The 2019 Memphis city election may have come to a finish with the conclusion of last Thursday’s runoff elections for two city council positions in District 1 and District 7, won by Rhonda Logan and Michalyn Easter-Thomas, respectively.
But 2020, which will be chock-full of elections, is just two flips of the calendar away, and one of the races sure to drawn much attention will be that for the position of General Sessions Court clerk, which will be vacated by current longtime clerk Ed Stanton Jr. (father of former U.S. Attorney Ed Stanton III).
Three of the known contenders for the clerkship are like Stanton, Democrats, and well known JB
Eddie Jones
to followers of local politics. The first name in the hat was that of Shelby County Commissioner Eddie Jones, who filed two weeks ago. At about the same time Commiss9oner Reginald Milton began informing people of his interest in the race .
The two Commisdsioners were just joined on the ballot by former longtime state Senator John Ford, who filed for the race on Monday. Yes, that John Ford, the controversial member of the local Ford political clan who ran afoul of the FBI’s Tennessee Waltz sting in 2005, was convicted of bribery, and served a term in state prison.
Ford formerly served a term as General Sessions Clerk, simultaneous with holding his Senate seat. Having long since regained his citizenship rights, Ford aims to re-establish himself as a public official. Despite his notoriety, he was regarded as someone with an in-depth knowledge of the ins and outs of state government, and as a go-to legislator for mental health and various other public issues.
Milton, a community organizer and chairman of the commission’s community grants committee, which he brought into being, was a veteran of several political races before his 2014 election to the commission and his 2018 reelection. He greeted the news of Ford’s filing by saying, “I’ve never run an easy race. I’m used to it.”
Confiding that he would make a formal announcement next week, Milton said, “I appreciate those willing to offer themselves for public office, and I look forward to sharing with the public why I feel I would be best suited for this position.
UPDATE: Other candidates for General Sessions Clerrk who have filed or requested petitions though Thursday, November 19, are:
Democrats Deirdre V. Fisher, Gortria Anderson Banks, Rheunte E. Benson, and Thomas E. Long; and Republican Paul Boyd.
Despite some wishful advance indications that the county government’s division over funding the University of Memphis swimming facility (“natatorium,” in officialese) would end in some de facto kumbaya, the resolution of things on Monday — with the expected near-unanimous override by the Shelby County Commission of Mayor Lee Harris‘ veto — left some nagging questions on all sides.
The university got the $1 million county contribution that would keep the natatorium on course to completion, and former Commissioner George Chism made a case for the advantages of the facility for needy youngsters in Shelby County without current access to a pool.
But the university — as evidenced in the testimony Monday of Ted Townsend, its chief for economic development and government relations — was no closer to having a definitive target date for a $15-an-hour minimum wage for all its employees than it was at the time of the veto that the mayor imposed two weekends ago at the behest of various union and activist groups.
Jackson Baker
Union rep Webster: “To this day nobody has seen a time frame:”
Townsend, affirming that “we are all focused on attaining a living wage,” contended that a fixed date for imposing a universal $15-an-hour standard was difficult because future state contributions to the university were unpredictable, as were enrollment figures. He made a case that the existence of employee benefits could equate to a de facto $16.82 income package.
Jayanni Webster of United Campus Workers, to whom Harris deferred in lieu of remarks of his own, would have none of Townsend’s arguments. She pointed out that women and blacks constituted a disproportionate segment of the 300-odd employees paid less than the $15 hourly figure and said the workers’ “seven-and-a-half years of fighting for a living wage” had been ignored by the university. “You cannot eat benefits or pay your light bill with benefits,” she said, noting, apropos the university’s claimed intentions, “To this day, nobody has seen a time frame.”
Similar arguments were made by Democratic Commissioner Tami Sawyer, a candidate for Memphis mayor, who turned out to be the sole defender of Harris’ veto. She pointed out the discrepancy between University President M. David Rudd‘s $200,000 annual salary and the wages of the university employees making less than $15 an hour. Sawyer was scornful of the university’s promises that “maybe in four to six to eight years” their pay situation would be remedied.
