phone, he talks like a human law dictionary, which was impressive to say the least.)

The document starts by telling us that in a study of over 7,000 cities across the U.S., the only groups of people that were “significantly helped by single-member districts” were African American males. (Note: Single Member Districts (SMDs) is another term for geographical districts where one person is elected. These are the core of the 10-1 proposal.) It goes on to argue that “women candidates are modestly hurt” by geographical districts.

So I read the scholarly articles referenced by the position paper and found the following: White women, not all women, were statistically elected less often from single member districts. Minority women didn’t seem to be affected. The researchers didn’t really know why this was, but guessed that it could just be the result of a White woman having to go head-on against a man in a small arena.

The paper argues at-length that minority groups who are spread across a large area (examples were Asian-Americans, gay people, possibly even renters) wouldn’t be able to get representation by single-member districts. It goes on to argue that with at-large seats, these groups would have a chance at being represented, especially down the line if their populations are growing like Asian-Americans in Austin are.

Theoretically, it is possible for minorities to be elected to the at-large seats. And over time, an at-large seat might allow for a greater number of possible voices to be heard. Looking back, we’ve seen that the first Asian-American was elected in 2005, despite the Asian American population being very small (as of 2010, it was 6.3% of Austin). The first Latino—and non-West Austin or downtown—mayor was elected in 2001. But these percentages aren’t very high when you consider Austin’s entire history. There’s also the example of Glen Maxey, the first openly-gay member of the Texas House of Representatives, who was elected from a single-member district.

So I called Altamirano, since he wrote the paper, and asked whether or not we should assume that the two at-large seats would go to West Austin like most of them have in the past. He argued, yes, that it “seems intuitive to assume the past pattern will continue” but that the inequality is minor compared to the “downsides with an exclusively geographic approach.” Once people are voting inside geographic areas, he went on, geographic “overrepresentation” would continue, but on a smaller scale. Instead of rich West Austin getting elected too often, sub-areas of districts would start winning too often. He’s basically saying that since you can’t ever stop people from complaining about unfair representation, that West Austin’s overrepresentation is a minor sacrifice compared to what he sees as the benefits of at-large seats. Assuming this is true for a second, what would those benefits be?

The AC4C paper argues that in the case someone isn’t being represented by their own district council member, they’d be able to go to their at-large council member as a back-up. This might be theoretically true, but consider the example the AC4C paper gives: “renters, people with disabilities.” How good have the current at-large council members been at listening to these generally fucked-over groups? Why would an at-large official listen to these groups if their voting base is rich, White Austin?

The third and most stressed point that Altamirano and I talked about was runaway spending. “Fair Today Fair Tomorrow” attacks 10-1’s purely single member district proposal, saying that since it will shift politics to a neighborhood-centered mindset, large amounts of money will be spent on hugely expensive projects that will only benefit people living near them. The AC4C paper also argues that the problem will be worsened by “log-rolling,” which happens when council members trade votes on projects that won’t benefit their districts for votes on projects that will.

Statistics and scholarly research show that the more elected seats there are, the bigger the government gets, and the more money it will spend. This is partially due to log-rolling. Particularly, Altamirano’s research cites Reza Baqir’s “Districting and Government Spending,” an article that investigates whether increased seats increases government spending and what kind of systems can break the pattern. As a basic rule, Baqir finds that as “the number of players” (council members) increases, so does the amount of money spent. But he goes on to say that “although critics of district systems may have been right in thinking that district systems contribute to more government spending, they were likely wrong in supposing that at-large council members would not cater to particular constituencies within the jurisdiction.”

The only system where more council members didn’t mean more money spent or more log-rolling was when a “strong” mayor was present. (A strong mayor has the power to veto other council members’ propositions and can only be overruled by a near-unanimous council vote.)  Currently, Austin’s mayor has the same amount of power as the other council members and no veto power. Neither the 10-1 or the 8-2-1 plans included a strong mayor proposal.

So even though AC4C claims that 10-1 will make Austin a “public expenditure outlier,” keep in mind that both the 10-1 and 8-2-1 plans add the same number of council seats. Also keep in mind that no research shows that at-large council members can stop the spending increase. Therefore, according to the research, we can expect both systems to affect spending in the same way.

