Community Power updates

This week WGXC will run a three-part segment I did with Dan Duthie, following up on the conversation I had with Will Yandik in October. Listen Wednesday through Friday nights at 6:15PM at WGXC 90.7FM in Greene or Columbia County, or online. In the meanwhile, I really think you should read up on the current state of affairs regarding the Energy Highway/Power Line project, maybe watch a video on the subject, and then call the Governor and let him know what you think at 518-474-8390. Meanwhile, here are links to Community Power Episodes 06 (with Neil Larson) and 07 (with Will Yandik).

Working while black

An interesting look into workplace discrimination from three black men discussing an Atlantic story entitled "Black Workers Really Do Need to Be Twice as Good." The discussion of this article begins at around the 55:00 minute mark and includes a lot of personal experiences of the three commentators (Aaron Rand Freeman, Jarrett Hill, and Shane Paul Neil).
 

Next Community Power Segment this Friday, LIVE at 6:15 pm

Will Yandik of Farmers and Families for Livingston asks of Governor Cuomo if there is an exit from the Energy Superhighway in an editorial in In My Back Yard. I'll be talking with Will about the state of play in the power line project and asking for your support for WGXC 90.7 FM during our Dead Air fund drive (boo!) on Friday, October 23, from 6:15 pm until 7 pm. You can tune in in Greene and Columbia Counties on 90.7FM or stream live over the intertubez. I'll post an edited version of the show here in a few days. You can go ahead and support the station right now by calling (518) 828-0290 or going to our homepage and clicking on the friendly donate now button. Thanks!!

Community Power Segment #6: Neil Larson

Airing on WGXC 90.7FM Acra, Wednesday, September 16, 2015, the sixth segment of Commuity Power, in which I talk to Neil Larson of Larson Fisher Associates about the process of historical resource surveys and the current state of the Community Resource Survey of Livingston. Tune in at 6:15 PM or listen online.

Free e-boook on measuring the impact of cooperatives on communities

Co-operatives and Sustainable Communities: Tools Book | Measuring the Co-operative Difference, a free e-book being made available by Cooperative Difference. From the link:

The Measuring the Co-operative Difference Research Network and the Centre of Excellence in Accounting and Reporting for Co-operatives joined forces to organize an international conference, focused on how and why co-operatives assess their performance and their impacts on society.



Academics and practitioners gathered to share their research and experiences with a variety of accounting and reporting tools and practices. The event offered an unprecedented opportunity to recognize and debate various reporting needs and practices, to hear from practitioners regarding the purpose and methods of reporting in their co-operatives, and to identify the building blocks for the establishment of key supports for co-operatives engaged in performance measuring and reporting.



Over a period of 3 days co-operative practitioners and researchers from Europe, North America and Latin America discussed the strengths and weaknesses of the various tools used by co-operatives, and considered how best to obtain and share reliable and accurate information on co-operative performance and impact. Participants agreed that in addition to being useful for co-operatives as part of their self-evaluation and strategic planning processes, the sharing of information resulting from use of various tools and reporting practices can help co-operatives in the implementation of the strategy for sustainable growth of the co-operative movement, outlined in the Blueprint for a Co-operative Decade.



The key questions posed by the conference organizers were: What do co-operatives report and why? What tools exist and what is missing? Which tools set co-operatives apart from other business forms (and do they measure the co-operative identity)? Which tools are standard in respective industries and are co-operatives leaders or followers in those efforts?



The conference was exploring five interconnected themes:

1. Statistics and data collection
2. Putting co-operative principles into practice
3. Community impact
4. Member and stakeholder engagement
5. Reporting practices (co-operative identity and sustainability)

The chapters in this book are organized according to these five themes. They offer an international snapshot of the work being undertaken in these areas, with the intention of sharing the knowledge and experience obtained thus far. The authors advocate a critical analysis of these materials, and suggest ways forward as practitioners and researchers address the reporting and dissemination challenges identified during the conference.

Good news, everyone! Being a sociopath is not immoral!

This editorial by Harry G. Frankfurt, writing for Bloomberg View, caught my attention. Especially the following paragraph:

Exaggerating the moral importance of economic equality is harmful, in other words, because it is alienating. It separates a person from his own individual reality, and leads him to focus his attention upon desires and needs that are not most authentically his own.

In other words, if you "exaggerate" the moral importance of of economic equality, you run the risk of veering away from sociopathy. So, beware! More basically, the whole editorial seems to be arguing against the strawman argument that people concerned with economic inequality on moral grounds want equality of outcomes. That is not a widely held position by people who argue about the importance of economic inequality.

