Tag: Lamar Alexander

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Time for Town Halls on Health Care

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

A group of local Democrats, acting on the premise that several key elected officials representing this area have been less than accessible to constituents wanting to express themselves on pending health-care legislation, have scheduled their own “town hall” meeting on the matter for this Saturday, July 8th, at the IBEW Meeting Hall on Madison.

It remains to be seen how much of a turnout this event will generate beyond the party cadres who organized it, although the city and its environs certainly contain a fair number of health-care activists, as well as a considerable complex of medical-related sites, and, needless to say, as a poverty capital of sorts, a largish number of individuals whose need for medical care is both acute and problematic.

Greg Cravens

Local Republicans may either ignore the event or dismiss it as a political stunt, which, in some measure, it may very well be. But that does not diminish the need for such public ventings of the health-care issue, especially since the three elected officials pinpointed by organizers of Saturday’s event — Senators Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker and 8th District congressman David Kustoff — have indeed not been as forthcoming to their constituents as they might be, though all have, to some degree, posted official statements on the matter.

Unfortunately, these tend to reflect standard Republican talking points against the Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare”) rather than involving direct interactions with members of the public, many of whom depend on the ACA and fear its extinction. To the extent that statements by the three officials have been part of an actual discussion, they belong to the rote responses and the dueling positions of a highly partisan Capitol Hill.

To be sure, any effort to discuss the health-care issue in a genuinely open public meeting risks being caught in a crossfire of conflicting accusations and demands. We have all seen clips of such meetings held elsewhere. So far there have been none locally, beyond a three-hour no-holds-barred town meeting in the cavernous East High School auditorium held earlier this year by Memphis’ Democratic congressman Steve Cohen. As it happened, discord was not a feature of that jam-packed affair, though Cohen has certainly been willing to take his risks and, as may be, his lumps — which was the case in 2009 when a Tea Party crowd challenged him for his support of the Affordable Care Act at a boisterous meeting at the Bridges building downtown.

Now, with repeal-and-replace efforts underway in Congress but with the issue still hanging fire, it is the turn of ACA’s opponents — including Corker, Alexander, and Kustoff — to put themselves on the line and take their chances in free and open public assemblies. We earnestly hope that current efforts by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to ram through a hastily concocted version of TrumpCare will continue to fail, giving our elected officials a chance to do so in the forthcoming August recess.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Echoes of Discord

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

As partisan disagreements on pending legislative measures continued to dominate the Washington political scene, there were distinct local echoes.

Even as Democrats in Congress were trying to force open discussion of the Senate’s pending version of an Obamacare repeal-and-replace bill, now being prepared in private by an ad hoc group of Republican Senators, the party faithful across the state held press conferences last Friday protesting the GOP’s close-to-the-vest strategy.

In Memphis, the protest, led by London Lamar, president of the Tennessee Young Democrats and including state Representative Antonio Parkinson, was held in front of the Cliff Davis Federal Building downtown. The group’s call for open discussion of health-care legislation was directed not only at congressional Republicans but at Tennessee Senators Bob Corker and Lamar Alexander and U.S. Rep. David Kustoff specifically.

Though the matter of the federal government’s current direct oversight of mandated improvements in the procedures of Shelby County’s Juvenile Court was not, per se, a partisan issue, local attitudes toward it have tended to cleave along party lines.

Such, at least, was the appearance of things after news accounts surfaced over the weekend detailing recent efforts by three county officials seeking an end to federal oversight of Shelby County Juvenile Court, the result of a 2012 Memorandum of Understanding between the county and the Department of Justice.

The officials — county Mayor Mark Luttrell, Sheriff Bill Oldham, and Juvenile Court Judge Dan Michael — were all elected under the Republican electoral banner. 

The three officials discussed the matter of ending the federal oversight with Attorney General Jeff Sessions during his recent visit to Memphis. As attorney general, Sessions has taken a hard-line approach to law enforcement, focusing on what he sees as a need for more stringent enforcement and stricter penalties.

Luttrell, Oldham, and Michael subsequently elaborated on their request in a formal letter to the DOJ, which maintained that the court’s shortcomings — pinpointed in the DOJ investigation and subsequent MOU — have been rectified.

That claim drew negative reaction, much of it from local Democrats. One critic was state Representative Larry Miller, speaking as a panelist Monday morning at the National Civil Rights Museum.

Answering a question from the audience about legislative action on juvenile justice, Miller noted the county officials’ letter to the DOJ and took issue with it: “They’re saying, ‘We’ve done it. … We no longer need oversight.'” Disagreeing, Miller said, “We’re not there yet. The system is based on incarceration of young black men.”

A more reserved response came from former county Commissioner Sidney Chism, now an employee of the Sheriff’s Department and a declared candidate in next year’s race for county mayor. Said Chism, evidently speaking on behalf of Sheriff Oldham: “He has taken the goals seriously and has worked hard to achieve them, and I think he believes they have been achieved.”

Two legislators who were on Monday’s panel at the NCRM — state representatives Joe Towns and John DeBerry — commented afterward that the MOU should remain in effect but acknowledged, like Chism, that Luttrell, Michael, and Oldham seemed to have made good-faith efforts to raise the standards in effect at Juvenile Court.

