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Editorial Opinion

The Invisible Hand

A once little-noticed phenomenon in public and governmental affairs is getting more and more attention these days, by no means all of it favorable. Call it “political out-sourcing,” an equivalent to the long-accustomed practice whereby governments — as in the case of prison management, say — turn over the operation of a traditional public enterprise to a private entity. The purpose of traditional out-sourcing is two-fold and reciprocal: The governmental body, which usually maintains at least some nominal amount of oversight, divests itself of an expensive obligation, while the private entity, which commonly acquires the formerly public operation via an accepted bidding process, has a potential profit opportunity.

Defenders of traditional out-sourcing, on both the giving and taking sides of the line, extol the process as a means of letting what economist David Ricardo called the “invisible hand” of the marketplace achieve efficiencies that are not possible for the clumsy and presumably visible hand of bureaucracy.

The newer practice of political out-sourcing is something superficially similar — but fundamentally different. One current instance of it is on display in the Achievement School District (ASD) now being operated by Tennessee state government on behalf of “failing” public schools via state takeovers of those instutitions. Another is the joint city/county Economic Development Growth Engine (EDGE), which is charged with charting the course of economic growth locally and customarily does so through the proffering of incentives to this or that industry that is eyeing a site for expansion and which EDGE has decided is worthy of being courted.

The out-sourcing here is different from the traditional kind, in that the administering institution is not private and its operating currency is not profit for itself but control over public policy (a short name for which is “power”). And its procedures are not the marketplace ones of Ricardo’s invisible hand, though they are, as critics are increasingly charging, “invisible” in a different sense (i.e., outside the purview of any significant public oversight). This is despite the fact that the enterprises themselves never cease being fully public in their scope and after-effect.

State ASD Director Chris Barbic’s powers are virtually dictatorial. He has been heard to boast that he has no elected school board to answer to. One result has been the perhaps predictable one of parental outrage at what, understandably, seems to them to be ASD’s arbitary co-optation of community property.

Similar reactions are now evident with respect to actions of the EDGE board, whose 11 members, mainly drawn from the business community, are almost entirely chosen by the mayors of Memphis and Shelby County, with minimal input from the city council and county commission, whose one-member reach is essentially cast in the role of observers.

Recent payment-in-lieu-of-taxes (PILOT) arrangements and other incentives extended to target industries — as well as the selection of the targets — have drawn fire from the public as well as from the two local legislative bodies, where discontent has begun to simmer and calls for the overhauling or even the abolition of the EDGE board are beginning to be heard.

It might behoove the folks in positions of authority vis-a-vis these matters to pay more attention to the vox populi and less to that which is invisible.

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

What They Said (January 22, 2015) …

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

Greg Cravens

About Chris Davis’ post, “A Closer Look at the Satanic School Bus” …

I question how long the devil would last inside a junior high school bus.

CL Mullins

More and more, WMC’s news lately consists of junk stories like this one and news “ripped-from-the-Twitter.” One wonders what kind of audience they’re trying to attract.

MichaelC

About Toby Sells’ cover story, “The Brady Bunch” …

“… 43 percent of wrongful convictions in 2012 were attributed to prosecutorial misconduct.” It bears repeating. Our criminal justice system is off the rails.

Jeff

About Bianca Phillips’ story, “Shelter Kills Dog That Had Guaranteed Adopter” …

The six “mistakes” noted in the article are just the ones that people were able to document. There are likely many more of the same “mistakes” that have not been verified. Many healthy, adoptable strays are killed on the morning of their due-out date before the shelter opens to the public, robbing them of any possible chance for adoption. Many of those animals are never even seen by the public.

James Rogers likes to tout his adoption numbers, but adoptions would be significantly higher if Memphis Animal Shelter (MAS) allowed adoptable animals to live longer than three days. Mayor Wharton says that he wants Memphis to be a “progressive” city. Yet he allows MAS to be run by someone with no sheltering experience, who promotes employees who have had discipline and policy violation issues and who continues to use antiquated, outdated policies that progressive shelters abandoned years ago.

Memphis will never be a progressive city until MAS has an experienced shelter director who uses current, progressive shelter processes and works with the community to provide every opportunity for healthy, adoptable shelter animals to find a new home.