Community Power Segments 01 - 05 now available here!

Community Power #5 has now aired, and I'm putting the first five segments up so you can listen to them here. As I finish the remaining segments I'll add them. The theme music is the "Apple Pickers' Reel", performed by Larry Hanks, from the Folkways Records' 1972 release Berkeley Farms: Oldtime and Country Style Music of Berkeley.

• Community Power 01 - Will Yandik, Farmers and Families for Livingston, Hudson Valley Smart Energy Coalition, and Deputy Supervisor of the Town of Livingston. Also, co-producer of this series.
• Community Power 02 - Erin Tobin, Director of Preservation at Preservation League of New York State
• Community Power 03 - Joe Gatti, Livingston Town Historian, and Will Yandik
• Community Power 04 - Pam Kline, founder of Farmers and Families for Livingston.
• Community Power 05 - Hayley Carlock, Director of Environmental Advocacy for Scenic Hudson, and Daniel P. Duthie, a lawyer representing four towns and three organizations before the Public Service Commission.

Community Power Segment #5 airing this week on WGXC 90.7 FM

This week on Community Power, I talk with Hayley Carlock, Director of Environmental Advocacy for Scenic Hudson and Daniel Duthie, a lawyer representing several towns in the Transmission Line project process. We discuss the current state of affairs in the process of approving bids for Transmission Line expansion in the Hudson Valley and the NY State Public Service Commission's technical conference: what the technical conference is for, what happened and what remains to be done. We also discuss prospects moving forward of preventing the project from happening. The interview will air in segments beginning on Wednesday, at 6:15pm on WGXC 90.7 FM and streaming online at wgxc.org. Don't miss it!

Panel in Athens NY, 8/15/2015

I'll be participating in a panel discussion with three artists and two environmental educators. It should be a pretty wide-ranging discussion of the relationship between art and advocacy, the impact of changes in our ecology on our economy, etc. Come on by if you're in the area.


Shifting Ecologies II - Panel Discussion
Aug 15, 2015: 5pm - 7pm
Athens Cultural Center
24 Second Street
Athens, NY 12015
(518) 945-2136
The panel will present and discuss the interplay between art and science on the subject of environmental change, and will conclude with a group manifestation by the river with multidisciplinary artist and activist Carrie Dashow.

Publlic Service Commission AC Transmission Cases Technical Conference, part I

The Public Service Commission has posted video of the webstream from the first part of the technical conference on the various transmission line proposals that are part of the governor's energy superhighway. I'll be talking to Hayley Carlock of Scenic Hudson and Dan Duthie of Strategic Power in the next installment of Community Power which will air on August 19th. LInks to the videos (or webstream if you catch the last one as it's happening) are below.

• Day 1, July 20, 2015.
• Day 2, July 21, 2015.
• Day 3, July 31, 2015.

No, actually #BlackLivesMatter doesn't mean #WhiteLivesDon't

Jeb(!) Bush is certainly not the only one who doesn't get (or at least dare not be seen to get in public) the point of #BlackLivesMatter. If it confuses you or gives you awkward feels, try this analogy on for size (linked to in the WaPo blog post by Dave Weigel, but originally posted on Reddit):

Imagine that you're sitting down to dinner with your family, and while everyone else gets a serving of the meal, you don't get any. So you say "I should get my fair share." And as a direct response to this, your dad corrects you, saying, "everyone should get their fair share." Now, that's a wonderful sentiment -- indeed, everyone should, and that was kinda your point in the first place: that you should be a part of everyone, and you should get your fair share also. However, dad's smart-ass comment just dismissed you and didn't solve the problem that you still haven't gotten any!
The problem is that the statement "I should get my fair share" had an implicit "too" at the end: "I should get my fair share, too, just like everyone else." But your dad's response treated your statement as though you meant "only I should get my fair share", which clearly was not your intention. As a result, his statement that "everyone should get their fair share," while true, only served to ignore the problem you were trying to point out.