But another nay vote came from 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen, who noted in a prepared statement that he had supported the original intervention by the Justice Department and said, “While progress has been made since 2012, there are still reports of race playing a factor in court hearings and reports of the juvenile detention facilities becoming more dangerous.” 

As of Tuesday, Sessions had not formally responded to the officials’ request.

Categories
Cover Feature News

Stormy Weather

CREDIT: David Kabelik

” Clouds are gathering over the campus of the University of Memphis as I arrive at the office of Dorian J. Burnette, professor of meteorology, climatology, and extreme weather. The Wichita, Kansas, native grew up in the heart of tornado alley. “That’s how I got into it, running from tornados,” he says. “Now, I take students, and I run toward tornados.”

Burnette’s the kind of person who sweats the details — you have to be if you want to be a successful scientist. When he talks about combing through 150-year-old documents for historical weather data, his enthusiasm is infectious. It helps to be passionate when your job involves looking deeply into the greatest existential threat human civilization has ever faced.

“Anthropogenic climate change — global warming — really shows itself from 1950 to the present,” he says.

Since the Industrial Revolution, the burning of coal, natural gas, and oil for energy generation and transportation has been subtly changing the chemistry of our atmosphere. The carbon dioxide released from tailpipes and smokestacks absorbs heat more efficiently than does the nitrogen and oxygen that makes up most of our atmosphere. As we add more CO2 to the air, it gets hotter.

Burnett’s specialty is dendroclimatology. He spends a lot of time examining tree rings under a microscope. “We see a pattern of wide and narrow rings. The wide ring is when the tree liked the environment. A thin ring — or maybe no ring at all — is when the tree hated the environment and was really super stressed. Those matching patterns of wide and narrow rings are consistent over large areas.”

David Kabelik

Dr. Burnette coring a bristlecone pine tree in Colorado for a tree-ring project.

Examine enough trees over a large enough area, and you can reconstruct the history of the climate. “Here is the Southeast, and we can get back several hundred years to potentially a thousand years, depending on what part of the Southeast you’re talking about. There are some kinds of trees that can go back 2,000 years in the Southwest.”

The evidence for man-made climate change, Burnette says, is clear, and not only in the tree rings. He sees it in daily weather observations made by Army officers dating back to 1821, in the National Weather Service records from the 20th century, and in NASA satellite observations from the 1970s.

“Each one of these separate metrics have their own strengths and weaknesses, and they’re not necessarily the same. And yet we get a similar answer when we carefully evaluate all of the data. But the most compelling evidence that the Earth is undergoing change is to just observe the natural world itself. Most of the glaciers are retreating. There are non-migratory species who are moving … 90 percent of physical and biological systems are responding in a direction that is associated with warming.”

TENNESSEE IN 2099

Across town, at Rhodes College, Sarah Boyle, chair of the Environmental Studies and Sciences program, is grading projects from students in her Geographic Information Systems (GIS) class. Dr. Boyle is a biologist; her speciality is deforestation. “When I was younger, I was primarily interested in primates — monkeys and apes. When I was in college, I pursued my interest in that area. I lived in the Amazon for a couple of years and tracked monkeys through areas that had been deforested and through areas that were not as impacted by humans to see what the differences were in tree species composition, which primates were there, which ones had gone locally extinct, which ones remained. How did their behavior and biology change?”

Like all plants, trees breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen. To absorb the excess CO2 we’re releasing into the atmosphere, we need more trees. Instead, humans are cutting down forests at an alarming rate. “Deforestation reduces the available carbon sinks,” she says. “Sometimes people burn [the forests], which releases a massive amount of carbon dioxide.”

The students in Boyle’s GIS class come from all majors, not just STEM fields. “Just recently, they were looking at different climate predictions for the state of Tennessee in terms of, under different scenarios, what would the temperature and precipitation look like in 2099?”

Giovanni Boles is one of Boyle’s students. “I was born and raised in the Netherlands, so climate change has always been a topic of discussion,” he says. “The Netherlands has always been threatened by the rising sea levels, especially considering that a third of the country is below sea level. Climate change has to be on the agenda for everybody, regardless of their location.”

Boles and the others fed a trove of historical climate data into a computer model that used realistic estimates from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) about future population and economic growth, land use, technological advancement, and, most crucially, oil and gas consumption. “They went through and modeled it out in all the areas of Tennessee to see overall what the changes would be. Based on this model, you do have a rise in temperature and a rise in precipitation. But it’s not uniform across the state. … They could see immediately that the southwestern areas of the state are quite different than the eastern part of the state.”

Dr. Sarah Boyle in the Amazon

Boles’ results indicated an almost seven-degree-Fahrenheit rise in average temperature, both minimum and maximum over the course of the century. “Looking at the gradient, some of them were shocked to see the huge range,” says Boyle.

Burnette says this pattern is consistent with predictions made by climate scientists for decades. “We have high uncertainty with certain aspects of anthropogenic climate change, but there are things that are really robust in the literature. Depending on what part of the globe you’re in, your average annual total rainfall may not change too much, but you’re liable to get more rainfall in heavier amounts, with longer, dryer spells in between. The fact that heat waves will become worse, that keeps coming out in the literature as well. Winters are not going to be as bad, because winters are warming faster than summers are.”