The 8-2-1 position is heavily centered on theory and research. While the founding members seem to agree that at-large seats should be an important part of Austin’s future, they don’t address whether or not there should be an independent, “citizen’s” redistricting committee. As a proposition, the 8-2-1 plan wouldn’t do anything special with districting and, like the rest of Texas, the council would be able to draw their own district lines.

I called Dr. Fred McGhee, one of AC4C’s founding members and a member of the council’s CRC, to ask him why he was one of the only people who opposed an independent redistricting committee. “It’s a solution in search of a problem,” he said, “and our charter is already extremely bureaucratic and unwieldy.” On his blog he went into depth about the issue: “I am not persuaded by those who argue that corrupt and corrupted politicians draw their own gerrymandered lines and therefore rig the rules of the game. This is not the point—of course they do. The question is whether a supposedly ‘impartial’ [independent redistricting committee] is the best way of fixing the problem.”

A better redistricting solution, in his opinion, would be led by the city demographer and council would have the final say over the map. He did go on to argue that this problem goes all the way to the top and what we really need is a total overhaul of the Texas Constitution. I think everyone can agree with that. But what this comes down to is should we wait around for the perfect solution? Or should we actively try to prevent known problems?

Latinos are quickly becoming a larger percent of the City. By 2020, it’s estimated that Latinos will make up around half of Austin. Some 8-2-1 proponents argue that, while at-large seats might go to richer (White) candidates now, in the future Latinos will have a better chance at them.

Some Random People Draw the Lines: 10-1

Under proposition 3, the 10-1 plan with an Independent Citizen’s Redistricting Commission (ICRC), Austin would be drawn into ten districts, with one council member elected from each, and one mayor elected city-wide. The ten districts would be drawn by a group of people selected by a specific process that was modeled after California’s move toward independent redistricting committees. The plan was designed by AGR and signed by over 30,000 Austinites.

The process is meant to avoid the problems we see at the Texas State level, where the district lines are drawn to maximize Republican power, or in Dallas, where the city is being sued for diluting minority voting power. The proposed 14-member ICRC starts with a call for applications. The applications are screened by the City Auditor and 3 randomly chosen auditors to make sure that nobody who applies has, in the recent past: been an elected official, been involved in a political campaign, been a lobbyist, donated over $1,000 to city candidates, or been an employee of the city. 60 applicants will be selected by the auditors (who are forbidden to communicate with council) and made public. Council members will have a chance to remove one applicant each from the pool for whatever reason. Eight names will be drawn randomly and publicly from the remaining applicants. These people will serve on the commission. These eight people will democratically appoint the remaining six members while making sure the ICRC is diverse racially, ethnically, by gender, geographically, etc.

As you can see, this process is a long shot from the one we’d see under the 8-2-1 plan where the council would choose their closest colleagues and allies to help them draw the maps. The ICRC actually goes further and has stipulations on what commission members can do after serving. They can’t be elected for 10 years afterwards, or become a city consultant or staff for three years afterwards. The goal is to keep districting and city business as separate as possible.

Peck Young, AGR’s leader, has been drawing Texas district maps for over 40 years and knows how fucked Texas politics can get. He told me about one of his most blatantly corrupt experiences from a rural Texas county: “I’d just been hired and a judge announced we were taking a 20-minute recess, looked at me and said, ‘come into my office, son.’ I walked right back in his office and he looked at me and said, ‘now I got a list of people you’re gonna fuck for me, you understand?’ and he handed me the names of two commissioners and two JPs and he said, ‘I don’t give a damn how you do it, but I don’t want to see these people in office next year and I hired your ass to see to it, do you understand me boy?’”

This is the type of deal-making that AGR insists will happen without an independent redistricting committee. Unlike other states’ “independent” committees, Austin’s won’t truly be independent by balancing an equal number of Democrats with Republicans and inserting one non-partisan member. (This is what they do in Colorado.) The goal is to keep the entire process as non-political as possible.