Other Democratic commission members made it clear that their sympathies lay with the workers but suggested that other factors led to their inability to uphold Harris’ veto. Eddie Jones said, “I’ve never voted against unions, but in this instance there was another way to do this before we get to a veto.” Alluding to former County Mayor Mark Luttrell‘s several vetoes of commission actions, all of which were subject to overrides, Jones said, “The last mayor tried it, and it didn’t work so well for him. I would prefer to see if we could work this thing out.”
Commissioner Reginald Milton spoke of “a cast of characters with well-meaning intentions,” including in that definition “the mayor, the county commission, and the university.” Calling for continued dialogue between the various parties, he said, “I will vote to override but will make sure that promises will be fulfilled.”
Commission chairman Van Turner foresaw a period of continued negotiation that would end in agreement with the university. Hopeful for change, Turner cited the memory of his father, who had been among the first African-American students to desegregate the university back in the early 1960s, a time, said Turner, when communication between whites and blacks was at a minimum.
Harris, who had largely left discussion to others, re-entered the debate to say that, while he had always enjoyed good communication with the commission, things were “not so good” with the university.
They were not exactly perfect with the commission, either. Commissioner Edmund Ford Jr., a persistent foe, released copies of a letter he had directed to Assistant County Attorney Marcy Ingram, asking for a ruling on whether Harris had, as university President Rudd suggested two weeks ago, committed an ethical breach by appearing to bargain with Rudd on the basis of a quid pro quo.
In the end, the 12-1 veto override vote spoke for itself.
There was a moment at Monday’s meeting of the Shelby County Commission when county Mayor Lee Harris seemed to be at variance with his adopted policy of a $15-an-hour minimum wage for county workers. It came as the commission took up a “resolution in support of all public sector employees in Shelby County earning a minimum wage of at least $15 an hour.” A positive vote for the resolution would put the commission, policy-wise, on the same page as the mayor.
Among those praising the resolution was Commissioner Tami Sawyer, a candidate for Memphis mayor, who was one of several commissioners who asked to be added as a co-sponsor. Commissioner Reginald Milton asked on as well, sharing an emotional recollection of doing janitorial work in an office building along with his widowed mother, from the time he was in the sixth grade until his graduation from high school, in order to help pay the bills for his family.
Jackson Baker
Newly named Shelby County Public Defender Phyllis Aluko, flanked by her mother and members of the Shelby County Commission.
At no time during that extended period, Milton noted, was the minimum wage for this labor raised. “It is abhorrent, it is a sin,” he said, “for people to make a living off the backs of other people and still use the word ‘Christian.'”
Commission chair Van Turner was next to comment, and he asked Harris if a summer jobs program the mayor had announced would also meet the $15 minimum-wage standard. “No,” Harris answered, and began to explain.
The program, which offers temporary blight-control jobs to teenagers, was a continuation of a program launched by former Mayor Mark Luttrell, Harris said. He added that he had decided that, for one summer, which would be coincident with the forthcoming bicentennial celebration of Memphis, the number of participants would be increased from 125 to 200, with wages running from $10 to $12 an hour. Six individuals, serving in managerial roles, would get $15 an hour.
This explanation seemed to be at variance both with the mayor’s announced policy of a $15 minimum wage for county employees, and with the vote about to be taken by the commission. But Turner expressed satisfaction with the mayor’s answer, noting that the terms of the mayoral-sponsored jobs program were consonant with the terms of the commission’s own summer-jobs program.
As Turner explained later to the Flyer, it was appropriate to consider temporary jobs for teenagers in a different light than permanent jobs held by adults, for whom the $15 minimum-wage figure would be universal and mandatory. Asked for his opinion, Milton concurred.
After this interlude, the commissioners resumed their discussion of the resolution mandating $15. Commissioner Brandon Morrison objected to the resolution, saying that a positive vote would create a “slippery slope,” and that she was “not convinced of the outcome.”
She abstained, while four other Republican members — David Bradford, Amber Mills, Mark Billingsley, and Mick Wright — voted no on the resolution, which passed by a vote of 10-4-1, with all commission Democrats in support. It was a reminder that, while party-line votes do not happen often on the commission, they do occur.
In other action, the commission approved without dissent Harris’ nomination of Phyllis Aluko to be the new Shelby County public defender, and passed on third reading an ordinance committing the county to its fiscal share of a city-county pre-K educational program.