FALSE SPRING

So it will get warmer. So what? Maybe more rain and shorter winters will extend the growing season and give us more crops. Not so fast, says Burnette. “You put yourself in danger of a ‘false spring.’ We saw that this year. It gets warm really, really early — like January and February — and refuses to cool back down. Then, all of a sudden, in March, you get a late-season shot of cold air. That’s damaging to the plants that are starting to bloom. You can see it on the trees right outside. The leaves are kind of sickly looking in spots. That’s a function of the hard freeze we had after the trees had already started developing their leaves.”

The chaotic climate will stress food crops. “The tropics are going to get hit the hardest, right away,” says Burnette. “If you warm up the temperature just a little bit, it will make it unsuitable for crops. There will have to be a shifting of the growing belts down there. Up here, there will be a little more room for warming. That’s where that 1.5- to 2-degree shift starts popping out. Once you get above that, you start seeing declines in yield. That implies that, if we warm up the planet a little bit, we can initially see some increases in yields in certain crops because of a longer growing season. But once we pass a certain key threshold, you start to lose the gains. Then if you warm up a little bit more, you have to shift. Do we want to take some crops that are relevant to the state budget and give them to another state? That’s where the rubber meets the road in terms of politics.”

The scientific consensus is that we need to prevent global average temperatures from rising more than 2.0 degrees C on average (about 3.6 degrees F). “The reason we chop it off right there is because we start seeing some issues with the planet itself, the biosphere of the planet, once you reach that threshold.”

Beyond the 2-degree threshold, the climate models lose coherence. Burnette says there is potential for disaster of unimaginable scale. “The Younger Dryas event has been studied significantly. It happened about 12,000 years ago. There was an abrupt cooling phase and then an abrupt warming phase at its start and end points. Some of the indications suggest that you can go from general warming conditions back to full glacial conditions in as little as 10 to 50 years. … There are tipping points, but you can’t really see one until, oops, you’ve moved across it already. Now, it’s too late to deal with it.”

DECEPTION + DENIAL

“I find the political aspect really interesting,” says Boyle. “In cities where people have been really impacted by these extreme climate effects and changes, the general populace says, yes, this is an issue. Insurance companies think this is an issue. But at the [political] party level, it’s this ‘yes or no’ fight, which is really unfortunate.”

The landmark Paris Agreement of 2015 set out goals and methods for each country to meet the crucial 2-degree target. But the 2016 election of climate-change denier President Donald Trump has thrown that process into chaos and uncertainty.

“Trump’s belief that climate change is a Chinese hoax should alarm everyone and epitomizes his proclivity for baseless conspiracy theory,” says Scott Banbury, Conservation Program Director for the Tennessee Sierra Club. “In fact, China is making enormous investments in clean energy, and Trump’s threatened abandonment of the Paris Climate Accords will result in the U.S. being less competitive in the future.”

It’s not just Trump. In March, Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander went on a 12-minute tirade in the Senate, railing against TVA’s plans to buy wind power — which does not add any carbon dioxide to the atmosphere — from Clean Line Energy Partners, operators of a wind farm in Oklahoma. He claimed that the deal would impose an unnecessary $1 billion cost on Tennesseans over a 30-year period. “TVA should not agree to buy more wind power, which is comparatively unreliable and expensive,” he said.

Banbury and the Sierra Club disagree. “Senator Alexander’s opinions on wind power are based on very outdated information. Clean Line is offering fixed, long-term rates that are cheaper than the current cost of generating electricity from coal, will undoubtedly be cheaper than natural gas in the near future, and free of the financial and environmental risks of nuclear.”  

Denying the reality of climate change has become an article of faith among most Republicans. Fossil fuel industries have thrown big money into sowing doubt among the conservative flock. Burnette says a favorite Fox News tactic is to exploit scientists’ unwillingness to speak in absolutes. “You listen to a scientist, and they’re going to caveat themselves constantly. We allow for these little probabilistic things that could technically happen.”

But on TV news programs, “They’ll bring on a climate scientist, and then they’ll bring on another person who may be a Ph.D., but he’s not necessarily super credentialed, and if you look at his publication record, he hasn’t contributed to the peer-reviewed literature at all. They bring these two head to head, and the audience sees one scientist arguing against another and think there’s discrepancy between the scientists.” This creates the impression that 50 percent of scientists think one way, and 50 percent of the scientists think another way. “It’s somewhere in the 90 percent range that think anthropogenic climate change is real, it’s a threat, and it’s us,” says Burnette.

STORMY WEATHER

“I was shocked. I didn’t see it coming,” says Nour Hantouli, of the election of Donald Trump. “I was hoping that Hillary was going to get into office so we could talk about how we needed to go even farther than that. Now, we’re starting from absolute ground zero with Trump.”

Hantouli is one of the founders of the Memphis Feminist Collective, a three-year-old organization active in community organization before and after the election. “Activism in Memphis is getting a lot more traction. I’ve never seen anything like it. There was the Women’s March, the Immigration March, they had thousands of people. We haven’t seen that in decades.”

