What? Wait? It's August?
A couple things this week - my favorite podcast, and redistrict madness has begun.
Since time’s a flying by, I’m going to hurry up and get right to the point before another month passes by.
First, I had the chance to appear on one of my all-time favorite Podcasts: Pitchfork Economics. If you don’t have this in your subscription list, you’re missing out. This podcast is full of valuable and interesting information about our economy. I’ve learned a great deal from it - and it’s helped me see the broader historical realities of how our economy does, and doesn’t, really work. (Hint: Making rich people richer doesn’t make working people rich. It just makes them work harder and longer so rich people have so much money they build toy rocket ships to fly into space).
This episode features a conversation about the Frito-Lay strike in Topeka.
Here’s the link if you’re a Spotify person.
The conversation references some of the information from a previous post I wrote, looking at the annual report for Frito-Lay’s parent company, PepsiCo - which revealed some obnoxious details like $15 billion in stock buybacks and a CEO to employee pay ration of 462:1
Aside from shamelessly plugging my appearance on this specific episode :) , I hope you’ll take time to listen to other episodes. It’s a fun and clever examination of economics, with loads of qualified people sharing really good information. Pitchfork Economics can be found on just about any podcast platform - I usually listen on Spotify or Google Podcasts. But it's also available here https://pitchforkeconomics.com/
Oh, wait, one more thing
Did you hear about those redistricting town hall meetings? Well, much like some of those small towns in Kansas - you better not blink or you’ll miss them, cause we’re cramming this very important job into just five days.
I’ll likely have more on this in a separate post, but I’ll dip a toe in the water here.
The legislature is tasked with redrawing political boundaries every 10 years. We shouldn’t be tasked with this, because what is designed to create fair representative districts becomes a self-serving free-for-all. On its face, lawmakers shouldn’t be allowed to pick their own voters and make life easier on themselves.
Historically, the redistricting committee travels to communities around the state to gather input from, you know, Kansas voters, so we can have a better understanding of what ties different communities together and be careful not to break them up.
It seems the majority leadership views this job much like a 12-year-old boy who’s just been told to clean up his room. Hence a 5-day whirlwind tour around the state, spending just 75 minutes in each community - with only 10 days’ notice for anyone interested to gather their information to offer the committee.
So, in 2011 the same tour spanned four months. In 2001, it spanned two full months. In both cases, the committee spent considerable time and gathered useful information from the communities they visited. In 2001, a nice report was issued to the entire legislature. In 2011, signs of our degrading democracy were already visible, so no report was offered. I’ve attached the schedules below.
I’ll dive into this in more detail in another post. Because I have more information to gather, but time’s a ticking if you want to have any say or input about how your community might be affected in the once-a-decade political slugfest known as redistricting.
(Late addition: Just this afternoon, the press reported that a second round of town halls will be scheduled during the fall. Don’t know if this is true, because no one I’ve talked with has seen anything official from House or Senate leadership. Actually, have yet to see anything official from either chamber - outside of the link on the Kansas Legislative Research Department’s website - on these town halls. If it is true, on balance, it will be better for communities. But it seems instead of wasting time flexing political muscle, the entire state would be better off if our leaders would hit the pause button, regroup, and come up with an actual plan that is focused on what’s best forthe people of Kansas. The communication and planning on this has been abysmal. And the only response from the people running the show was a press conference saying that the people criticizing them are being big meanies, and that it’s really the research department that put this all together - which is also not true, because they wouldn’t have done anything without being told to do it by leadership).