Jcs

Thank you for your coverage of this story. Every incident mentioned is well-documented. It is more than obvious that no attempt is being made to change operational procedures at MAS. It is well beyond time for Mayor Wharton to publicly and specifically address the citizens of Memphis regarding these atrocities and offer a plan to immediately correct all problems.

Midtown Maven

About Louis Goggans post, “Former U of M Provost Ralph Faudree Dies” …

Dr. Faudree was one of the reasons that I am proud to have earned my first college degree, a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics, in 1986, from Memphis State University (now the University of Memphis). At that time, women were rarely seen in the halls of the math department, much less in upper division classes. Under Dr. Faudree’s leadership, my advisor Tom Caplinger, shepherded me successfully to degree completion and my admission to the Law School at the University of Memphis.

Julie Byrd

Ralph Faudree was a brilliant scholar and terrific administrator. He was the foundation of the U of M for many years and will be missed by those who worked for and with him.

LesMiserableTiger

About Bruce VanWyngarden’s Letter From the Editor, “New Year’s Notebook” …

After reading the above, I am reminded of an old saying: “In the land of the blind, the man with one eye is King.”

Ichabod McCrane

“In the land of the blind, the man with one eye is King,” he sneers as he swishes open his raincoat.

Mia S. Kite

Mia S. Kite, Where else does the imagery in your head go?

Ichabod McCrane

Ichabod, Well, I can see that you don’t need such a big raincoat.

Mia S. Kite

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Selma

As a dramatic rendering of history, the movie Selma trumps almost any artwork we can remember. It stirs the imagination, expands the spirit, and breaks — but finally resurrects — the heart, as we are presented a compelling vision of a

just mission that, finally, rose triumphant out of tragedy and did indeed overcome. 

It is impossible to see the film without gaining some understanding of the courage, will to endure, and outright heroism of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — whose legacy and incompletely fulfilled mission have both been commemorated during the past week. 

Beyond its value as a testimonial to a martyr and to the overdue social reordering that he did so much to begin, Selma is an extraordinarily powerful and aesthetically soaring film experience. Directing, acting, cinematography — the whole package. Many have wondered why the movie failed to gain more Academy Award nominations than it did.

We ourselves have a misgiving — and unquestionably it has been shared by others. It was given most direct expression by one Joseph Califano, who served President Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ) as Secretary of Health and Human Services during the period of the march on Selma led by Dr. King and the epochal voting rights legislation that it led to and that LBJ sponsored.  

In the movie, LBJ is presented as antagonistic, if not to King’s voting-rights mission as such, then at least to its timing. “Contrary to the portrait painted by Selma, Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King Jr. were partners in this effort,” wrote Califano in an op-ed for The Washington Post. He called attention to an extended telephone conversation between the president and the civil rights leader — a recording of which is now easily accessible to anyone — in which the two men are clearly collaborating completely on the voting-rights agenda. LBJ even urges King to pick out a place like Selma to dramatize the issue.

For reasons known only to herself, the film’s director and co-writer, Ava DuVernay, chose not only to distort this reality, she even invents a scene in which Johnson, determined to halt King’s momentum, urges FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to send bugged evidence of King’s extramarital lapses to his wife. History is clear on this point: LBJ did no such thing. Such tapes were made and circulated, but during the tenure of Johnson’s predecessor, John F. Kennedy, under the authorization of Attorney General Robert Kennedy. And Hoover, and Hoover alone, was the instigator.

History is also clear that any delay on voting-rights legislation suggested by LBJ was both limited and purely tactical: to allow Medicare and other Great Society legislation to clear the Congress before having to buckle down and dismantle — as dismantle he did, in short order — the inevitable filibuster against his voting-rights bill.

We understand that DuVernay may have wanted to maximize the role of blacks in their own liberation and to offset the excessive credit so often given to alleged white benefactors in previous films about the civil rights era. But to unfairly tarnish LBJ in this case does nothing to ennoble MLK.

To their mutual credit, the two giants were indeed partners in the cause of establishing equality in voting rights. By definition, the extension of justice is not a zero-sum affair. Nor should the allocation of credit be.

