Join the Media, Inequality & Change Center, the Penn Program on Regulation, and the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy for this talk from Sandeep Vaheesan on his new book “Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States.”
About the Book
Until the 1930s, financial interests dominated electrical power in the United States. That changed with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal which restructured the industry. The government expanded public ownership, famously through the Tennessee Valley Authority, and promoted a new kind of utility: the rural electric cooperative that brought light and power to millions in the countryside. Since then, public and cooperative utilities have persisted as an alternative to shareholder control. Democracy in Power traces the rise of publicly governed utilities in the twentieth-century electrification of America.
Sandeep Vaheesan shows that the path to accountability in America’s power sector was beset by bureaucratic challenges and fierce private resistance. Through a detailed and critical examination of this evolution, Vaheesan offers a blueprint for a publicly led and managed path to decarbonization. Democracy in Power is at once an essential history, a deeply relevant accounting of successes and failures, and a guide on how to avoid repeating past mistakes.
Purchase the book online here!
Sandeep Vaheesan
Legal Director
Open Markets Institute
Sandeep Vaheesan is the legal director at the Open Markets Institute. He leads Open Markets’ legal advocacy and research work, including its amicus program.
Vaheesan works on a range of anti-monopoly topics, including antitrust law’s role in structuring labor markets and promoting fair competition. From 2015 to 2018, he served as a regulations counsel at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where he helped develop rules on payday and title lending and debt collection practices. Before that, he worked at the American Antitrust Institute.
Vaheesan’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Harvard Law & Policy Review, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Yale Law Journal Forum. He has a forthcoming book titled Democracy in Power with the University of Chicago Press on the history of public and cooperative power in the United States and the lessons it offers for building a clean, publicly accountable electric industry today.
Victor Pickard (moderator)
C. Edwin Baker Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy
Annenberg School for Communications
Victor Pickard is the C. Edwin Baker Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at the Annenberg School for Communication, where he co-directs the Media, Inequality & Change (MIC) Center. Previously he taught at NYU and the University of Virginia and has held visiting appointments at Cornell, Goldsmiths, and LSE. He also worked on media policy in Washington, D.C. as a Senior Research Fellow at the media reform organization Free Press and the think tank New America, and as a Policy Fellow for Congresswoman Diane Watson.
Pickard has authored or edited six books, including the award-winning Democracy Without Journalism? Confronting the Misinformation Society (Oxford University Press, 2020) and America’s Battle for Media Democracy: The Triumph of Corporate Libertarianism and the Future of Media Reform (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Other books include After Net Neutrality: A New Deal for the Digital Age (with David Berman; Yale University Press, 2019), Will the Last Reporter Please Turn out the Lights (with Robert McChesney; The New Press, 2011), The Future of Internet Policy (with Peter Decherney; Routledge, 2016), and Media Activism in the Digital Age (with Guobin Yang; Routledge, 2017).
Pickard has also published more than 150 articles, essays, and book chapters in leading scholarly journals, magazines, and anthologies, and he has co-authored three major policy reports. In 2009, he was the lead author of the first comprehensive report on the American journalism crisis, “Saving the News: Toward a National Journalism Strategy” (published by Free Press as part of the book Changing Media: Public Interest Policies for the Digital Age). In 2017, he co-authored the major report “Essential Principles for Contemporary Media and Communications Policymaking” (with Robert Picard; published by the Reuters Institute, University of Oxford). In 2018, he co-authored the report “The Media Democracy Agenda: The Strategy and Legacy of FCC Commissioner Michael Copps” (with Pawel Popiel; published by the Benton Foundation).
Shelley Welton (moderator)
Presidential Distinguished Professor of Law and Energy Policy
Kleinman Center and Penn Carey Law
Shelley Welton is Presidential Distinguished Professor of Law and Energy Policy with the Kleinman Center and Penn Carey Law. Welton previously was an Associate Professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law.
At the Law School, Welton teaches environmental law, climate change law, and a seminar on Networks, Platforms, and Utilities. She also teaches “Introduction to Energy Policy,” a university-wide graduate course, for the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy.
Welton’s scholarship focuses on how climate change is transforming energy and environmental governance within the United States and transnationally. Current research projects include exploring a just energy transition for the U.S. south; understanding what lessons the failed nuclear renaissance offers for climate infrastructure development; and investigating grid reliability governance under climate change. Her scholarship has appeared in publications including the Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, California Law Review, Columbia Law Review, Michigan Law Review, and Harvard Environmental Law Review.
Prior to academia, Welton worked as the deputy director of Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. She also clerked for the Honorable David Trager of the Eastern District of New York and the Honorable Allyson Duncan of the Fourth Circuit. She received her Ph.D. in law from Yale Law, her J.D. from NYU School of Law, a M.P.A. in environmental science and policy from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, and her B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.