Hantouli is one of the Memphis organizers of the March for Science, a national movement to push back against Trump Republicans’ proposed gutting of government science research. First on the chopping block are the EPA and NASA’s climate science programs.

“Our goal is to highlight the national goal of bringing science to the public, by reaching out and bringing them in,” says Hantouli. “We want to let folks know why these intersections are important and why we have to unite against these policy changes and the toxic cultural climate that’s going on.”

Scientists prize objectivity above all else. Politicization of science is a major taboo, and for some, that even extends to taking political action in self-defense. “You say you’re not into politics, but politics is into you,” says Hantouli.

The initial March for Science organization was done by a coalition between scientists and academics, who had little experience in the field of direct political action, and experienced social justice organizations such as Hantouli’s Memphis Feminist Collective. Tensions mounted over methods and priorities, and the internal conflict came to a head with a proposal to rally in Health Sciences Park adjacent to the University of Tennessee medical campus. Unfortunately, that is also the site of the grave and statue of Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest. The debate split the group, and as a result, there will be two separate March for Science demonstrations in Memphis on April 22nd. One, a march from Gaston Park to LeMoyne Owen College, and the other a rally at Civic Center Plaza.

“If your life has been touched by science, if you want to meet Memphis STEM professionals and educators, or if you want to discover and contribute to the inclusivity of the Memphis STEM community, this is a first of its kind event in our lifetime to make that connection,” says Rally for Science Memphis spokesman Colin Kietzman.

“The problems we’ve been seeing here in Memphis are not unfamiliar to everyone else. The scientific community and their relationship to the public has been an issue. That’s something we have to work on,” Hantouli says.

KEEPING HOPE FOR THE FUTURE

“People ask me, ‘How can you study what you study without being horribly depressed?’ I think as you work toward the problems, you have to have some optimism that the work you’re doing will provide some positive changes in the future,” says Boyle. “I see that in the students. They know how dire the issues are, but I think they have that optimism to work toward a goal for a better future.”

“We’ve had some good news of late,” says Burnette. “Emissions are not as high. That’s good. That’s buying us a little bit more time. That’s the encouraging thing. I try to look at it from an optimistic point of view. It’s certainly not too late, and that’s not just optimism talking. But the problem is, the longer we wait, the correction is going to have to be much more draconian to fix the problem. That’s the reason why I wish a certain group would stop arguing about the science and start talking about policy.”

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Corker and Alexander: Stumbling Toward Leadership?

So what have we here? In this space previously, we have lamented the evasions and relative silences from our state’s two senators — Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker — regarding the out-of-control governmental efforts of billionaire ex-builder, President Donald Trump, who seems to be going about the business of running the country as if it were some sort of Lego project that he can’t find all the pieces to and can’t be bothered to look for.

Now it seems that both Alexander and Corker have, in fact, begun, however tentatively, to make remonstrations signaling at least a bit of discontent with the antics of The Donald. On the score of Trump’s ill-advised executive order abruptly banning from these shores the populations of seven predominantly Muslim countries, Alexander had this to say, finally: “This vetting proposal itself needed more vetting. More scrutiny of those traveling from war-torn countries to the United States is wise. But this broad and confusing order seems to ban legal, permanent residents with ‘green cards’ and might turn away Iraqis, for example, who were translators and helped save lives of American troops and who could be killed if they stay in Iraq. And while not explicitly a religious test, it comes close to one, which is inconsistent with our American character.”

All very sensible, even if filtered by an excess of caution that is all too typical of Alexander. His statement was followed forthwith by one from home-state Senate colleague Corker: “We all share a desire to protect the American people, but this executive order has been poorly implemented, especially with respect to green card holders. The administration should immediately make appropriate revisions, and it is my hope that, following a thorough review and implementation of security enhancements, that many of these programs will be improved and reinstated.”

This statement too, is much tempered by a wish to be diplomatic toward someone who is, after all, not only a newly installed president but the titular leader of the Republican Party, to which both senators are duty-bound to show homage.

Previously, Corker and Alexander had each, however back-handedly, expressed reservations about the rush by Trump and, for that matter, several members of the congressional Republican leadership to eviscerate and hastily abandon the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) before a substitute could be concocted. The GOP continues to search for a plan that would at least simulate the advantages offered to the uninsured and under-insured populations by the ACA. Ultimately, though, each toed the party line.

Now, perhaps, they’re a tad footsore from such exertions. It may even be that Senators Alexander and Corker are ready to join the likes of Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Marco Rubio in a readiness to talk truth to power, even if that power happens to bear the same party label as themselves.

Something might be lost in the process, but something more is to be gained. In this case, it might be some measure of public safety for the rest of us, and for Alexander and Corker themselves, a claim to real leadership.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Shelby County Politics Wrap Up

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

At press time on Tuesday, U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) was scheduled to make one more effort, via a unanimous-consent request on the floor of the Senate, to get a vote on the confirmation of Ed Stanton III of Memphis as U.S. District Judge. 

Stanton, now serving as U.S. Attorney for Tennessee’s Western District, was nominated by President Obama in May 2015 to succeed Judge Samuel H. “Hardy” Mays.