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

What They Said (January 15, 2015) …

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

About Bianca Phillips’ story, “New Bill Would Get Wine in Grocery Stores by Summer” …

Liquor stores are wonderful places. When I walk into Joe’s or Kimbrough’s it’s the same feeling I used to get at Happy Hal’s Toy Town. The availability of booze at Save-Mart or wherever will weed out the schlubs from these sacred places.

Crackoamerican

Greg Cravens

Hanging your hat on the personal service you get from a local liquor store is so funny. By that logic, we should not have grocery stores at all, because the corner convenience store owner can better help us pick out milk, Gatorade, or candy. There is no logical reason at all that any retail business should not be able to sell a legal product, just like the liquor stores that have enjoyed political protection from their cronies for years. The message from the voters is clear.

Dewey

About the ongoing discussion about the proposed Fairgrounds TDZ …

I have been a resident of Cooper- Young for six years and I’ve been pleased with the developments in the area. The KROC Center has been a huge success. However, regarding the ongoing effort to establish a TDZ in the Fairgrounds, I can confidently say that the majority of the citizens living in the area affected by this development do not agree with Robert Lipscomb’s vision.

The new development will eliminate almost all of the parking used for the Liberty Bowl games. My neighborhood already fills up with cars during games and events. What will happen when more parking is eliminated?

Baseball? Who is asking for so many baseball fields? Why take land that can be accessed by the public 24/7 for many different uses and relegate it to one sport for only part of the year? It ostracizes people living in the area, not to mention the noise we will have to put up with.

Hotel? There are already two perfectly good buildings that used to be hotels within a mile of the area — at Union and McLean and Madison and Cooper. Let’s make these buildings work before building yet another hotel in a primarily residential area.

Shopping? Most people living in 38104 live there because they don’t want to be a part of the big-box-store culture. This forces a shopping center on people who don’t want it and will lead to a decline in property values (see Wolfchase and Oak Court Mall). Not to mention that the new businesses would compete with those that are already here. We can’t even keep all of the storefronts in Cooper-Young occupied. Let’s focus on that first.

Tearing down the Coliseum and Pipkin building is irresponsible, historically and practically. Both buildings have many years left in them. Before putting a death warrant on these buildings, we need an honest third-party review of what it would cost to keep the buildings.

The most important part of our disagreement with the TDZ plan comes down to the fact that this is public land being sold for private interests. This issue must be addressed with the concerns of all the organizations and citizens involved.

Jordan Danelz

About our cover story, “New Year. New You” …

How about making 2015 a year of working together – affirming our unity and connectedness – seeing America as the one nation that it is. We are at the very point in time when a 400 year old is dying and another is struggling to be born – a shifting of culture, science, society, and institutions enormously greater than the world has ever experienced. Ahead, the possibility of regeneration of individuality, liberty, community, and ethics; a harmony with nature, with one another, and with the divine, such as the world has never dreamed. 

Ron Lowe

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Support Insure Tennessee

No one can say that we were lax in urging Governor Bill Haslam to find some way to come to terms with the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Tennessee, with its large lower-income population and a financially threatened hospital network, needs to take advantage of the billion or so federal dollars that come annually with Medicaid expansion.

Had the Governor made his peace early on with the ACA (or Obamacare, as Republicans prefer to call it), he might have been able to get his plan across in quick order and relatively uncomplicated fashion. He chose to procrastinate, however, possibly to keep the restive Tea Party component in the Republican-dominated legislature at bay. He proclaimed the existence of something called “The Tennessee Plan,” which, he said, was in the process of creation and which, when complete, would form the basis of a waiver request with the Department of Health and Human Services.

We would later learn that there was — at that time — no such plan, not even much of a skeleton for it. And meanwhile the GOP majority, goaded on by determined ultra-conservative foes of Medicaid expansion (and perhaps even of Medicaid itself) like Germantown state Senator Brian Kelsey, took advantage of the delay to pass legislation that requires approval by both houses of the General Assembly for any state involvement whatsoever with the ACA.

Haslam, it seemed, had put himself — and the state, especially its working poor and its medical providers — in a box from which there was no escape.

