Author: Editorial

Tennessee, we were informed last week, has the lowest taxes of any state in the country. So, are we number one? Or are we number 50?

The news, such as it is, will be seen in different ways by different people. Proponents of a property-tax increase to pay for schools will say Memphis and Shelby County residents are not as overtaxed as some of them think they are. Opponents of higher property taxes and a proposed payroll tax — or a state income tax — will likely say Tennessee is in an admirable position and ought to do nothing to change that.

The low-tax honors mainly stem from Tennessee’s lack of a state income tax. The benefits are greater for those in higher income brackets, and the burdens of the existing regressive system based on sales taxes are heaviest on the poor.

Property taxes vary widely from city to suburb in the Mid-South. Memphians pay the highest property taxes because they pay both Memphis and Shelby County levies. Suburbs have lower property-tax rates than Memphis.

In short, the low-tax tag makes for a snappy newspaper headline or attention-grabber on your Internet home page but may not be great policy. Taxing food and necessities for poor people is nothing to brag about, nor are per-pupil school expenditures well below the national average.

Charles Williamson, director of finance for the city of Memphis, says Memphis will be able to maintain its AA rating on its general obligation bonds “if we present a good plan and the rating agencies are persuaded that it will work.” If not, Memphis will be looking at higher property taxes a year from now. And however you read that headline, an increase would not be the end of the world.•

For a minute there, we were worried. When the Republican Party concluded its nominating convention (read: coronation ceremony) last week, President George W. Bush promptly ascended to a double-digit lead over Democrat John Kerry in a couple of the major polls, and the nation seemed doomed to watching another one of those prolonged death marches — avoided in recent times only by the agile and charismatic Bill Clinton — in which the Democratic nominee would slog his way inexorably to defeat.

Things may still turn out that way, but the latest polls show that Kerry has arrested his slide (or, alternatively, Bush has come somewhat back to earth), and there still might be a competitive presidential race after all — with a number of key states still regarded as problematic for either candidate.

We welcome that uncertainty for a number of reasons. First among them has to be the fact that we were unconvinced by the glib generalizations floated in Madison Square Garden last week concerning President Bush’s handle on the overriding questions of war and peace. We are especially dubious about the course of the ongoing war in Iraq, where August was an especially lethal month for the American troops — largely underequipped reservists — still engaged there. Nor do we discern much to comfort us in the president’s vague proposals for an “ownership” society. We’re somewhat intrigued by his call for drastic revisions in the nation’s tax structure, but our fear is that what he has in mind is the same old tax largesse for corporations and the wealthy, writ large.

Beyond our doubts about the president’s policies, however, is a simple belief that the nation is entitled to the kind of genuine dialogue concerning its future that only a competitive election can ensure. We trust that something like that will emerge from the series of forthcoming debates between the two major candidates, but it would be disingenuous not to acknowledge that the absence of such a dialogue so far has owed as much to Democrat Kerry’s fecklessness as to dissembling on Bush’s part.

To the extent that the Republican campaign team was in league with the swift-boat prevaricators who managed for a solid month to keep Kerry on the defensive concerning his war record in Vietnam, we say shame on them. But that shame is two-edged. Kerry is entitled to bear his share of it for failing to use his own party convention in Boston to establish much more than the fact of his meritorious service in Vietnam a generation ago. Once that fact could be brought into question — and, in effect, neutralized — he was left with very little that was both tangible and clearly articulated in his candidacy.

That was then, this is now, and there is still time for both candidates to contribute something other than platitudes and evasions to the election process. Remembering all too keenly the spoiler role played in 2000 by third-party candidate Ralph Nader, we have not been advocates of his being granted a place on the platform for any of the nationally televised debates. And we still shudder to think of what the effect of his candidacy might be in several of the battleground states, where he would certainly take more votes away from Democrat Kerry than from Republican Bush, altering the outcome of the electoral vote as he seems clearly to have done in both Florida and New Hampshire in 2000.