AC4C’s Fred McGhee was, again, skeptical and argued that you can’t possibly take politics out of a political process. Maybe not, but AGR seem like they’re determined to try. Peck Young continued: “Now what I want, and what we want as a group, is for us to be as far away from that old judge as we can physically and legally get. And to be blunt, boys working on 8-2-1 would embrace that judge, everything but his language.”

But the redistricting issue isn’t the only problem that people have with the 10-1 plan. Some of the Asian-American community is concerned that they aren’t going to be represented under a purely geographical system, since their numbers are low and spread across a large Area.

When I asked Young about this, he pointed to statistical data that AGR had come up with, arguing that while it might not be possible to create an Asian majority district, that it is possible to draw a district centered around North of 183 that has an Asian population of about 16%. This district would be almost “four times as Asian” as Austin is city-wide, and it would look similar to San Antonio’s district 9, which is currently held by an Asian representative.

Altamirano, in particular, argued that growing minority groups (especially Latinos) who supported single-member districts were working against their own best interests. Since Latinos are supposed to become a majority in Austin by 2020, he questioned why they’d want to settle for two or three districts, when they’d theoretically be able to dominate the at-large seats in the future.

Single member districts don’t necessarily harm large, dispersed Hispanic populations, though. If we look at San Antonio, which has a 10-1 system, we see the city is about 60% Hispanic and that 6 out of the 10 single member districts are filled by Hispanics. The only at-large seat is the mayor, who also happens to be Latino. “Fair Today Fair Tomorrow” argues that San Antonio’s district 5, an area which has a Hispanic population of 95%, was drawn to pack as many Latino votes into one district as possible and that the rest of the Hispanics were divided across other districts. But Peck Young, who was involved with San Antonio’s 10-1 redistricting, said the reason why district 5 was created with a 95% Hispanic population is because there’s a neighborhood in district 5 with a 95% Hispanic population. Either way you look at it, it’s hard to argue that Latinos aren’t being represented fairly in San Antonio under the 10-1 system.

This is a map created from San Antonio’s districts, and from 2010 census data (courtesy of Eric Fischer’s “Racial Division Maps.”) As you can see, district 5 (at the Southwestern middle part of the city) is drawn heavily Latino (yellow dots). 8-2-1 proponents argue that this is an example of packing, a way of diluting minority voting power, while Peck Young (a 10-1 proponent who helped draw the San Antonio districts) says this map represents a heavily-Latino neighborhood, nothing more. San Antonio is 60% Latino and their current council is 60% Latino (not including their Mayor, who is also Latino). Arguments like this are common to redistricting. Note: a yellow/orange dot represents Latino, red represents White, blue represents Black, and green represents Asian.

The case of Blacks in Austin, like in other major cities, is a tricky one. For one reason or another, some Blacks are leaving Austin while others are dispersing around the city. Under the Voting Rights Act, there has to be a district where Blacks have a shot at electing a representative. According to Peck Young, with 10 districts, it’s possible to draw a district where the Blacks have a plurality (the highest percentage, but not a majority) of the citizens voting age population. With 8 geographic districts, he claims, the potential Black district will have a White plurality.

When I asked to look at the maps, it was clear that AGR was wary of a reporter getting ahold of them and releasing them. The maps are to be drawn by the citizens, Young explained. That’s what the group decided and that’s how the maps are going to be drawn.

The arguments that 10-1 will harm minority representation, create a log-rolling environment, and the citizens districting proposition has the potential to create even more problems, haven’t stopped several groups from backing the proposition. As of August 2012, 28 organizations have endorsed the 10-1 plan, including the Austin NAACP, Austin Firefighters Association, Austin Police Association, UT Student Government, Central Texas Republican Assembly, Austin Neighborhood’s Council, Mexican American Democrats, Travis County Green Party, Austin Central Labor Council, and more. (You can find a full list at the Citizens Districting 10-1 website.)