Well, who is to say that the age of miracles has passed? The governor, at length, did come up with a plan called “Tennessee Promise,” with a two-track modus operandi that would allow participants either to accept vouchers for use with private insurors or to come within TennCare (Tennessee’s version of Medicaid) with an obligation to make modest co-pays and premium payments. It seemed a genuine compromise between the ideology of the marketplace and governmental intervention to meet an obvious social need.

And Haslam’s plan possesses a “fail-safe” provision that allows for automatic discontinuation of the state’s program in case of default by either the federal government, which promises to provide 90 percent of funding after the first two (fully paid) years or the Tennessee Hospital Association, which has pledged to take care of the remaining 10 percent.

This last provision should have invalidated the oft-expressed doubts by critics of Medicaid expansion in Tennessee that the state would veer into ultimate insolvency by committing itself to the federal funding, but it hasn’t. The critics have merely shifted ground a bit, crying rhetorical crocodile tears and claiming that either the feds or the Hospital Association or both will weasel out in two years’ time and leave the impoverished masses once again without coverage.

To call this claim “disingenuous” is to give it too much credit. The population on which this bogus concern is lavished is without coverage now. Even in the critics’ implausible scenario, something now is far better than nothing, ever.

All sophistries aside, Haslam’s plan is entitled to full and bipartisan support in the February 2nd special session. We urge its passage, the sooner the better.

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

What They Said (January 8, 2015) …

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

Greg Cravens

About Chris Shaw’s “Interview With Hi-Tone’s New Owner” …

Just please keep it weird. If that place starts stinking of patchouli, I’m gonna be ticked.

Devron

About Bruce VanWyngarden’s column, “A Merry Little Christmas” …

Humbug! Given the assumption that this incident should inform us of something, I wonder if “Christmas spirit” prevailing is any less fantastic than Jesus incognito.

An equally valid lesson, irrespective of religion, might be: Be mindful of avoiding proximity to idiots. The best outcome is inconvenience, and the worst is incalculable. In a pinch, use kindness to regain distance.

Brunetto Latini

You acted like a gentleman in spite of the circumstances. Your mother should be very proud! You showed us all how to be gracious as well as merciful.

Fat Bachelor

Fat bachelor, excellent take. Gentlemanly pretty much sums it up. I can’t believe you’re still single.

Mia S. Kite

About the Flyer‘s editorial on possible compromises in Nashville …

I wouldn’t get too optimistic about Republicans in the state legislature wanting to compromise on anything but health care. They are just adjusting to political reality. They realize voters would tend to remember if  several hospitals in the state were allowed to go belly up because of some crazy ideology, and the business leaders mentioned were probably large donors to the state GOP.

Rusty

If we are going to spend billions every year on health care and food assistance programs, then we need to start investing more of that money into sustainable projects that are nearly free, or can pay for themselves over time. Community farms would boost every local economy in this country.

I don’t think it makes sense that we pay farmers to not grow certain crops while children go hungry. Farmers should be paid for their surpluses instead. Until we meet the needs of our own people, we are a poor example to the world.

This is how we put people back to work: a New Deal that will allow all young people to build the food system in this country, block by block, just like we built up the roads and bridges during the Great Depression. It is our most pressing need. Any initial costs would be made up after harvests and sales in the first year.

It will change our society when there is a local food system for every person. The people will eat, and no one will go hungry. It will free up everyone to live in social harmony when our basic needs are met.

Garrett Collins

About Toby Sells’ story “More Details Emerge on Ikea Memphis Deal” …

I am ecstatic about an Ikea closer to me than Dallas! I will be traveling to Memphis and, thus, staying in a hotel and probably eating in Memphis while I do my shopping there. A lot of us will. It’s not just for people in Memphis. It’s for all of us who currently would have to travel six hours to get to an Ikea.

Nancy Hutchens

I’m excited about the new Ikea store. When I first heard about it, I thought it was going to be a factory. But I like having the store here even more. It shows that my hometown is really coming up. And, goodness knows, we need those jobs, because they offer real salaries.