But if it takes the presence of Nader to force both Bush and Kerry off their dimes and to get them to think seriously and out loud about issues, then we’d be prepared to rethink that whole matter.

At the Republican National Convention in New York this week,

Americans (if they bother to tune in) will hear speaker after speaker extolling the virtues

of President George W. Bush, telling us what a wonderful job he has done

during his first term. They’ll hear how he has turned the economy around with his

tax cuts. How he has improved our schools. How he has made all of us safer.

All these statements are arguably if not demonstrably untrue, but none

more so than the last. The latest issue of Mother

Jones documents quite succinctly how this administration’s nation-building in the guise of terror-fighting has

made America distinctly less safe.

A few examples:

Amount needed for basic security upgrades for subway and commuter

trains in large cities: $6 billion (equivalent spending in Iraq: 20 days).

Bush budget allocation for train security: $100 million (Iraq equivalent:

8 hours).

Amount needed to equip all U.S. airports with machines that screen

baggage for explosives: $3 billion (Iraq equivalent:

10 days).

Bush budget allocation for baggage-screening machines: $400 million (Iraq

equivalent: 32 hours).

Amount needed for security upgrades at 361 U.S. ports: $1.1 billion (Iraq

equivalent: 4 days).

Bush budget allocation for port security: $210 million (Iraq equivalent: 17 hours).

Amount needed to buy radiation portals for U.S. ports to detect dirty bombs in

cargo: $290 million (Iraq equivalent: 23 hours).

Bush budget allocation for radiation portals: $43 million (Iraq equivalent:

3 hours).

Amount needed to help local firefighters prepare for terrorist attacks:

$36.8 billion (Iraq equivalent: 122 days).

Bush budget allocation for firefighter grants: $500 million (Iraq

equivalent: 40 hours).

Amount needed to get local emergency medical crews ready for

terrorist atttacks: $1.4 billion (Iraq equivalent:

5 days).

Bush budget allocation for emergency medical training grants prior to

eliminating the program altogether: $50 million (Iraq equivalent: 4 hours).

Any further questions? Ask your nearest cheering

Republican. n

Mother Jones documents how nation-building

in the guise of terror-fighting has made America

distinctly less safe.

Though he was involved — tangentially, all too tangentially — in the tsunami of the Iraqi visitors fiasco, Memphis mayor Willie Herenton got second billing to the City Council in that matter. And with scandal winds blowing up in the wake of ex-county aide Tom Jones’ revised-pension try (see Cover Story and Politics), Herenton had to play second fiddle in the media for most of last week to his beleagured Shelby County counterpart, Mayor A C Wharton.

All this had to be telling on the patience of our city’s three-term-going-on-life mayor, whose alpha-male propensities and determination to be unrivaled — even, it would seem, in controversy — may have led to his now notorious New Year’s Day speech blistering the members of the City Council. The former city schools superintendent said to the Flyer apropos the mayor’s break-in period at City Hall: “The biggest transition for me was coming into an organization and having to work with politicians on the City Council.” That transition never has been completed. The resulting feud with the council has only just begun to abate, and it may kick up again after the mayor’s latest action. That, of course, was the sacking of police director James Bolden, one of the few mayoral appointees to get by the council without a fight last January.

Bolden was ordered to resign after a still-mysterious incident in which the mayor reprimanded several officers at a drug-arrest scene for what Herenton later described as “horseplay.” When Bolden defended the actions of his men (who asserted that Herenton had used profanity when speaking to them), the mayor professed himself “disappointed” — a word which, in Herenton’s lexicon, is equivalent to a pink slip.

Bolden is but the latest in a series of such dismissed officials. Not just police directors (four of whom had left, voluntarily or otherwise, previously) but a host of other mayoral appointees have been shown the door, one or two of them in the mayor’s first week in office, back in 1992.

Even granting that those now departed must have possessed the usual ration of human flaws, there is something amiss here. Our mayor is occasionally mentioned as a prospect for high administrative office elsewhere. (Some speculate that the Bush administration may have a post in mind for him — say, secretary of education to succeed Rod Paige.) But whether he moves on or remains in his current post until the spirit moves him to retire, it behooves Herenton to remember that his is still an elective position, paramount but not solitary or unchecked in the panoply of city officials.