• It’s the spring of a city-election year, and events involving candidates are beginning to fill up the calendar. Last Thursday saw four concurrent fund-raisers, three for city council hopefuls (Cody Fletcher, running for the District 9, Position 1 seat, Chase Carlisle, running for a District 9 seat, with position number not yet selected, and Britney Thornton, District 4 council candidates). Eighth District Congressman David Kustoff was the beneficiary of a fund-raiser the same night.
Whether one is running for an office anew or is preparing for a reelection race, it is necessary to have a fund-raiser at regular intervals.
The most obvious reason for this is, duh, to raise funds. No one (or virtually no one) gets elected these days without having enough money to pay for mailers and other advertising, staffers, office space, etc., etc. Beyond the purely material, though, there are other reasons for doing fund-raisers. A good fund-raising event also serves as a mixer, whereby supporters, donors, staffers, the host, and — believe it — curious voters looking for a horse to back can get together, get a sense of who they are, and gauge something of the long-term outlook for the candidate in question.
And, finally, a good fund-raiser is a good party, as well as yet another occasion in a series in which the candidate gets to do his/her song and dance and perfect the campaign message.
All those qualities were working for Shelby County Commissioner Reginald Milton last Friday night at a fund-raiser for his reelection campaign held at the Peabody Avenue home of Allison Stiles and Robert Cohen. The address was good, the hosts were known to be quality folks, and the hors d’oeuvres and light libations made for sociability.
Most important was the mix of attendees — diverse by race, by gender, by class, and, perhaps most importantly, by party. Former Commissioner Mike Ritz, a Republican, was there. The guest speaker for Milton was 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen. Former Memphis Mayor A C Wharton was on hand. Organization Democrats were there in force, as were Republicans, independents, and candidates for other offices, taking advantage of the opportunity to show themselves in such company.
And Milton put in a good word for himself and his intentions, talking about his history as a proprietor of a nonprofit, working directly in his District 10 community.
All in all, the auguries were good for Milton, who may or may not have a significant opponent next year in his county commission reelection bid (in which case, said opponent — or opponents — will surely also get their proper due in this space). The likelihood, though, is that, like most incumbents who have performed well (and well in this case means consistently, with effort, with effect, and with apparent sincerity) Milton should be in good shape for reelection.
It was not ever thus. Milton made several runs at elective office before finally winning his current seat in a 2014 nail-biter with Martavius Jones (now a city councilman). And he spent much of his first term learning by trial and error, as one does.
He seems to be peaking at a good time. In the last year he has been a prime mover of the commission’s adoption of MWBE (minority and women business enterprises) and LOSB (Locally Owned Small Business) programs, designed to diversify the dispensing of county contracts in the interests of fairness. He also was the force behind the commission’s Enhancement Grants, the device whereby each individual commissioner is allowed to determine the local beneficiaries of county grant funds, a not unimportant source of the current more generalized dispersal of authority that partly underlies the ongoing reapportionment of county power vis-a-vis the commission and the county admininistration.
Milton is one of four commission Democrats (of the current seven party members serving) who will be seeking reelection. The others are Van Turner, Willie Brooks, and Eddie Jones, and each of them no doubt harbors thoughts of offering personal leadership for a party contingent that stands a fair chance of increasing its numbers next year.
Milton has served notice of that ambition, by word and deed, and organized the joint filing of the (would-be) returning four at the Election Commision last week. So far he has gone largely unsung in publicity emanating from the commission — in this space and elsewhere. This column is in one sense a means of amending the balance sheet. The man indeed has a song — one likely to become louder in the course of time.
There was real mystery when County Commissioner Reginald Milton issued an online invitation to a generous number of his friends, who cross all sorts of race, social, political, and gender lines but have one thing in common: A disproportionate number of them are movers and shakers in Memphis and Shelby County. JB
Reginald Milton and friends
The invitation was to a birthday party at the Stax Museum on McLemore, where, said the invite, a “major announcement” would be made. Immediately the politically inclined among the invitees began to speculate on what race it was Milton was choosing to announce for? President? After all, he is by profession a community organizer, just like the past previous President, Barack Obama. State Representative? State Senator? Governor? Mayor? And, if the latter, which kind of Mayor? City? County?