Vanessa McVay

About Les Smith’s column, “The Council and the Mayor” …

The city council should not be eligible for any city benefits — no city insurance and no city retirement. Private employers don’t pay benefits to part-time employees. At the risk of being a cynic, my opinion is that it was no coincidence that Wanda Halbert’s proposal will include most councilmen in the retirement program.

Jenna C’est Quoi

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Call Us Pollyanna …

Attentive readers will have noticed that the current issue of the Flyer is devoted to variations on that annual chestnut, the New Year’s resolution. Our staffers have searched their souls (and reserves of will power) to provide examples

of this eternal urge to be made new and better than ever (and to expunge undesirable habits) purely through determined actions of one’s own.

If we take a few liberties with the notion, we can also find instances of such a resolve in affairs of state, where it is sorely needed. Lamar Alexander, the recently reelected senior U.S. senator from Tennessee, has become the new chairman of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. Alexander, as an old governmental hand (now in his third six-year Senate term, (with a lengthy spell as Governor of Tennessee and a shorter one as U.S. Secretary of Education behind him) seems bent, not on creating new habits, but on recreating old ones of across-the-political-aisle collaboration with members of the other major party. 

As governor, especially, Alexander was able to pioneer significant reforms in public education, but only with the advice and consent (and votes) of supportive Democrats, who then constituted a majority in the Tennessee legislature. Not only is Alexander capable of doing good in his own right, he is potentially a resource for President Obama to learn from. The Democratic president has had precious little luck so far in getting congressional Republicans to even consider working with him. Alexander can perhaps give both the president and his stiffer-necked GOP colleagues pointers for getting along with each other. (Yes, we know this has a Pollyanna sound to it, but so do all New Year’s resolutions.)

Tennessee’s other Republican senator, Bob Corker, who has ascended to the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is also well placed to effect some useful collaboration, and he has been known to proclaim (and practice) the utility of constructive bipartisanship in the past. So far, though, he hasn’t tipped his hand on meeting Democrats halfway on any of the several foreign policy issues now pending.

Closer to home, we have the case of Governor Bill Haslam, another Republican who in crucial ways of late has attempted to cross the political divide. The governor’s decision to participate in Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act (even if disguised within a plan called Insure Tennessee) is long overdue but welcome all the same. We suspect he’ll have more trouble convincing his fellow Republicans to go along than he will with the legislature’s dwindling number of Democrats, who will have their own opportunity to demonstrate government rather than partisanship.

In any case, both in Nashville and in Washington, the two power capitals that influence our destinies the most, we see evidence, however modest and tentative, of a genuine desire to change. Wishful thinking or not, that would certainly make for a Happ(ier) New Year! So let us hope.

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

What They Said (December 25, 2014) …

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

Greg Cravens

About Joe Boone’s music feature, “Venerable Studio Changes Hands” …

What did they do with the hundreds of pictures of Sai Baba that were hanging everywhere?

Yeah Man

About Steve Steffans’ Viewpoint, “Southern Democrats: Down, Not Dead” …

I’m going to get this article tattooed to my forehead so I don’t have to keep saying this over and over again when I talk to any Tennessee Democrat who isn’t from Memphis.

Autoegocrat

About Bruce VanWyngarden’s letter from the editor, “Good Cop. Bad Cop” …

I’ve been an advocate of a constitutional ban on union representation for public employees for quite a while.

But I have to admit, if I were a police officer and had heard and read all of the idiots and their mindless followers blaming “economic inequality” as the root cause for the recent highly publicized police incidents, I’d probably want a good union steward, too.

Nightcrawler

Your call for police departments to “man up and acknowledge their bad apples” is one of the best positioned arguments on the issue I have read. Unfortunately, this posture of “protect your own no matter what” permeates so many organized labor organizations, to the detriment of the reputation of the organization overall. From teachers to bus drivers to NFL players, the representing labor organizations seem to go out of their way to protect even the most obviously unqualified or, at times, criminally inclined members at the expense of the reputation and good work of its majority.