It behooves the one major local official who has consistently stood for local governmental consolidation to demonstrate by example not just that he’s the Big Man, but that he possesses the ability to work within a Big Tent.

It might be helpful to that end if the mayor tucked in his elbows a tad and gave his department heads and fellow governmental officials a little more room to operate without fear of reprisal. n

Call it a tempest in a teacup, if you will. But there’s no doubt that last week’s controversy regarding City Council chairman Joe Brown’s decision to refuse access to City Hall to a visiting Iraqi delegation was an international embarrassment of the first order for Memphis. When you’re suddenly famous for buffoonery from L.A. to London, you should not consider it anything less than a black eye for the city.

Brown has apologized, sort of, but steps need to be taken to ensure that Memphis never again finds itself in such self-inflicted hot water. For starters, let’s be certain that whoever happens to hold the largely ceremonial office of City Council chairman is brought up to speed on the duties of that office, e.g., that he/she understands that the chairman is a point person as regards international visitors and thereby has in place a system for welcoming such visitors. In that fashion, “misunderstandings” (as Brown called last week’s snafu) can be eliminated and avoided.

Second, let’s find a means to give some legitimate funding for the Memphis branch of the Council for International Visitors, our local liaison with the State Department. This all-volunteer organization has struggled for years, with virtually no budget, to show off Memphis to dignitaries from abroad; in such circumstances, one could seriously argue that last week’s debacle was an accident waiting to happen. Elisabeth Silverman, who tirelessly organizes local tours and meet-and-greets for our foreign guests, was underappreciated before last week, and she should not be scapegoated now for the preeminent sins and misdeeds of others.

We spend literally millions trying to present a positive image of Memphis and Tennessee to the world at large. Surely we can spend the minimal amount of time and money required to ensure that no foreign delegation to this city ever gets treated so shabbily again.

Third, local rivalries and political grandstanding, both of which played a significant part in the misunderstanding, should be prevented by whatever means necessary from interfering with the sensitive issue of foreign visitors to our city. Though both Chairman Brown and Mayor Willie Herenton, who made himself unavailable to meet with the Iraqis, pleaded protocol issues and would adamantly deny being influenced by their frayed relationship with council member Carol Chumney, it seems indisputable that, as various of her councilmates have indicated in one way or another, Chumney’s decision to take a hands-on role in shepherding the Iraqis put off her colleagues in city government. They should not have let their feelings toward Chumney get in the way of their larger responsibilities to the visitors and to the community’s good name.

And Chumney, who characteristically released a detailed “chronology” of events putting the blame for the fiasco on any and all others, needs to reexamine her way of interacting with other council members and with the mayor’s office. The causes she advocates may be — and most often are — estimable in themselves, but she seems determined to pursue them with a minimum regard for other officials and maximum regard for her own celebrity.

Last week was not strike one for Memphis. It was a strikeout, a whiff, a total embarrassment in the eyes of the world. We had best be better prepared for the next time at bat.

Many are mystified as to why the recently concluded Democratic convention in Boston did not give the party’s nominee, John Kerry, the customary postconvention “bounce” that newly crowned presidential prospects normally get from such conclaves.

Despite the fact that Kerry, whose platform style normally ranges from the dreary to the merely ordinary, gave a fairly spirited oration at last Thursday night’s concluding convention session, the polls taken afterward show that the Massachusetts senator has dropped, not risen, in the polls vis-à-vis his Republican opponent, President Bush.

Pundits everywhere are asking themselves, What doth this mean? And so far no one has a satisfactory answer. Unless …

Unless skeptics like ourselves were right all along in suggesting that more trouble was ahead if Democrats repeated the cautious electoral tactics of their congressional races in 2002 — a year which saw the party lose seats in the House and surrender control of the Senate to Republicans, defying the normal off-year pattern.