So what did the invitees find when they arrived? Here is the post-event reveal from Milton himself, on his Facebook page:
I want to say how much I truly enjoyed sharing my special day with all my dear friends. The party was a blast.
For those who were not at my Birthday Bash and wanted to know what the “big” announcement was, it involves my nonprofit, SMA. We have secured additional funding and are moving forward with converting a 57,000 sq. ft. warehouse into a multi-purpose center. Plans for the “Urban Warehouse” include a technical college, a nonprofit incubator, a youth development/mentoring center, and a foster care support agency. Oh, by the way, yes I do plan to run for re-election for Shelby County Commission – District 10. Thank you all!
JB
The secret revealed: plans for the ‘Urban Warehouse:
Milton was certainly right about the party’s being a blast. Good food, a bar, good company, a band, dancing, and this was Stax, after all, where the walls teem with exhilarating exhibits from Memphis’ musical past.
There was a “show and tell” by Milton of the plans for his forthcoming Urban Warehouse project. There were endless opportunities for group pics and selfies by an endless number of smart-phone photographers, who placed the results on their Facebook pages..
And — piece de resistance! — there was cake, of course, as what well-attended birthday party should not have cake? Everybody got a piece; there was no resistance.
For this edition of Never Seen It, I was invited by Memphis Flyer Senior Editor Jackson Baker to join the Political Cinema Club for a Studio on the Square screening of 1984. The Political Cinema Club is not a formal group so much as a loose, rotating bunch of cinephiles who work in politics and sometimes get together for movie nights.
The film was a big screen adaptation of George Orwell’s seminal science fiction novel by director Michael Radford. It was shot during the exact same period of time that Orwell, writing in 1948, set his novel: April-June, 1984. It starred John Hurt as Winston Smith, Suzanna Hamilton as Julia, and Richard Burton, in his last role, as O’Brien. It was also one of the earliest feature films shot by Roger Deakins, who would go on to produce visual masterpieces such as No Country For Old Men and Fargo with the Coen Brothers.
The film was recently re-released for a week’s theatrical run, and it proved to be terrifyingly relevant to our current political situation. In addition to me and Mr. Baker, the group consisted of Reginald Milton, County Commissioner, District 10; John Gammel, a retired civil servant, artist Peggy Turley; Steve Mulroy, Associate Dean at the University of Memphis School of Law and a former County Commissioner, and David Cocke, Democratic activist and lawyer.
Peggy Turley: I knew nothing about this film. I don’t know where I was in 1984.
Chris McCoy: It was a laugh a minute!
PT: I feel beaten down. It wasn’t easy.
Jackson Baker: That was what you’d call ponderous, actually.
Richard Burton as O’Brien in 1984.
John Gammel: I didn’t know that was Richard Burton’s last film.
PT: He was almost unrecognizable. His eyes and his voice were the only recognizable things.
JG: And John Hurt, he was accused of being 45 in the movie, but if he was 45, he was rode hard and put up wet.
Chris McCoy: It’s like he was born old.
JB: It took an effort of imagination to see him with her! (Suzanna Hamilton, who played Julia)
CM: Griding dystopias will take it out of you. Had you ever seen it before?
JG: I think I tried to watch it once, but it gets off to a slow start…
CM: You were like, “OH MY GOD, WHAT IS HAPPENING?”
JG: It’s a little grim.
Suzanna Hamilton as Julia
CM: Steve, have you ever seen the movie before?
Steve Mulroy: No. I read the book, of course.
CM: Everybody reads it when they’re young. I read “Politics and the English Language” when I was about nine years old. Way too young.
SM: I think I read it when I was a freshman in college for a politics and literature course.
CM: I was a kid who read sci fi compulsively, and the essay was in the back of my copy of 1984. So what did you think?
SM: It was about what I expected. A slow, ponderous, depressing treatment of the subject, that would be visually interesting, because I read about that color thing they did. [A process known as “bleach bypass” was used on the film, which creates a washed out, desaturated color palette while retaining the sharpness of the image.] It reminded me of the [Francois Truffaut] adaptation of Fahrenheit 451. I admire them for tackling such difficult and important work, and of course the work itself has a great message and is historically important, but as cinema, I dunno. It was hard to take.