There are bad people in every profession. If others in those professions would acknowledge that and help clean house, it would benefit everyone — fellow professionals and the customers of those professions alike.

rjb

I’m still wondering why no one is talking about the fact that Ohio has an Open Carry law. In fact, the city of Cleveland’s ban on open carry was overturned by the Republican legislature — something the NRA praised. And before you say, “Well, kids are not covered by open carry!” Remember that the officers after the shooting called in: “Shots fired. Male down. Black male, maybe 20.”

Charley Eppes

About Wendi C. Thomas’ column, “The Roots of Protest” …

It appears Obama and the Democrats are going to fix the black unemployment problem by opening the borders to millions more illegals and giving amnesty to those already here. I’ll admit I don’t understand how flooding the job market with an unending supply of cheap labor is going to help African Americans get jobs, but I’m sure all of the black Democratic politicians have it figured out because none of them are complaining.

GWCarver

Every Republican and Democratic administration in the past 30-plus years has refused to enforce the laws that would have fined employers of illegals thousands of dollars per hire. That simple upholding of their sworn duty would have saved those jobs that big business couldn’t export via the myriad of free-trade agreements. It ain’t a Democrat vs. Republican thing.

CL Mullins

The prospect of low-cost labor has been very appealing to both Republicans and Democrats alike. And the lack of any sort of sustained protest from the general public who enjoyed those lower priced goods produced by that cheap labor was also a factor. Call it the Walmart Factor. There are many who scream about what they consider Walmart’s “slave” wages, but they also enjoy the low prices, so they really don’t complain too much.

Arlington Pop

I can agree that public investment in Graceland is nonsense, but what other economic development plans are on the table for Whitehaven? Southbrook Mall? That is even more nonsensical by a large margin.

If it’s all going to boil down to race for everything that occurs, then the point that the money is being spent in Whitehaven rather than downtown or in East Memphis should amount to something. But it is conveniently forgotten in this column.

Brunetto Latini

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

What They Said (December 18, 2014) …

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

Greg Cravens

About Toby Sells’ story, “Tracking Trolleys” …

Dear Santa (All We Want for Christmas)

It’s our most favorite form of public transport,
Not a carriage horse with a whinny
or a snort.

Not an Uber or Lyft or even a cab,
Scampering to hop in after paying a tab.

We could cruise along as the hours
went by,
The thought of them now brings a tear to my eye.

No matter if it’s red, yellow, or blue,
We’d gladly take one, or perhaps even two.

They helped with all of our holiday
shopping,
Even if sometimes they went by without
stopping.

It was the hypnotic sound of them going
clickety clack,
If we were too critical of the schedule, we’ll
take it back.

We miss the drivers as they waved a
cheerful, “Hi,”
You see, we want a streetcar, just passing
on by.

In you, Santa, we leave all of our trust,
In 2015, their presence is a must.

Neither you nor your legion of cheerful
elves,
Want our stores to be left with goods on
their shelves.

It was like a Sinatra song as they picked us
up in the rain,

Please bring back the trolleys that ran on
South Main.

Mark Parsell

About Ruth Ogles Johnson’s Viewpoint, “Hail the Man!” …

In response to Ruth Ogles Johnson’s column praising the sanitation workers, I couldn’t agree more. These men and women are doing an important job that the rest of us wouldn’t ever want to do. Whatever they get paid is not enough.

But, where did Johnson get the idea that Pay As You Go (PAYG) is somehow going to increase the funds available to pay the workers? If they have a contest for worst idea in history, PAYG is a definite contender. The idea is that citizens pay more if they generate more trash. If their trash exceeds their can capacity, they buy extra special bags for $3 apiece (no, that is not a typo), and the increased funds generated will enhance the city’s coffers.

What will actually happen will be a lot of uncollected trash, people putting their extra trash in front of their neighbor’s house, and litter getting even worse. Also, we’ll have yet one more bureaucratic department storing and selling “certified” garbage bags.

I worked 30 years with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, much of it with the agency’s solid waste programs. One thing I came to believe is that the purpose of sanitation departments is to keep cities sanitary by efficiently picking up the trash. It is a mistake to use said departments to push a social agenda to make citizens act better by recycling more waste. Another thing I learned is that while curbside recycling may be environmentally friendly and popular, it is rarely cost-effective, even with the decreased landfill costs. If more money is needed to cover sanitation department expenses, just raise the monthly fee. Don’t initiate some cockamanie program like PAYG.

