Transparency Is Good, Even If It Hurts

The Environmental Working Group led the way with its FOIA request to get farm payment data from FSA and putting the data up on the Internet.  News organizations are following the precedent--here is a CBS report from Florida spotlighting FSA payments made to dead persons.  They matched data from the SSA's death index to payment data from EWG's database to identify such cases. 

I find the matching interesting because one of the conditions under which USDA provided the data was that social security numbers were replaced in the data by constructed numbers, meaning EWG doesn't have social security numbers.  But, given the advances in computing it was presumably easy enough for CBS to match using name and address from EWG's files to the name and address from SSA's files--they got along without the SSN.

There's some misinformation in the article--notably when an EWG type compares making welfare payments to a dead person with making farm payments to a dead person.  The comparison is invalid, because the farm payment goes with the land, not the person. And I wonder how many cases there are of the heirs leaving an estate open just out of inertia and procrastination. As usual the media and critics make things seem simpler than the reality is, at least the reality seen by a good bureaucrat.  But the bottom line is, if FSA doesn't follow its rules, people should be able to find out.  And if people think the rules are wrong, then in a democracy they can get them changed.

Under the Obama adminstration's open government initiatives, I'd like to see FSA put up its own database, including all the data it gives to EWG, plus the matching to SSA's files.  Of course, that would take resources FSA doesn't have, so maybe it's better to out-source this stuff to EWG and the media.

Pigford and the Women

From a Government Executive post:

two key House members introduced legislation Thursday to establish a $4.6 billion compensation fund for female farmers who have been denied loans since 1981.

The article discusses Pigford and the other discrimination cases filed against FSA and USDA.  But there's no substantive discussion of the basis for the amount or any indication of what lawyers are involved.  (In the Pigford case there were allegations of misconduct by some of the lawyers.)

Updated:  See the press release on De Lauro's site for more details.  I refuse to use my dwindling brain cells to analyze the differences between De Lauro's process and Pigford but it looks as if it's the two track process again: one track for people who credibly claim to have applied for a loan, another track for people who can prove discrimination.  The first track gets $5,000 instead of the $50,000 for Pigford; the second gets an adjustable $109,000. 

One white male chauvinist legalistic remark:  there's no provision to prevent double-dipping by a black female  farmer (or, in the event, a Hispanic female or a Native American female farmer).

Google's Web History

Looked at my Google Web History today and found some mysterious searches in my top 10. Specifically, they're in the format: ocean2-*.org  where the asterisk represents a string of numerals.  Clicking on the link produces a "Server not found" message.  Doing Whois for "ocean2.org finds very little.  So, big concern.

However, this page at serverfault provides a possible explanation--it's a byproduct of doing searches on Google Books (which I often do in my genealogy pursuits).

Payment Limitation Rules Proposed by Christmas?

From the Delta Farm Press:

“I expect — and I don’t want to create any more anxiety out there than already exists — but I expect we will be announcing our proposals for rules governing payment limits and actively engaged as well as a memorandum of agreement with the IRS,” said James W. Miller, undersecretary of agriculture for farm and foreign agricultural services.
Miller, the keynote speaker at the USA Rice Federation’s Rice Outlook Conference in New Orleans on Thursday, said he anticipates the regulations for the new payment limit rules and the implementation of the new crop disaster program known as SURE, could be published by the end of the year.

I might even rouse myself to read the darn thing (I assume an interim final rule) but I'm sure it will be fun and games for FSA and farmers to figure out.

Most Incredible Sentence Today--Robin Hanson

" Even if we gained from other kids’ schooling, that only suggests we subsidize schools, not that governments run them. "

Robin Hanson is usually interesting, but occasionally I find him obtuse, as in this discussion of why we have public schools.  His argument is that public schools are a means of propaganda for the government and vested interests (i.e., Protestant theology in the 19th century). What stops me dead in my tracks is the "if" in his sentence, as if there were any doubt.  In my mind, the big argument for globalization is the idea it gets more minds working away at hard problems, like maybe how to prevent Alzheimers (or whatever issue rings your bell). 

Electronic Health Records Advance

My healthcare provider is Kaiser, which has had electronic records for a while now.  They've improved the setup--my wife was able to schedule an appointment online very easily (about as easily as I was able to schedule an appointment for the car to be serviced).

Today, though, I got an email from the vet (for our two cats)--they're going electronic as well.  So far I'm less impressed with the software than the others I've mentioned, but the march of progress is carrying all before it.

Losing Historical Data

"Climategate" has in part focused on the loss of climate data supporting the research.  From another realm, that of high energy physics, comes another tale of scientists losing data, and the audit trail between raw data and published results.  No one will allege conspiracy here; it's a non-controversial field of science. 

(I do shed a tear for the idea that Fortran is an endangered language--if people can worry about the languages of the remote areas of the world being endangered they surely should also worry about Fortran and Lisp. )

Worst Sentence, Punctuation of the Day

"Our relatively youthful and socially diverse population includes a large component of people,..."

Apparently this conservative isn't sure what else our population includes. But since we liberals try to be half-way fair to our conservative brethren, here's the full sentence, with the proper punctuation inserted: ". Our relatively youthful and socially diverse population includes a large component of people, particularly males[,] with limited skills and education."  Still not graceful writing, I wouldn't use the word "component" in this context.

 From a Politico opinion piece attacking Obama for his climate change policies.

A Mystery for Political Scientists

It's commonly agreed farmers have greater influence in the EU than in the US.  That accounts for the greater subsidies in the EU.  But, as reported by Dan Morgan via Farm Policy, EU politicians ignore farmers when it comes to climate change, while agriculture looks to be a key player in Congressional debates over cap and trade information.  Why?

"...American farmers often wish they wielded the same kind of power and influence [as EI farmers].
“So I was surprised recently by the answer I got from a senior official from Brussels when I asked him about the role agriculture was playing in the European debate over climate change. After a pause and a momentary blank stare, the European Commission official replied that the farm lobby hadn’t been a major factor.”

Those Learning Curve Glitches with FSA Payments

There's a post here (Illinois Farm Bureau) saying that the glitches with centralized payments from Kansas City have been so bad that some House members are considering forcing the payment process back to the county offices.

Updated:  NASCOE has a piece on this (click on "Nascoe Now" to download the Word document) which essentially says there's no going back (rather like Obama with Afghanistan, maybe).