Although here and there, Kerry, his running-mate John Edwards, and other notable Democrats uttered some trenchant criticism of the Bush administration last week, it is no secret that convention speakers were advised by party officials and spokespersons for the Kerry campaign to soft-pedal their dispraise. Such advice was carried out to the point sometimes that a visiting Martian political scientist might have been perplexed as to just whom the party orators were finding fault with in their warnings about the current national course and in their urgent proposals for change. The names Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, and Rumsfeld almost never passed the lips of speakers at the podium — not even to mention such lesser potential foils as Perle and Wolfowitz, those industrious under-the-radar neocons whom many assign a significant role in engineering the nation’s military involvement in Iraq.

Insofar as the Iraq quagmire got referred to at all, it was usually in connection with purported failings in the nation’s intelligence apparatus. The nation’s spies, not their masters in the executive branch, have been asked to take the rap for Iraq. That’s the bottom line. Never mind the abundant evidence — supplied by former counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke, among others — that the administration applied considerable pressure on the intelligence agencies to find “evidence” of nonexistent WMD and of illusory collusion between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. Democrats on the 9/11 Commission said to put such evidence in; Republicans said to leave it out. In the interests of harmony, the Democrats graciously acceded to the GOP.

That seems to be the rule in today’s national politics. It was certainly the pattern in 2002, when Democrats tried so hard to adapt themselves to Republican economic and military policies. It is an irony but no accident that Kerry and Edwards both voted in 2002 for the congressional resolution giving President Bush a blank check for his Iraq venture. Both also voted for parts of the president’s economic package — even though the growing deficit and the fiscal insecurities resulting from it have become significant national agonies.

Once upon a time, Democratic maverick Howard Dean was chastised for hollering out loud about such circumstances. Last week, he and every other Democrat who spoke to the nation minded their Ps and Qs. All but one — erstwhile demagogue Al Sharpton, a third-tier pretender to the presidency this year. That only Sharpton dared to toss aside his assigned script and improvise some honest critical commentary is a telling commentary on the Democratic establishment’s enduring timidity in election year 2004.

Bill Clinton brought down the house with his Monday night speech at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. Even the right-leaning pundits on the Fox Network (with the exception of Ann Coulter, perhaps the looniest person ever to be taken seriously on network television) acknowledged that the former president had made a formidable case for his party. Former Clinton adviser, now official Fox Hillary-basher, Dick Morris, called the speech a “masterpiece.”

Clinton’s principal political gift has always been his ability to humanize and personalize grand-scale issues, to illustrate them in such a way that they resonate with average Americans. That gift was much in evidence Monday night, as Clinton contrasted the actions of President Bush and Vice President Cheney — and his own actions — during the Vietnam conflict with those of John Kerry.

“During the Vietnam War,” Clinton said, “many young men, including the current president, the vice president, and me, could have gone to Vietnam but didn’t.” Clinton wangled a student deferment. Bush used family connections to get into the Texas National Guard. And Cheney asked for and got five student deferments before he turned 26 and became ineligible for the draft. His explanation: “I had other priorities.”

John Kerry, Clinton went on to point out, also came from a privileged background, also was a student, and could have also easily avoided going to Vietnam. But, instead, he asked to go. The point was obvious: America, if you’re looking for a patriot, look no further. If you’re looking for someone who’s literally battle-tested, here he is.

Clinton also self-deprecatingly noted that for the first time in his life, he was wealthy enough to be a beneficiary of President Bush’s tax cuts. He went on to point out in a very concrete manner how the $5,000 tax cut granted to him and other millionaires forced budget cuts that led to a reduction in the number of cops on the street. I’d rather have more cops on the street, he said, than give millionaires a $5,000 tax cut. It would be hard to imagine many Americans disagreeing with him.

The 24-minute address was interrupted numerous times by ovations and shouts from the faithful, a testament to Clinton’s sustained popularity. Amazingly, despite the lingering residue from his impeachment and the Lewinsky affair, Clinton’s approval ratings with the American public are higher than those of Bush or Kerry.