Harry Freeman

About Taylor Berger’s Viewpoint “Dividing by Zero” …

Great article! I live in Cooper-Young and don’t know anyone who is in favor of this Fairground Fantasy Project. Most cities would put in a nice park if they were given this sort of opportunity of (having) vast land in the middle of the city. Some decent housing surrounding a park would go much further in supporting our city with the subsequent property taxes than what Robert Lipscomb is proposing.

Mark Jones

Taylor Berger is one of the bright lights in Memphis, and it’s great to see him getting involved in the public process. As a columnist, the emphasis is on opinion and not always the facts, and there are some he’s overlooked when it comes to the Fairgrounds.

When the city council approved and Mayor Wharton signed the application for a TDZ at the Fairgrounds after six dozen presentations to the council and the public, most people knew that the concept was 20 years in the making from the time it was first suggested by the Memphis Chamber, Governors’ Alliance for Regional Excellence, and Shelby County government that a key economic opportunity for Memphis was to compete in the $8 billion youth sports industry, and it was 10 years from the time that a blue-ribbon citizens group first recommended the Fairgrounds as a site for this kind of development. The notion that Memphis should “pause and take a breath” ignores the project’s long history.

TJonesMfs

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Light in the Legislative Tunnel

Okay, so what happened to gridlock? In Washington, there was the passage of the so-called “Cromnibus” spending bill, which provides safe passage for $1 trillion in federal expenditures through 2015. No showdowns, no filibusters or cloture battles, no threats to shut down the government.

Granted, there are some objectionable provisions, and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) inveighed valiantly (but in vain) against one of them — a proviso that seemingly opens the door for big financial institutions covered by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to resume the trading in derivatives swaps that contributed so much to the Big Crash of 2008-9.

But congressional Democrats didn’t want another shutdown battle and, for a change, neither did Republicans, who may, after their virtual sweep at the polls this year, simply want a chance to prove they can actually govern. There is still a gridlock of sorts. The word “cromnibus,” incidentally, is an amalgamation of “continuing resolution” and “omnibus.” The former term, often abbreviated as “CR,” denotes a decision to continue with the previous year’s spending and authorizations in lieu of an agreement. But only one aspect of this year’s omnibus bill had to be dealt with in that manner — funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which the GOP held up so as to leverage DHS funding next spring against President Obama’s executive actions on immigration.

Still, the end-of-year spending bill hearkens back to what, in comparison to gridlock, were the good old days of bipartisan wheeling and dealing, mutual backscratching, and backroom deals. That’s what constitutes “progress” in our time.

And in Nashville … After two years in which the state’s new Republican super-majority successfully blocked acceptance of millions of dollars in annual funding for Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the GOP’s acquiescent  but well-intentioned Governor Bill Haslam has somehow wriggled his twisted arm free and cut a deal with the feds! And even Ron Ramsey, the arch-conservative state Senate speaker and lieutenant governor who has more or less directed legislative policy during Haslam’s tenure, has professed himself open-minded about the plan that the governor is calling “Insure Tennessee.”

Never mind that Insure Tennessee may or may not be an ideal way of coping with the problem of uninsured Tennesseans or of applying the substantial federal subsidies that come with acceptance of this aspect of ACA. The plan’s complicated methodology has a Rube Goldberg-like look to it — one that will, we hope, get spelled out via debate during the special legislative session Haslam has called for in early January.

The point is that if the GOP’s legislative super-majority, which has granted itself veto power over any proposed version of Medicaid expansion, can be brought to accept Insure Tennessee, and, if the feds do follow through with a waiver for Haslam’s alternative, there are real benefits. Most importantly, TennCare, the state’s version of Medicaid, would get a badly needed infusion of operating funds, enough to help rescue Tennessee’s hospitals, so many of which are teetering on the edge of insolvency.

Make no mistake: Neither in Washington nor in Nashville is right-wing tunnel vision over with. In some ways it may be just beginning. But maybe there is light at the end of the tunnel — something worth groping toward, anyhow.