Sightline on TV!
A belated heads-up: You have *two* opportunities to see Sightline researchers/bloggers on TV today.
This afternoon at 3pm, Alan "car-less" Durning will be on KOMO's Northwest Afternoon show (Channel 4 in Seattle), telling the story of how a neighborhood like his has made his family's year-long experiment to live without a car possible.
And tonight at 7pm, on Seattle Channel's "City Inside/Out," Clark Williams-Derry engages in a lively debate with former King County Council member Brian Derdowski about some very hot Northwest issues--growth, density, and neighborhood character. (The segment was partly inspired by this online debate.) If you miss it, it will replay several times and you can view it online at www.seattlechannel.org.
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Minimum Wage Boost Won't Last
It's been mostly buried by the acrimonious debate over the Iraq War supplemental that Congress just passed, but attached to that spending bill is the first minimum wage hike since 1997. The boost to $7.25 per hour will affect about 13 million workers nationwide. President Bush has said he'll sign it. It's good news.
But unfortunately, Congress also missed a huge opportunity to do what Washington and Oregon have been doing for years: index the minimum wage to inflation. It's not rocket science, but it's surprisingly easy to forget this little verity: if your wage stays constant, but inflation occurs, you're really and truly getting a pay cut.
To see what I mean, take a look at the history of the US minimum wage from 1960 to 2009.
Pretty sweet deal for workers, huh?
Now take a look at the same trend, with inflation factored in. [Wages are expressed in 2006 dollars; the red dot is the current wage.]
Not so groovy, is it?
The only fair remedy is to index the minimum wage to inflation. That way the lowest paid workers won't be subjected to the fickle whims of politicians. Those whims can be tough, by the way: Congress just ended the longest stretch of not raising the wage -- thereby effectively decreasing it every year -- since the minimum wage was enacted in 1938.
Is Greenwashing Good for You?
In an undeniable rush, corporate giants are jumping on the “green” bandwagon: Wal-mart, Ford, Dow, General Electric, British Petroleum, Chevron, DuPont, to name only a few. “There's a tendency to put a green smiley face on everything,” says Joel Makower, author of The Green Consumer. And smiley faces are rearing their heads all over the place. “We use our waste CO2 to grow flowers,” claims a Shell Oil ad.
Right…
But, the concept isn’t new. In 1999, "greenwash" was added to the Oxford English Dictionary, where it is defined as: "Disinformation disseminated by an organization so as to present an environmentally responsible public image." Naturally, green branding breeds even greener skeptics.
There are plenty of arguments for why this is inherently bad, especially if it’s just lip service – or worse, polishing up the public image of big polluters or convincing people that an environmental problem is being solved by industry when it isn't.
On the other hand, if huge corporate ad campaigns help cultivate a green-conscious public that doesn't stop at voting with their dollars but also votes its greenness at the ballot box, we have a better chance of moving sustainable policies forward. Greenwashing, for all the ire it raises among the truly green, might have long term political benefits.
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Social Engineering Watch
Get this: not spending tax dollars to build a parking garage is "social engineering," according to a column in today's P-I.