CM: Hitchcock said that mediocre books make the best movies. You can’t make a great movie out of a great book, because it’s too dependent on the language. In this case, 1984 the book is all exposition.
SM: It’s all going on inside Winston’s head… How many times did you read the book?
CM: Seems like eight or nine times. It was one of my faves. I think it may have influenced me a little too much. But I haven’t read it in a long time. I remember that there was more than one visit with O’Brien in the book.
SM: He also did a better job in the book of establishing Winston’s deep seated fear of rats. There were times that a rat would appear in the apartment, their love nest, and he would freak out. So by the time they did the horrible torture in the end, it was already baked in. In this one, it seemed like it came out of nowhere.
CM: The imagery was there. He went back and his mom was not there, but the rats were there.
SM: Hurt is a fantastic actor. He had absolutely no vanity in making himself look horrible. Richard Burton did his usual job, but it kinda felt like he was phoning it in.
CM: The idea of Richard Burton is always better than actual Richard Burton. Except for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf.
[We decamped to Bosco’s for beers and a more intense discussion]
JB: Do you remember the scene in Cabaret, where the Nazi gets up and sings “The future belongs to me” and the old folks are looking like, what’s going on? That exactly paralleled the opening scene. There were older people in the audience who were looking bewildered.
CM: How the kids were portrayed throughout is the creepiest part.
JG: Although the kids looked not as grim. Life for everyone in the outer party is pretty grim. They’re all in blue uniforms, and devoid of anything happy. The kids at least are clean.
CM: They seem to be enjoying it.
JG: They’re cleaner and they’re happier. Everyone was dirty. I just wonder, in our world, it’s so bright and shiny. For me, that was a real question. If you took all of the grimness out of that movie, what would be left?
CM: You mean the visual grimness?
JG: I mean the grimness of life. People were living lives that were tiny.
JB: The Nazis at least could craft a good story. They took care of their kids. They took them on cruises and played around. There were fairs and festivals that brought the people together, going beyond the nasty torchlight assemblies. It portrayed a situation so dystopian, I could not believe in it. There has to be a carrot…
CM: In a successful dystopia, there’s a carrot as well as a stick.
JB: If that’s how you define success for a dystopia.
SM: That might be a criticism of dystopias in real life. In the book, it was all stick and no carrot. It was as grim in the book as it was in the movie.
JB: It is a criticism of Orwell, but it really came across in the movie.
CM: The carrots are for the Inner Party.
SM: Orwell’s point, though, and it may not be convincing—Jackson, I don’t think is convinced—is that if you constantly rewrote history, and constantly changed language, with new editions of the dictionary, slimming it down, you can do such an effective job of brainwashing people that maybe you wouldn’t need the carrots any more. You could so completely brainwash people and control their thinking that your dystopia would still work.
JB: When that movie came out, I was working in Washington DC working for a Democratic congressman. It was 1984, and Reagan was president. The reason I never dragged myself to see the movie was, I figured if 1984 was about a dystopia, well, we already had the dystopia! We already had morning in America. We already had the Evil Empire. That dystopia was organized around greed. If you’re going to do that, you have to have a carrot.
CM: Does everyone always think they’re living in a dystopia? In 1984, you thought “Wow. We’ve hit rock bottom. This is no longer America…”
JB: It could have gone further, and it did!
SM: Every time you think we’ve hit rock bottom, it gets worse.
JG: I thought I was living in a dystopia until I moved to Memphis
David Cocke: First of all, it’s all relative. Orwell was just coming out of the worst totalitarian episodes, with World War II and Russia. His model was Communism.
CM: He was a disillusioned socialist.
DC: But even in France you had totalitarianism during the war. It was a whole experience of living in this grim, warlike, thought controlled society.
JB: Have any of you read Homage to Catalonia, Orwell’s book about his experiences during the Spanish Civil War? It was incredible.
DC: The thought control, the conformity that warps the independent mind, exists not only in the grim totalitarian moments, but also in social conformity. There are elements in our culture today, but none of us feel like what we saw in that movie. I think the Vietnam War was the closest this country has come to that environment.
CM: You mean the state of constant war? Because we’ve been in a state of constant war for 16 years. There are kids today who can drive who have never known anything but America at war.
DC: I’m not arguing with you, but the number of people involved in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the number of deaths assosicated with those wars is miniscule compared to Vietnam.