Book Smart vs. Street Smart

Could Citizens Districting 10-1 be an overly optimistic, obvious reaction against all of the inequality that’s been dragging most people in this city down for so long? Yes. It’s possible that in their attempt to find a way to keep the most obvious and corrupt behind-the-scenes dealmakers out of the districting process, they might have overlooked some research and political theory. There could be problems down the road with their redistricting commission, or with the single member districts.

AGR might have focused so much energy into disrupting our current system where the richest areas of town get the most representation that they’ve entered “class war” territory, as one 10-1 critic said. But if it’s classism when you fight against handing excessive representation to the rich, what do you call it when the rich get more than their fair share of representation for 40 years?

The AC4C people are angry. I get it. They feel like they’re being made into the “bad guys,” the “insiders,” when all they feel like they’re trying to do is have an intellectual, theoretical argument about the whole thing. But at what point do you take your nose out of the books, and realize that a lot of the answers are staring right at you? Yes, theoretically more voices can possibly be heard over time by an at-large seat, but how many different voices have really been heard over the past 40 years right here in Austin? If there’s anything that 8-2-1 is guilty of, it’s trying so hard to find the perfect plan, a plan that no theory or statistical analysis can punch a hole in, that what they have is something that was already pushed by council ten years ago and got its ass kicked.

There will never be a perfect representation proposal. No matter what proposition we put on the ballot, and no matter how hard we try to avoid them, mistakes are going to be made. Problems are going to come up and we’ll deal with them when they do.

I know this is the corniest shit on Earth to say, but I’ve really got to: VOTE. Register if you haven’t. (You can do it with your food stamps application, which you’re going to need once taxes and water rates go up this year.) We’ve got the highest rent of the major Texas cities, one of highest average household incomes, and yet more people in Austin are struggling to get by than in Texas overall. We didn’t vote ourselves into this problem, but we might be able to vote ourselves out of it.

If you’re tied up about which proposition to vote for, and you know that you don’t want to vote for both, think about this: What kind of council hand-picks a group to tell them which redistricting plan to choose, but then totally ignores their decision? And how much better are they going to be at “listening” to their own Redistricting Commission when it draws a map that doesn’t favor the council?

Update: I had a lot of people ask me for the City Demographer’s powerpoint, so I decided to just upload it here. I’m also adding a link to the “Fair Today Fair Tomorrow” position paper.

Austin Demographics 2010 (PPT) – Making sense of the census

“Fair Today Fair Tomorrow: Why a hybrid city council is the unifying choice for Austin”

Servers are doing better in cities where the blue bar (hourly wage) is taller than the red bar (rent). Unfortunately, Austin has the highest rent and the lowest median server wage of the comparable Southern cities we checked.

Something annoying happened to me this month. It’s inescapable, especially in a city that is growing as quickly as Austin is. And, it’s probably happened to every single renter that has lived here long enough to re-sign a lease. My rent went up, but only by enough to make the extra cash a slightly lesser hassle than moving to another apartment altogether. Well, that’s life. But the thing is, I’m not making any more money than I was last year, or the year before that. Which obviously means that a slightly higher percentage of my income is now going directly to my apartment complex.

I’m lucky and have a pretty cheap apartment. It’s a studio (400 square feet) and I share it with my boyfriend. That means we only pay $325 each. We’re really getting a deal if you think about the fact that fair market rent on a two bedroom apartment in Austin is at $989. I know plenty of people that are paying way more than that.

Servers in Austin make an average of $8.82 per hour according to US Bureau of Labor Statistics. So, the average server has to work about 55 hours per month – just to make rent (assuming that one person’s rent is half of the fair market for a two bedroom apartment). If the average server also works full-time (160 hours per month), then they are paying about 30% of their total income on rent alone. That seems high to me. When I first started waiting tables in Washington State, I always paid for rent with my tips from one week’s worth of part time work. The other three weeks pay, and my $8.55 per hour paychecks, went directly into my savings account. I know I can’t compare a city with a completely different minimum wage than ours, so I decided to take a look at some other $2.13 cities to see how Austin stacked up.