Sponsored by 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen of Memphis, a Democrat, and heartily endorsed by Tennessee’s two Republican Senators, Bob Corker and Lamar Alexander, Stanton was expected to be a shoo-in for Senate confirmation long ago, but the same partisan gridlock that has prevented Senate action on Obama’s Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland has held up action on Stanton and other judicial nominees.

• The two major political parties have both now established local headquarters for the stretch drive of the presidential race. 

The Republicans went first, opening up a combination HQ for 8th District congressional nominee David Kustoff and the coordinated GOP campaign at 1755 Kirby Parkway on August 31st. The Democrats will open theirs, at 2600 Poplar, with an open house this Saturday. 

At the GOP headquarters opening, Kustoff spoke first, then Shelby County Commissioner Terry Roland, as West Tennessee chairman for Donald Trump. Next up was Lee Mills, interim Shelby GOP chair (he replaced Mary Wagner, who had been nominated for a judgeship). He began recognizing Republican gentry in the room.

When Mills got to David Lenoir, the Shelby trustee who’s certain to oppose Roland for county mayor in 2018, he fumbled with Lenoir’s job title, then somewhat apologetically said, “David, I always want to call you tax collector.” Roland then shouted out delightedly, “I do, too!”

• Given the overwhelmingly Republican nature of voting in the 8th District in recent years, Kustoff’s chances of prevailing are better than good, but for the record, Rickey Hopson of Somerville is the Democratic nominee. Hopson is making the rounds, having spoken at last month’s meeting of the Germantown Democratic Club, one of several local Democratic clubs taking up the slack for the Shelby County Democratic Party, decertified by state Democratic chair Mary Mancini several weeks ago.

Another Democratic underdog challenging the odds is Dwayne Thompson, the party’s candidate for the state House District 96 seat (Cordova, Germantown) now held by the GOP’s Steve McManus. A fund-raiser is scheduled for Thompson next Wednesday, September 28th, at Coletta’s Restaurant on Highway 64.

Memphis lawyer John Ryder, who currently serves as RNC general counsel and who supervised both parties’ rules changes and the RNC’s redistricting strategy after the census of 2010, has been named Republican Lawyer of the Year by the Republican National Lawyers Association and will be honored at a Washington banquet of the RNLA at the Capitol Hill Club in Washington on Tuesday, September 27th. “Special guests” will include Senator Corker and RNC chairman Reince Priebus.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Take No Prisoners

Recently, the Justice Department announced that the federal prison system would distance itself from privately owned prisons. The gradual implementation will take five years and instructs officials to not renew contracts or to limit the power of private companies in these “contract prisons.” This tangled relationship began at the federal level in 1997. But in many ways, the privatization of prisons is homegrown Tennessee politics.

Tennessee-based Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the first and largest private prison company in the U.S., felt the aftershock of the news with a 35 percent drop in stock prices.

The Justice Department determined that private prisons were neither more cost-effective nor safer than government-run facilities. In an eight-category analysis, inspectors found that contract prisons lagged behind their publicly run counterparts. This included a higher rate of assaults directed at prisoners and staff. The Justice Department decided that contract prisons are a poorer option than government-run prisons.

This wasn’t the message touted by government in the 1980s. CCA first emerged in Nashville. Its cofounder, Tom Beasley, began his career under Tennessee politician Lamar Alexander. Within two years of its founding, many Republicans and Democrats at the state level owned stock in the upstart company that was generating substantial profits from the incarceration business.

The company also capitalized on growing discontent and legal qualms about state prisons. A series of riots in 1985 shook Tennessee politics. Lawsuits had already snaked their way through the courts, and an investigation found prisoner living conditions “shocking” and “unsafe.” The investigation cited recently enacted tough-on-crime measures as the major factor in a massive prison population boom. In the late 1970s, Alexander ran on a tough-on-crime platform that put people in prison and kept them there for longer.

Prisoners had begun airing their grievances to local newspapers. Prisoners at four locations burned facilities, took hostages, demanded a live press conference, caused more than $11 million in damages, and attracted national attention. The state’s leaders decided Tennessee needed to unload its prison problems.

Enter CCA. The governor’s wife, Honey Alexander, and Speaker of the House Ned McWherter quickly dumped their CCA stock to avoid any appearance of conflict of interest. Then, in a swiftly called special session, Governor Alexander endorsed a full buyout of Tennessee prisons by the private company, calling this new alternative “cheaper and better.”

Other politicians and legislators questioned the legality of the deal but paid no mind to the implications of turning the prison system into a for-profit business. After revisions, the state legislature struck down the buyout proposal.

Although the full buyout never happened, the slow encroachment of private companies into prisons soon became a reality as the legislature approved the takeover of several state facilities. Republican members of the state legislature supported the move. Democrats largely accepted it and provided no viable alternative. Although prisoners and state prison workers protested privatization, politicians in Tennessee remained silent.

Those opposed to private prisons have gained important allies in recent months. For the first time, a presidential hopeful from a major party has made a serious call to do away with contract prisons. And although Bernie Sanders’ run for president is over, there is a political opportunity for Democrats to fight prison privatization, especially in light of the Justice Department’s decision.