 Got it? Good. (h/t Anne Laurie at Ballon Juice)

Bernie's not like a rolling stone

Jesse Myerson, in his article in Rolling Stone, "Why Doesn't Bernie Sanders Run on a Truly Socialist Platform?", mentions some interesting policies Sanders ought to be running on, including the Employer of Last Resort (ELR), linking to two policy notes by my fellow Levy Economics Institute scholar Pavlina Tcherneva. Myerson ironically points out that Sanders hired Stephanie Kelton, another Levy associate, to be chief economist for the Democratic staff of the Senate Budget Committee. Kelton is a proponent of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), which supports the idea of the government as employer of last resort. The basic idea behind ELR is that the government would guarantee a job to anyone who can't find one in the labor market. The alphabet-soup programs of the New Deal era were a step in this direction. This is not a popular idea with the Chamber of Commerce or the National Association of Manufacturers because it gives workers a decent fallback if they (the private employers) don't offer decent working conditions and pay. Workers might get a little uppity if that were the case. Profits might fall slightly (if you ignore the increased income flowing into workers' pockets that they would tend to spend on the things that those employers make). Anyway, I second that motion: Bernie add this to your platform!

Community Power Segment 4 airing this week on WGXC!

Tune in to WGXC this week for the fourth segment in the Community Power series. In the coming weeks, I'll be posting each segment that has aired already on Soundcloud, so that you can listen to them at your leisure.

• Part I: Wednesday, July 15 at 6:15 PM
  The first part of my interview with Pam Kline, organizer of Farmers and Families for Livingston, in which we talk about her restoration of her home, a Dutch farmhouse from the colonial era, which is along the proposed route of power line upgrades.
• Part II: Thursday, July 16 at 6:15 PM
  "The second part of my interview with Pam Kline, organizer of Farmers and Families for Livingston (http://www.farmersandfamiliesforlivingston.com/), in which we talk about the organizing of resistance to proposed the Energy Superhighway's local impacts.

The Rise in Earnings Inequality, Dissected

In their NBER working paper, Firming Up Inequality, the authors find:

Covering all U.S. firms between 1978 to 2012, we show that virtually all of the rise in earnings dispersion between workers is accounted for by increasing dispersion in average wages paid by the employers of these individuals. In contrast, pay differences within employers have remained virtually unchanged, a finding that is robust across industries, geographical regions, and firm size groups. Furthermore, the wage gap between the most highly paid employees within these firms (CEOs and high level executives) and the average employee has increased only by a small amount, refuting oft-made claims that such widening gaps account for a large fraction of rising inequality in the population.

To say the least, this is an interesting finding, if it holds up to scrutiny. The implication is that the rise in earnings inequality over the past few decades is as a result of new firms paying higher wages than previously existing firms. So the earnings inequality breaks down into a new economy/old economy dichotomy.

If I only had a brain

Let's play find the logical fallacy [hint in the post title]:

. . . economic inequality is not what is holding Americans back.
"The challenge isn't that some people are successful and some people aren't. Taking from the successful people to provide for those that aren't isn't the solution," Bush said after a closed meeting at the Metropolitan Republican Club on Manhattan's Upper East Side.

Did you find it? Answer below the fold.

Community Power Part I, This Wednesday at 6:15pm

The first segment of Community Power airs this Wednesday, April 15th at 6:15pm on WGXC 90.7FM Acra or streaming live online at wgxc.org. "Community Power" is a year-long, monthly series of interviews about Governor Andrew M. Cuomo's New York Energy Highway Blueprint, the local response to that initiative, and the Cultural Resources Survey of Livingston. In this interview Will Yandik, Livingston deputy supervisor, farmer and a founder of Farmers and Families for Livingston and the Hudson Valley Smart Energy Coalition, provides an overview of the history of the project, and the current status of the Energy Highway and the Cultural Resources Survey. Yanik was interviewed by Thomas Masterson at the WGXC Hudson Studio, Mar. 18, 2015. The series is produced by Thomas Masterson, Will Yandik and WGXC.

Newsflash: reduced spending on the poors will reduce the income of the poors

The Congressional Budget Office presents, in extremely neutral language, the impacts of three options for reducing spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP or the program formerly known as Food Stamps). Why? Because "some policymakers have expressed a desire to scale back the program significantly to reduce federal spending." Are these the same "some policymakers" who don't want women to have access to birth control or any kind of family planning, too? The smart bet is on yes. Why do I mention that? Well, it turns out that a majority of the recipients of SNAP are children. Unfortunately for them, they are post-born children, the kind our elected leaders somehow care less about than the pre-born. Three quarters of recipient households have children, people over age 60 or disabled members. What will happen if benefits are cut? Spoiler alert: the earth-shattering conclusion of the CBO analysis: cutting spending would hurt either the bottom 20% of households or the second-lowest 20% of households by after-tax income, the most, depending on just how you cut the spending.