JG: In Iraq and in Syria? Civilian deaths have been…
DC: I’m not talking about civilian deaths. They are other people in another world. They are on TV, but they’re not us. What we saw on TV in the 1960s was our kids getting shot, not the Vietnamese getting shot.
CM: I know kids who I grew up with who did multiple tours in Afghanistan.
PT: In the film, they were constantly seeing images of war on television. But a lot of that was just theater, right? It was not necessarily real war.
DC: And our armies are professionals, by the way. They’re volunteering.
SM: I think maybe you’re both right. Orwell wanted just enough war to distract the populace and control the populace. Then he took it farther, and they were at the brink of starvation. But that’s not the real world model in America. The real world model in America is to have just enough war to rally everyone around the flag, but not enough to actually cause sacrifice on the part of the public. George W. Bush after 9/11 said, everyone go shopping. We’re supposed to keep the same standard of living, and keep in the back of their mind that there’s a war out there, and we all have to be loyal.
CM: It’s the invisible army against the invisible enemy. That seemed very familiar to me.
JG: I think the War On Terror is as close to that situation as is possible, really. The absence of real war is a part of it. The domestic impact of the War on Terror has been in terms of the whole militarization of the country, and how that affected policing. I mean, police have always been ruffians, to a certain extent, but they’ve never in history been as entitled. They have been totally militarized. What is it, evil empire…
PT: “Bad hombres” today.
SM: With Bush it was the Axis of Evil.
JG: Only after 9/11 did you hear majors and colonels going on TV and saying, “We’re going after the bad guys.” That’s not a military term. It’s “The enemy”. In the military, the enemy is honorable.
…
SM: I thought it was interesting in that, another way the film was faithful to the book was that the proles seemed less brainwashed and really happier. If there’s any hope, it’s from the proles. When you left the main sector and went into the forbidden proletariat sector, there was at least some genuine happiness. Even the old washer woman who was singing a propaganda song created real beauty. That was the one shred of hope.
JB: There was a lot more of that in the book than the movie.
DC: In other words, it was the middle class who took the brunt of the dystopia.
JB: If you want a real example of an Orwellian dystopia today, look at North Korea.
PT: Oh yeah. That’s why I don’t think there’s a need for carrots. They are dark and beaten down, observed, and controlled.
Reginald Milton: I agree with you on that. To the elites, the enemy is actually the people themselves. There is a group who are empowered and who have a good quality of life, and everyone outside of that is the real enemy.
JB: We are their Eurasia.
RM: Right. North Korea is the same. It’s basically using people as tools to prop up a very small segment who are enjoying a high quality of life. Then there’s the situation in Cuba, where, when President Obama opened up relations, the Cuban government still attacked Obama, because at the end of the day, they still had to have an enemy. If they didn’t have an enemy, the people might go “Wait a minute, who IS our enemy? Who is to blame for all of these problems?” So the reality is that, this is how it’s always been. Imagine a boot, stamping on a human face, forever. That’s exactly what the North Korean government is. It’s an oppressive government that caters to a small segment and uses the masses to maintain them.
Never Seen It: Watching 1984 with the Political Cinema Club (2)
CM: The Eurasian government, and the East Asian Government, and the Airstrip One government—the inner parties in all three of those have more in common with each other than they have with the people they are supposed to be governing. They’re all using the same tactics to maintain power.
DC: In the book, were they real? Or were they manufactured?
CM: They were real, and the war was real. They would have skirmishes, but they weren’t having a war where they were trying to win. It was perpetual war to keep the people in line.
DC: Well, that’s what we have in this country now, right?
CM: Yeah. The idea was to eat up the excess economic production.
PT: It’s like what just happened, with the missile strikes in Syria.
SM: This is the first time I’ve actually wondered if it was real, though. Under W., I never doubted that they honestly, sincerely believed their line about evildoers. There were neocons who wanted to remake the Middle East in their own image, and they were using terrorism as an excuse. But they definitely wanted a real war. With Trump, I don’t know what he wants. It might not be real.
CM: Reginald, your point about how there has to be an enemy applies to Trump. When he started flailing was when he suddenly didn’t have an Obama or a Hillary to push around any more. They keep trying to push Hillary and Obama back out into the news, because they need an enemy, or else his incompetence becomes obvious.