The move to end the relationship between federal prisons and private companies is an important step, but it’s not where privatization began, nor is it where it should end. More than 30 years ago, the Democratic Party’s silence on the issue in Tennessee allowed prison privatization to take hold. The Justice Department’s decision affects only a fraction of prisoners living in private prisons. Most prisoners are still held at state-level prisons, where CCA began and is still a dominant force.

The same criticisms that the Justice Department acknowledged regarding privately run federal prisons hold true for their state counterparts. Ending the for-profit business model of incarceration at the state level is a battle that must be fought in state legislatures around the country.

Andrea L. Ringer is a PhD candidate in the history department at the University of Memphis.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

Tennessee’s Two GOP Senators Skirt Issue of Presidential Endorsement

CREDIT: JB

JB

Senators Corker (l) and Alexander

Hours after maverick presidential hopeful Donald Trump’s second straight Republican primary victory, this one in South Carolina, Tennessee’s two GOP Senators, Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker, were in the limelight Saturday as featured speakers at the Shelby County Republican Party’s annual Lincoln Day at the Holiday Inn on Central Avenue. And they had to deal with it.

Both declined to make any direct comment on Trump’s victory, which, among other things, chased out of the race former Florida governor Jeb Bush, a symbol of the national Republican establishment, and opened the way to a serious claim on the GOP’s nomination by Trump himself, an outlier’s outlier and the surprise front-runner among Republicans this year.

“My experience is that Tennesseans didn’t elect me to tell them how to vote,” Alexande said. Both in earlier remarks to reporters and in his remarks introducing colleague Corker as keynoter of the Lincoln Day dinner itself, Alexander stressed the importance of nominating an acceptable conservative so as to ensure that a GOP president, not a Democrat, has the choice of filling the Supreme Court vacancy left vacant by the death of Antonin Scalia.

To win the presidency, a Republican nominee has “got to get a few Democrats and independents:” to vote for him, Alexander said.

And he, like Corker, made a point of pooh-poohing early contests — Iowa and New Hampshire as well as South Carolina — as guides to the matter of who should be nominated. Alexander likened the nomination contest to an NFL season, in which the decision comes down to a final two teams after a long winnowing-out process.

Corker would use a a similar metaphor, comparing the Iowa causes and the New Hampshire primary — and, by implication, to South Cartolina — to “pre-season games” but suggesting that the forthcoming multiple primaries, including Tennessee’s. on Tuesday, March 1, “Super Tuesday,” amounted to a real “Showtime.”

“The citizens of our state have the tremendous opportunity of seeing so much and taking it in, and now we have to decide,” said Corker, who, unlike Alexander, hinted broadly that he would be making his preference public in a matter of days.

Acknowledging that “we’ll be getting some calls tomorrow” from various candidates’ camps — and perhaps from party dignitaries — Corker said he would “have to decide first who I’m going to support,” either by Monday, the last day for early voting in the March 1 primary, or by Tuesday, March 1, itself.

Corker said the ideal candidate would have to demonstrate prowess in three specific ways: a determination to deal with fiscal issues, a plan for dealing with “a growing wealth gap” between tich and poor, and an ability “to lead the world.”

JB

8th DISTRICT CANDIDATES AT WORK —- Attendees at Saturday’s annual Republican L:incoln Day dinner at the Central Avenue Holiday Inn had a fair chance of encountering candidates in the 8th District congressional race. Top: George Flinn working tables; Bottom, left: Mayor Jim Strickland is chatted up by candidate Steve Basar and his wife Brenda. Bottom, right: Brian Kelsey has a one-on-one conversation.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Tis the Season for Memphis Politics

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Jackson Baker

Drawing a crowd of local and statewide Democrats at a party fund-raiser over the weekend was visiting U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ). Booker is the tall, balding fellow behind Mayor AC Wharton.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus — if you happen to be a political junkie. Those whose appetite for the electoral process was not sated by the close of the Memphis run-off races on November 19th have a freshly wrapped gift under the tree — the prospect of fresh voting March 1st, “Super Tuesday,” for which a preliminary deadline of sorts passed during the week. 

Last Thursday, December 10th, was the filing deadline for the 2016 General Sessions Clerk’s race, the party primaries which will take place on Super Tuesday, along with presidential primaries for both parties.

The deadline came off as something of a stealth event — save for those individuals directly involved in the outcomes or a relatively few activists in the two local political parties or the really zealous members of Shelby County’s aforementioned political-junkie class.

But, whether or not many people were paying attention or even thinking about it, at the stroke of noon on Thursday, December 10th, the curtain did indeed fall at the Election Commission on applications for the General Sessions clerkship, which is now held by Ed Stanton Jr., who is not to be confused with his son, Ed Stanton III, who is U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Tennessee.

(The younger Stanton is involved in a stealth situation of sorts, too. He was appointed last April by President Obama to be a U.S. District Judge at the urging of 9th District congressman Steve Cohen, a Democrat, has been backed for the appointment by U.S. Senators Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker, both Republicans, and easily sailed through a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in October. But his final confirmation vote by the full Senate, along with those of many other judicial nominees, has been snarled in a delay that stems from the continuing partisan gridlock in Congress.)