Presidential polls show Kerry and Bush neck-and-neck in both the popular vote and in the electoral polls. But in the next 100 days so much could happen, so many events (some possibly horrific) could alter the course of this election, that current polls could bear very little resemblance to November’s cold reality.Democratic strategists believe Bush’s best chance at winning re-election is convincing voters that the Democratic ticket would be soft on terrorism. John Kerry will get his first real chance to dispel that notion before a national television audience this week. He needs to connect on a human level, not just as an intelligent wonk. It’s a lesson Al Gore never learned. He, too, could have done far worse than to take a cue — or three — from the man from Arkansas.

“Let our errant sisters go.” That was the advice of the celebrated New York editor Horace Greeley at the time of the Southern states’ secession from the Union in 1861. The newly elected president of the United States, one Abraham Lincoln, was not of that persuasion, however, and a conflict between regions ensued that remains unrivaled in the amount of American blood spilled.

Obviously, nothing this drastic is involved in the current set-to involving the secession of Germantown from the existing city/county system — the Memphis/Shelby County Public Library & Information Center — even if Collierville follows suit, as seems all too likely. But the crisis is still quite real. Germantown Mayor Sharon Goldsworthy, speaking on behalf of herself and her city’s Board of Aldermen, has vowed to “step up” and fill the gap left as a result of substantially reduced library funding from the Shelby County Commission, which was determined to hold the tax line this year. During its recent budget hearings, the commission made it clear that community libraries would have to make do with less money or compensate for reduced county funding through their own devices. Nobody should have been surprised that the issue of local control would enter so directly into the equation.

Just as Lincoln declined to turn over Fort Sumter to the state of South Carolina, so have the powers that be on the City Council and in the library system so far refused to continue systemwide privileges for the seceding Germantown library. Bizarre as it seems, Germantown cardholders have already been refused the right to check out books in the larger city/county system. Though Goldsworthy professed optimism on that score this week, it was even doubtful whether books borrowed from the former Germantown branch will be returned there if they are left at “drops” elsewhere in the system.

In the long run, Germantown, which has hired the private firm of Library Systems and Services, LLC to run its system, will undoubtedly be able to make a go of things. So will Collierville. But it will cost them. At some point, Bartlett (which drew back from secession this time and determined to stay in the system, though at the cost of a likely tax increase) may follow suit, as might other suburban communities. Will they take the next logical step and depart the existing county school system, financing their own schools through municipal taxes? Something like that would seem inevitable, given that county schools, too, were denied additional funding this year and forced to make severe cuts in their operating and capital-improvement budgets.

Shelby County’s newly “independent” outlying communities could soon find themselves realigned in a governmental confederation that resembles nothing so much as the dreaded consolidation that suburbanites have sworn holy oaths to resist. The fact is that, where general services are concerned, none of the suburbs, not even wealthy Germantown, can do without some sort of city/county umbrella. Memphis mayor Willie Herenton and Shelby County mayor A C Wharton have both proposed models for “functional” consolidation of schools. The current breakaway movement in the library system may end up, ironically enough, providing the impetus to a far more general consolidation — and much more quickly than anyone would have dreamed.

It is one of the immemorial customs of local government that, at the end of each fiscal year, the last governmental entities to be served are the schools. This is especially true at the Shelby County Commission, where, at budget-crunch time, superintendents for both the city and the county school systems are usually the final major appellants for increased funding.

So it was this year, when Dr. Carol Johnson, city schools superintendent, and Dr. Bobby Webb, county schools superintendent, offered a joint presentation to the commission. Though the particulars of their needs varied, each made the case that unfunded federal and state mandates — from No Child Left Behind requirements, from Tennessee’s Basic Education Program, and from an assortment of judicial decrees — meant that the commission’s decision to hold the budget line for the two systems was, in effect, a budget cut.