I decided to look at average minimum wages and fair market rents for other Texas cities. First, I looked at our neighbors to the south: San Antonio. Servers in San Antonio make an average of $9.36 per hour – only slightly higher than Austin’s. But, the fair market rent on a two bedroom in San Antonio is only $760, meaning that servers down there only have to work for about 40 hours a month to make rent. That’s 15 hours less than us. Maybe San Antonio is just a super lucrative city to serve in.

Before I cut my losses and headed for San Antonio, I looked a little farther to Fort Worth. The average minimum wage for servers there is $10.08 per hour, close to $2 more than ours (they’re rollin’ in it!). Shockingly, fair market rent is quite a bit lower than ours. The going rate for a two bedroom is $863. That means that servers need to work roughly 42 hours to make rent. Slightly more than in San Antonio, but still way less than in Austin. Other Texas cities beat Austin by quite a bit too. In Dallas, servers need to work 45 hours to make rent (still 10 hours less than here), while in Houston they came the closest to us, at 51 hours to make rent.

Curious if Austin was just the butt-hole of Texas, I also looked at Memphis and Nashville (the “other” music capital). Both cities’ wait-people average more per hour and have substantially lower rents than Austin. The number of hours needed to make rent was almost exactly the same as in San Antonio – 41 hours in Memphis and 39 hours in Nashville. So, it would appear that Austin isn’t such a great place for servers compared to any major city in the South.

So why is Austin such a shitty city for waiting tables (generally)? I think it boils down to a couple of things.

First and foremost: rent here is getting out of control. In the last two years, my rent (well, my share of rent – I can’t afford to live alone) has gone from $225 to $325 while my square footage has gone from 750 to 400. Yet, I am making the same money, not a penny more than when I started working here two years ago. Of all the cities I looked at, Austin had the highest fair market rent rates. Rent here is going up fast and it’s not only people in the service industry but all minimum wage workers that are struggling to keep up.

But it’s not just rent; Austin’s waiters make less of an average hourly wage than any other city I looked at. Why? Well, the only real explanation for this is tips. All of the cities I looked at have a reduced, tipped minimum wage of $2.13 per hour. Sorry Austin, but I finally have the data to prove what I’ve suspected since I first started working here: You tip like shit. Apparently people in San Antonio and Memphis know that 10% isn’t a good tip (neither is 12%, 15% or 17% for that matter).

Try as I did to find data explaining why people here are such poor tippers, I couldn’t. I know from experience that upper middle class people (rich people) don’t tip well. I know too that college students don’t learn how to leave a proper tip until they’ve graduated with a degree in Gender Studies and are bussing a table for the first time. But, there aren’t any hard facts to prove my suspicions.

Next time I hear a coworker with a $500 rent telling me in a macho fashion that they “make good money,” maybe I’ll shove this article up their ass and prove to them that they don’t.

Ever since it reached a level of general western-world ubiquity sometime in the 2000s, it has been widely accepted that the internet is one of humanity’s most ingenious inventions. The ways humans interact and connect with one another world-wide has been changed so fundamentally that to describe them would seem futuristic and absurd to twenty-year old incarnations of my now aged grandparents. Sites like Wikipedia, Google, and YouTube have not only entered the lexicon, but have also become invaluable research tools for the average individual curious to discover more about the world at large. Soon, it seems, it will be difficult even to find a cellular phone plan that doesn’t require paying for round-the-clock internet access as part of the basic contract.

For the first time in the history of our species, information and knowledge have become more or less democratized [though it can be argued that inherent class discrepancies lead to the fact that those who are unable to afford internet access, i.e. the bottom rung of the socioeconomic strata, now face more obstacles than ever when attempting upward social and economic mobility], and it would seem the average internet user has few excuses not to continue their education far past their formative school years.

But the human capacity for perversion should never be underestimated.

According to some not-so-groundbreaking research (mine), the internet, along with being one of the final bastions and troves of limitless, easily accessible knowledge available to an increasingly apathetic and dumbed-down populace, is used primarily for two main purposes: “trolling” (the sending of inflammatory or provocative messages purposefully crafted with the expectation that this initial message will elicit equally negative responses, or, if the troll is particularly lucky or adept, the commencement of an all out “flame-war”); and, of course, the viewing of pornography.  Both of these purposes being symptoms of the altogether larger first-world problems of boredom and a general and ever growing inability to empathize with other sapient beings.