Stanton Jr. is regarded as a heavy favorite to be re-elected as clerk, though at the filing deadline he had drawn two Democratic primary opponents, Del Gill and William Stovall; one Republican challenger, Richard Morton, and one independent opponent, William Chism. 

Stanton is one of two Democratic incumbents who have successfully withstood challenges from Republican candidates in recent years. The other is Shelby County Assessor Cheyenne Johnson. Both were reelected four years ago, in part of an off-year cycle for county officials. 

After that 2012 election, the office of assessor was rescheduled in sync with the general slate of county officials, and she was forced to run again in 2014, winning that race handily and leaving Stanton’s position as the only county office scheduled in a different four-year cycle. He will vie for the Democratic nomination with Gill and Stovall on the aforesaid “Super Tuesday.”

Early voting for both the presidential primary and the General Sessions Democratic primary will run from February 10th to February 25th. The winner of the General Sessions primary will run on August 4th against Chism and Morton, who will have been nominated without opposition by the GOP on March 1st.

August 4th is also the date for party primaries for state legislative races.

Confused? Don’t worry. We’ll keep reminding you as each case comes in its turn.

• It’s a fair bet that most political activists have focused more attention lately on the string of seasonal holiday parties that various Democratic and Republican groups have been holding.

Though they certainly play a role in binding the local organizations together, and several double as party fund-raisers, these gatherings, like holiday parties of all kinds, are more about good cheer and a break from routine, or, as was the case with the party held over the weekend by the Democratic Women of Shelby County, the expression of a special tribute to longtime party activist Myra Stiles, whose household has been the traditional home base for the DWSC’s annual holiday affairs. 

More pointedly political, perhaps, was the party held on Sunday at the riverfront home of Shelby County Commissioner Walter Bailey Jr. and his wife, Carolyn Bailey. This event featured a national political celebrity of sorts, U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D-New Jersey), was held to raise funds for the Tennessee House Democratic Caucus, and brought in numerous Democratic Party officials and state House of Representatives members. 

The event also enticed a significant turnout from local Democrats — a proverbial who’s who, including Cohen and outgoing Memphis Mayor A C Wharton, a late arrival who got an especially warm welcome. Suggested donation amounts ranged from $2,500 for PACs (Political Action Committees) to $1,000 for party finance council members to $250 for individuals. House Democratic Caucus chair Mike Stewart of Nashville set a goal of $20,000 for the event, and that fairly modest threshold would seem to have been easily met and exceeded.

Booker is one of the Democratic Party’s ascending stars on the national scene. Well aware of the current low ebb of Democratic fortunes in Tennessee, at least numerically, he reminded attendees of the event that he, too, had tasted defeat in his mayoral race in Newark, before finally winning in a second try and beginning his rise.

And he cautioned his audience against fatalism, contending that Democrats continued to prove they had the numbers to win in presidential races and that overcoming low turnout in non-presidential races was the key to an overall political revival.

Presidential politics was a subject much under discussion at Republican holiday events. Typical was the annual Christmas party of the East Shelby Republican Club at the Pickering Community Center in Germantown, Monday night. To judge by the comments volunteered in conversation, celebrity candidate Donald Trump still is riding high, though support was also evident for other candidates, notably Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Florida Senator Marco Rubio.

• Before the week is out, Mayor-elect Jim Strickland may — and no doubt will — get off a few more striking acts in his run-up to the New Year’s oath-taking, but, to those of us in the news business, nothing could have been more startling than his back-to-back selection of Ursula Madden and Kyle Veazey as major assistants  in his administration-to-be.

Talk about cherry-picking!

It was eye-opening enough last week when Strickland announced the appointment of Madden, longtime news anchor for major local television outlet, WMC-TV, Action News 5. To follow that up with this week’s announcement of a Veazey appointment is downright staggering.

Does the new mayor intend to launch a state-of-the-art news operation as an adjunct to city government? In the couple of years he has served as lead of the politics-and-government reporting team for The Commercial Appeal, Veazey not only resurrected that paper’s cachet as a leading source of political news, he elevated the public’s sense of urgency about public news in general.

A former sportswriter, he brought a statistician’s zeal and a fan’s passion to the business of covering politics. And for the rest of us in the field, he made it fun to compete, and that’s a word — “compete” — that he gave new meaning to.

Trying to keep up with Veazey in one sense was a lost cause: He had too much energy, too much commitment, and, to be honest, too much of an advantage in exposure to try to out-do. But he also enlarged the scope of the game itself. It wasn’t a zero-sum matter of win-lose. No knee-capping. No screw your buddy. In a way, it was like being in an orchestra. You still had ample play for your own instrument, and it was impossible not to admire the way he handled his.

Now, just what the hell is he going to do in city government that will top that act?

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

What They Said (March 26, 2015) …

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

Greg Cravens

About Bruce VanWyngarden’s editor’s note, “Sammons ‘R Us” …

I read Bruce VanWyngarden’s editorial for the March 12th issue with stunned disbelief. We’re all supposed to be happy not only that this “connected” character, Jack Sammons, has lots of power but also will now “run” a newspaper? Never mind how irrelevant your paper is now. Surely one doesn’t have to go all the way back to the great muckraker days to find journalists who would be troubled by a chief officer of anything running their own paper? And I guess your new position on “pesky laws” that prevent conflict of interest is that they are unnecessary relics of the past? But congratulations on thoroughly brown-nosing your new boss on his way through the door.