Besides superintendents Johnson and Webb, a variety of other petitioners tried to get the commission to relent. But neither they nor 93-year-old local crafts artist Mahaffey White, who included a spirited case for the schools in her remarks accepting a special birthday tribute, could make a dent in the commission’s resolve. The metaphor of county school board president David Pickler, that the bill for No Child Left Behind was coming due and that the bill was “expensive,” was matched by one from Commissioner Tom Moss, who likened the financial strictures faced by county government to a “freight train” and said the coming of that train had been unmistakably signaled last year. Worse, said Moss, it will come again next year. Meaning: even further belt-tightening is in prospect.

As always, there were haves and have-nots in the handing out of this year’s table scraps. Just as was the case in statewide budgeting each of the last two years, most agencies and departments had to accept significant cuts. But some were, in both the Orwellian and in the actual sense, more equal than others. Sheriff Mark Luttrell, who lobbied early on and long thereafter to restrain the cuts faced by his department, was able, just in the last couple of weeks, to convince the commission to put $14 million back into his budget. Though Luttrell’s painstaking presentations drew a commendation from commission budget chairman Cleo Kirk on Monday — for helping to clarify the fiscal predicament faced by his and every other division of county government — they may have, paradoxically, come at the expense of the schools’ needs.

As one representative of the county system pointed out privately on Monday, it is the custom for commissioners to hold off settling the school funding issue until last in the budget process. The reason? If there has to be a tax increase, the commissioners can more easily placate their constituents if their vote for additional taxation is clearly predicated on educational needs.

But this year’s budget process indicates that safety issues may have overtaken educational ones in the minds of commissioners’ constituents. Never mind the arithmetic pointed out by Commissioner Michael Hooks, one of three diehard supporters of additional school funding (along with commissioners Kirk and Walter Bailey). Hooks noted that per-pupil spending in each of the relatively impoverished adjoining rural counties was higher than that of Shelby County’s. That fact was taken by other commissioners merely as proof of the urgency of the safety factor, which was driving the out-migration of families with school-age children.

Whatever the reason, the lesson of this year’s budget process was that education has, whether temporarily or not, been relegated to the back of the room.

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry has chosen North Carolina senator John Edwards for his running mate. The announcement comes after months of media speculation, making the long-awaited decision something of an anticlimax. Pundits and political mavens had put forth a number of possibilities for the veep slot, including popular screamer Howard Dean, union favorite Dick Gephardt, General Wesley Clark, and even maverick Republican John McCain. But Kerry chose Edwards, the man who finished second to him in the Democratic primaries. The obvious question: Why?

Kerry has been branded by the Republicans as an Ivy League liberal, a wonkish policy geek, and a member of the ruling class. Edwards, a trial lawyer known for defending the disenfranchised, comes from a solidly working-class background. He attended public schools. He’s young and energetic, with school-aged children, and in 1998 People magazine voted him “the sexiest politician in America.” Most important, Edwards, who gained a lot of traction with his “two Americas” rhetoric during the Democratic primaries, is good on the stump. He’s personable and charismatic in a way that can only be described as Clintonian. In many ways, he is everything Washington-insider Kerry is not. In 2001, Republican senator John McCain told The Charlotte Observer, “[Edwards has] got the ambition, the talent, and the brains to go very far, to be president of the United States.”

But there is a downside too, and a steep one at that. Though Edwards will certainly mitigate Kerry’s patrician image, he didn’t perform particularly well in the South during the primaries, winning only his home state. It’s unclear whether his presence on the ticket will bolster Kerry’s support below the Mason-Dixon line. Edwards will also be bludgeoned by the Republicans for his record as a “trial lawyer,” a term that conservatives equate to “evil-doer.” And while both Kerry and Edwards have become outspoken critics of the war in Iraq, both initially voted in favor of the resolution that gave President Bush the power to invade.

Still, when Edwards speaks, it is of the “haves and the have nots,” not the “haves and the have mores.” With the ever-bulging deficit and an economic “recovery” that has yet to touch most working-class Americans, that theme could become a potent weapon in the coming campaign.