However stark and socially pertinent, none of this should come as particularly surprising or new information. Since pretty much its first widespread public use, the internet and perversion go together like cops and child molesters in prison (the metaphor, of course, falling short at the fact that, unlike prison, where police officers and pederasts meet up in protective custody—the smaller, secluded group of the prison at large—the perverts of the internet are the general population). Hell, one of my first experiences with the internet was when I was twelve and I didn’t have it, but my next door neighbor did, so every afternoon I’d go over to his house and, sitting in the side room of the garage where his family computer was kept, we’d burn through his AOL hours disc by logging onto AOL Instant Messenger and asking strangers if they “got pics?” Then, after inevitably getting bored with this game, searching for naked pictures of the girl from Seventh Heaven (no, not Jessica Biel, who actually had semi-nude photos published in Gear magazine around this time, but the slightly more homely Beverley Mitchell, for some reason).

But that was back in the Wild West frontier days of World Wide Web-based perversion and sexual curiosity. These days, perverts are no longer cloistered away to obscene chat sites. Instead, with the inception of so-called “porn 2.0”—tube sites such as Youjizz, YouPorn, PornoTube, PornTube (distinct from “PornoTube”—common mistake), FuckTube and BookpornTube (compelling name, I must admit, though surprisingly unliterary in the final analysis)—the perverted majority of the internet finally have a way to truly interconnect with one another: rubbing them out to the same videos as thousands of other horny people.

Someone, however, decided the perverts of the interweb weren’t connected enough by these shared masturbatory stimuli. Somewhere down the line, apparently, the question was asked at a pornographic video tube site board meeting: what happens when the trolls of the internet are given a medium with which they can broadcast far and wide to other trolls and pervert-trolls, just how they, as an individual and lonely troll caught in the vastness and potentially infinite wisdom of cyberspace, feel about a particular pornographic video? This led to the somewhat alarming decision to begin including “comments” sections for each video on many of the more popular tube sites.

In an effort to try and better understand the perverts of the internet (myself included), I decided, at great risk to my personal sanity and computer security, to browse through a varying array of these comment sections to see what I could glean from the pervert-trolls of the internet. Interestingly, the results actually managed to be profoundly disturbing in ways that superseded my already sordid expectations. With the hopes of not encouraging additional traffic to any of the sites, many of which are hosted in foreign countries, thus allowing the sites to avoid prosecution for the hosting of copyrighted material and in turn denying profit to the hardworking men and women of the pornographic industry (yes, that previous sentence was completely serious), I will be withholding the names of the sites in question, though I will be providing my notoriously stringent editor with URLs for all of the videos in question. Videos will be chosen the same way I choose which Wikipedia articles I’m going to read to kill time: I will start at the homepage and see what looks interesting until I’m inevitably led down a wormhole sticky with wasted-time and shame and regret.

##

Video One: “Retail Store Creampie”

The Video:

I’ll start first with what appears to be a short excerpt taken from a longer film. The video has seven comments and an overall rating of 88.50% with 554 “Good” votes, and 72 “Bad” votes. The video is four minutes and six seconds long and depicts a young woman in a green shirt getting plowed by a guy with a shitty tattoo on his ribs. Throughout the video she makes some fake moany noises and says things like “fuck me.” Also, she’s getting banged in a store on a clearance rack for some reason. Pretty standard porn territory.

The Comments:

Comments range from the coherent, if subject-ambiguous, “nice cock. Love his pussy pounding, wish it was me,” to people being pissed about false advertising in the title of the video, “not a creampie stupid,” and, “THAT WAS NOT A CREAMPIE MOTHERFUCKERS!!!”  Then there is the somewhat baffling, “can’t stand those fake moans, quiet moans are hot, but not those fake-ass American-hoe ones. FUCK YOU AMERICAN ASSHOLES. WHITEPOWER!!!”

(Reader, take note that this last comment, left 07/31/2010 at 1:12 am, is a classic example of trolling.  Notice how the comment doesn’t make sense, but implores others to reply defensively.)