John E. Cox

Editor’s note: Mr. Cox, I read your letter in stunned disbelief, as well.

About Bianca Phillips’ cover story, “Getting Schooled” …

Sounds like a lot of territorial bickering between two entities, “This is my school yard and I don’t care if you want to put down green grass for the children to play on; our dirt yard is just fine, so go away.” Our local school system has failed for years in educating our children and it sounds like the schools that have been taken over by the ASD are making a lot of positive gains and turn-arounds. The priority here is educating our children and we should be willing to do whatever it takes to get this done.

Pamela Cates

About Wendi C. Thomas’ column, “The Long Shadow” …

If the family structure is a primary predictor of an individual’s life chances, and if family disintegration is the principal cause of the transmission of poverty and despair in the black community over the past 50 years, then family integration will stabilize the institution and offer children hope.

For once and for all, we must reach out and “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Walking on eggshells out of fear or guilt, being angry at the sins of the past, or throwing money at a problem that only the heart can solve must end.

MempHis1

It’s a puzzle: “middle and upper class parents who hoard opportunity for their kids” are the same people who oppress by riding in bike lanes.

Brunetto Latini

About Jackson Baker’s post, “Flinn: Change of Venue Not the Reason for Leaving Council” …

Personally, I’m glad Shea is leaving. His lack of lunacy and apparent common sense really took away from the overall character of the council. Ditto for that other stick in the mud Jim Strickland. We need more dancing and redacted credit card invoices!

Smitty1961

About Tim Sampson’s Rant …

It was interesting to discover that three of the seven Republicans who did not sign Senator Tom Cotton’s letter to the leaders of Iran were Bob Corker, Lamar Alexander, and Thad Cochran.

For these three men, it would have been in their best political interests to go along with the rest of their Republican colleagues. But they put their country above their own political interests and refused to sign a letter that was so wrong and dangerous in so many ways and one that may guarantee that a deal in the best interests of the U. S. and the entire world is not reached.

These Senators should be praised for showing real leadership and real political courage.

Philip Williams

About Bruce VanWyngarden’s editor’s note, “The Heart and Soul of Memphis” …

I was born and raised in Memphis but now call Nashville home. I live in the middle of one of the hottest neighborhoods in the country’s “It City,” but still miss the soul of Memphis. It’s something that all the new money, popularity, real estate prices, and relocated hipsters will never understand … and certainly can’t replicate.

MT Blake

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Tennessee’s Senatorial “Moderates”

We have had our differences with Tennessee’s junior U.S. Senator, Bob Corker — particularly over his repeated interventions against the United Auto Workers during the UAW’s campaign last year to represent workers at the Chattanooga Volkswagen plant. We understood that Corker had been instrumental in attracting the plant to his hometown and that, like numerous other Tennessee figures in both parties, past and present, he had a commitment to the state’s Right to Work law, which allows workers to remain independent of union membership.

In conducting his own high-volume campaign against the UAW, Corker interfered too directly and too insistently with the union-representation election, we thought, and we said so in no uncertain terms. We were also concerned that Corker’s over-zealous effort — supported by other Republican officeholders including Governor Bill Haslam — would contravene Volkswagen’s stated international policy of making management decisions in tandem with “workers’ councils.”

In any case, the plant’s workers were induced to reject the UAW bid. By now, the matter has receded into our rear-view mirror, especially in view of the fact that the UAW has since been permitted to maintain a presence at the VW plant and to lobby there for eventual recognition.

So we can revert to what had been, by and large, our admiration for Corker’s studied attempts to maintain independent views on most matters and to swim against the tide of partisan polarization in Congress, maintaining good communications with the White House and with congressional Democrats.

We are never going to agree 100 percent with either Corker or his GOP Senate colleague, Lamar Alexander, but — even though neither would admit to being covered by the term — both can be considered “moderates” on today’s badly skewed political spectrum, as can Haslam, for that matter. Political realities being what they are in red-state Tennessee, they may be the best we can hope for.

We congratulate Corker on taking over the reins of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, as we have previously congratulated Alexander on his chairmanship of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. Both can provide useful service — and balance to some of the more extreme views in their now-predominant party. In particular, we trust that Corker’s counsel on the ever-mounting specter of ISIS and other Middle East issues will be seasoned with the same careful judgment that caused him, correctly, to advise disengagement from full-scale war in Afghanistan and, in particular, from the corrupt regime of Hamid Karzai.

John Jay Hooker

We learned this week that another distinguished Tennessean — John Jay Hooker, former gubernatorial candidate, friend of the Kennedys, orator, and tireless campaigner for unpopular issues — has terminal cancer and will be focusing his formidable mind and will on lobbying for legislation in Nashville to allow individuals the right to voluntary termination of life. We don’t necessarily agree with that position, but we admire the courage and invincible determination of Hooker, who once gratified our editorial staff with an extended visit that showed off his good will and his formidable persuasive qualities. We wish him well.