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.