What I learned:

The art of trolling is alive and well in porn comments. Also, if your video promises a creampie (sex act—you can look it up your damn self), you’d better deliver.  Otherwise, people will call you names like “stooped.”

Video Two: “Barely Legal Casting”

The Video:

With a total of twenty-four comments, this video has 1,484 votes with an 86% positive rating and 1,714,761 views.  It was added to this particular site eight months ago which means that this video is watched roughly 7,030 times per day.  The video is part of the “Backroom Casting Couch” series of videos.  It is a “reality” porn series, where a middle-aged dude, face always blurred out, has unprotected sex with women, many of them girls who appear to be amateurs and in their late teens. In this video the man asks a girl who claims to be eighteen, but could pass for fifteen, a whole bunch of awkward questions about sex, which she answers in a way that either highlights a strong history of character acting, or simply belies her actual sexual greenness. The man then proceeds to have her strip in front of the camera, ostensibly as part of a casting process. After sexing her up against a wall, he ejaculates on her face in a close-up that is really just creepy and left me feeling not aroused, as porn should, but rather cold inside.

The Comments:

Highlights include the somewhat racist, “have you ever done any black chicks? Or are you afraid that they’ll find out & shoot you? LOL” by someone named Bonezz_11 (his profile picture shows a shirtless dude with sunglasses and a visor blowing out some sort of smoke, and under “more info” he is listed as a twenty-two year old male who has been actively using this particular site for over two years and has watched 2,224 videos, giving him an average of three porn videos per day); the perverted, “daddys girl exploited, love it,” and, the misogynistic, “she looks hot with a dick in her mouth, but other than that, not so cute. too tiny,” by Freaknasty831, whose profile picture is an erect penis.

What I learned: (Besides how many porn videos Zach Bonezz_11 watches per day.)

That the American public education system is profoundly failing to teach its youngsters that riddling your text with comma splices makes you look like a total dumbass.

But, my porn comment research did lead me in an educational direction. Additional research into the authenticity of the Backroom Casting Couch series revealed that the male “star” of the videos is an Arizona man named Eric Whitaker, and that he totally has Herpes Simplex Virus Type I (he released proof through his Twitter account for some reason). The girls in the video are paid a flat fee up front, and are fully aware that they are entering Whitaker’s sleazy as hell Scottsdale office to have sex on camera, though apparently Whitaker has no qualms about knowingly spreading his Herpes, an offense which in the state of Arizona could possibly be considered aggravated assault.

Since June 2011, the greasy fuck Whitaker has been on the radar of sex crime detectives.

Next month Anderson continues to probe the porno-troll world and stumbles across a sex scandal involving a senator’s daughter.

Published September 1, 2012

Lines Matter: How Geographic Representation Could Completely Redefine Austin
by Brandon Roberts

Served: The Poorest Servers in Texas
by Marie Scott

Sexscapes: The Internet Gives a Voice to the Perverts of the World
by Anderson Rodriguez

Drink of the Month: Rice-A-Rummy
by Lisa van Dam-Bates

September Show Listings
by Austin Cut Staff

My parents are weirdos. That’s really what my present-day dietary restrictions boil down to. When I was growing up we couldn’t have sugar, dairy, processed anything, or tasty anything. So, I was raised on rice milk, used sparingly because “it’s expensive.” To me, cereal tastes normal with rice milk. Coffee tastes normal with rice milk. My palate thinks that soy milk is gross and grainy, and regular milk is too thick and creamy. So, it’s no surprise that I want to drink my White Russians with rice milk, or that I want to make delicious new beverages with it too.

This one is tropically inspired and, if you have a blender, would be good in smoothie form too.

Combine:

-          Ice

-          Rice milk (original, not vanilla)

-          Coconut rum

Bacardi Coco costs a little more than Malibu, but has almost twice the alcohol – 21% vs. 35%. Otherwise get whichever brand is cheapest – you’ll get a hangover no matter the quality. If you’re going to make a smoothie of it, add some pineapple and you’ll basically be drinking the healthiest most delicious piña colada ever.