Phony populism doesn’t feed the family
Memphis is blessed with an abundant supply of drinking water from an aquifer far below the surface known as the Memphis Sand. To keep things that way for generations of Memphians well into the future, this abundant supply must not be treated like an infinite supply.
That’s why the Tennessee Valley Authority should look beyond one of the options it is considering for water to cool the $975 million natural gas-fired power plant under construction in Southwest Memphis — drilling wells into the Memphis Sand.
The new plant will be a valuable asset to the Memphis area, providing a reliable source of electricity to accommodate future growth as it replaces the coal-burning, 57-year-old Allen Fossil Plant and significantly reduces both carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions.
The decision to build the plant arose from agreements entered into by TVA in 2011 that settled alleged Clean Air Act violations at Allen and other coal-fired plants.
But the agency has said it is leaning toward pumping from as many as five wells in the Memphis Sand to obtain cooling water. Although the water would be recycled, circulating continuously through the plant, evaporation would make it necessary for TVA to pump as much as 3.5 million gallons of water daily from the aquifer, possibly sucking less pure water from a shallower aquifer into the Memphis Sand.
The city’s primary source of drinking water is not an inexhaustible supply. If it were, the state of Mississippi might not have sued Memphis for the estimated $615 million worth of water from the aquifer the state says has been stolen from Mississippi since 1985.
The pending lawsuit demands a halt to pumping practices that have redirected the flow of aquifer water, which could force Memphis to use the Mississippi River for at least some of its drinking supply.
How the legal argument is resolved is a multimillion-dollar question for the city of Memphis. And it points to the need for a formal process in which the aquifer is equitably apportioned among the affected states — the kind of agreement that has controlled the distribution of water among water-scarce Western states for decades.
In the meantime, Memphis Sand withdrawals should be restricted to those that are necessary.
For the TVA, that could mean taking another look at the use of effluent from a nearby wastewater treatment plant for cooling, an option that was dropped initially because of the expense.
It could mean buying water from Memphis Light, Gas and Water Division, another drain on the Memphis Sand.
The TVA is reported to be still studying the alternatives. Doing its part to protect one of the Memphis community’s most valuable assets should be one of its top priorities.
You would have thought Labor Day 2016 would bring us a serious conversation about lifting the incomes of American workers and expanding their opportunities for advancement.
After all, we have talked incessantly all year about alienated blue-collar voters and a new populism rooted in the disaffection of those hammered by economic change.
But this isn’t the discussion we are having. Instead, we are enduring an attackfest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Their strategies are entirely rational. Voters are understandably skeptical about politicians getting anything done, and both candidates know they have a better chance of encouraging negative votes rather than securing a positive mandate.
I’m sorry to say the media make things worse by preferring spectacle and confrontation to digging into whether this plan to promote manufacturing or that idea for raising incomes will in fact work.
The truth is that Clinton has offered many more serious proposals for raising worker incomes than Trump has. Her website is full of ideas on expanding profit-sharing, a “Make it in America” initiative to promote manufacturing, plans on family leave, child care, cutting student debt and much more.
One of the banes of this campaign is the media’s temptation toward false balance: If a reporter says Trump isn’t offering a lot of plans, he or she feels obligated to say either that Clinton is short on specifics, too, or that she may have a lot of plans but isn’t packaging them very well. But if the media doesn’t want to cover them, all the bright bunting in the world won’t matter.
In the meantime, Trump has effectively reduced his campaign to immigration and trade (plus “law and order”). He argues that the problems U.S. workers face will be magically solved if we throw millions of immigrants out of the country and if he gets a chance to negotiate much tougher trade deals.
It would be good to have a sane, fact-based debate about how immigration and trade affect incomes and job opportunities. But Trump’s vicious tone toward immigrants and his breathtaking lack of specificity about trade show he’s more interested in exploiting these issues than thinking about them.
In the meantime, voices outside the campaign are trying to interject practical ideas that might help Americans whose incomes are lagging. The Opportunity Nation campaign will release a middle-of-theroad plan at the end of this week. Its main architects, Republican John Bridgeland and Democrat Bruce Reed, draw on ideas that have won support from both parties on expanding early childhood programs, increasing high school graduation rates, creating much broader opportunities for national service, and finding new ways to connect the 5.5 million Americans aged 16 to 24 who are disengaged from school and work.
That there is nothing radical in the plan may be its virtue given how hard it will be to get anything through Congress if voters again produce divided government.
Well worth more attention is the “10-20-30” initiative from Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C.. He would mandate that at least 10 percent of spending on federal programs go to counties where at least 20 percent of the population has lived below the poverty line for 30 years or more. Clinton has endorsed it, and House Speaker Paul Ryan has spoken favorably about it.
When it comes to politics and our nation’s divisions around race, the plan has important virtues. The 488 counties include many that are predominantly white, as well as many that are predominantly AfricanAmerican, Latino or Native American. Clyburn notes that the vast majority of counties that would benefit are represented by Republicans in Congress.
It’s also a brute fact that workers’ wages have declined or stagnated because the bargaining power of employees has been drastically undercut. A just-released study by the Economic Policy Institute showed that the weekly wages of non-union men without college degrees employed in the private sector would have been 8 percent higher in 2013 if union density had remained at 1979 levels.
And if older union models are out of date in some sectors, we need new ones such as those proposed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, DMass., to strengthen the rights of Americans who work in the gig economy.
This was supposed to be the election in which the interests of the non-elite finally got a hearing. We still have two months to make it happen.