JG: Best case in point: Gun sales are down 26%.
DC: The reason they were hoarding the guns is that they were afraid the liberals were going to take over and take them away. Now they don’t need them.
JG: The NRA made a deal with the Kalishnikov factory to lobby to get restrictions on their sales lifted in the United States.
CM: The elites have more in common with each other than they do with their own countrymen.
SM: Just like the pigs and the famers had more in common with each other than they did with the other animals in Animal Farm, which is also Orwell.
CM: That’s the children’s book version of 1984.
SM: Jackson said earlier about the carrots and the sticks. I think the carrot model of dystopia is Brave New World, where everything is bright and shiny, and they used drugs to control the populace.
JB: I think that’s closer to where we are.
CM: Here’s to soma!
ALL: Cheers!
[This fascinating conversation went on for another hour, and there was much more than I could possibly transcribe, so I will leave it here.]
Never Seen It: Watching 1984 with the Political Cinema Club
The issue of county participation on the board of the city-owned Memphis Light, Gas & Water is, for the time being, moot. Or as Shelby County Commissioner Heidi Shafer, one of the supporters of the now lapsed proposal, puts it, it’s a Groundhog Day matter that will surface again when the political weather changes.
The weather wasn’t right on the commission when Commissioner Terry Roland raised the issue of a county member on the MLGW board in an effort to include it on the commission’s official wish list to present to the Tennessee General Assembly, now in session.
It became a city vs. county controversy, with commissioners representing inner-city districts, like Reginald Milton, defending the right of Memphis, which owns the giant utility, to operate it strictly according to the terms of its current charter, which limits direct participation in the administration of MLGW to a five-member board appointed by the mayor of Memphis. The board oversees a management corps that handles the utility’s various operations.
Milton and other Memphis members of the commission objected to Roland’s proposal for county participation because they saw the idea, in Milton’s words, as “a slippery slope,” something which could lead to further demands for direct participation from each of the county’s six separate suburban municipalities — Germantown, Collierville, Millington, Arlington, Lakeland, and Bartlett.
The Roland proposal met with resistance also from Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland and with some concern from the county administration of Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell.
Given that MLGW is owned and operated by the city and is governed by a charter that specifically limits the manner of its administration, the kind of change sought by Roland and his allies would unquestionably transform the nature of MLGW governance. Roland invokes the vintage term “taxation without representation” to describe the voiceless nature of county representatives who pay the fees and submit to MLGW policies without having input into either.
One matter that exacerbates the issue is city council member Patrice Robinson’s proposal that customers’ bills be rounded off to the nearest dollar, with the additional revenues, estimated at $2.5 million annually, going to help the city’s low-income residents weatherize their homes. Roland cites the proposal — which has been amended to allow county residents to decline the rounding-off on their bills — as the very kind of matter that county customers should have a direct voice in. There may be equivalent needs among disadvantaged county residents, he and others note.
Though his effort to put the commission on record as lobbying for a change has failed, Roland says that state Senator Mark Norris and state Representative Ron Lollar (R-Bartlett) are even now looking into possible legislative remedies. And he himself intends to make an appeal for change to the Tennessee Regulatory Authority. One way or another, this groundhog is an issue that hasn’t gone away.
Tennesseans whose names were still circulating in the grapevine, as of mid-week, for possible appointive positions in the administration of President-elect Donald Trump were U.S. Senator Bob Corker, 7th District congresswoman Marsha Blackburn, former state Economic Development Commissioner Bill Hagerty, and former Congressman Harold Ford Jr. of Memphis. Corker is receiving steady mention as a possible Secretary of State; the others are not pinpointed for any particular office.
• A fascinating sidelight to last week’s election of officers by Democratic members of the General Assembly in Nashville was the elevation by his party peers of Memphis state Representative John DeBerry (District 90, North Memphis/Midtown) to the position of “Leader Pro Tem,” a largely honorific (or, as the Tennessee Journal termed it, “undefined”) position. DeBerry, a businessman/preacher with a distinct talent for oratory, is a former chairman of the legislative Black Caucus who often votes with House Republicans and has for years been on the hit list of Democratic progressives. He was most recently opposed by activist Tami Sawyer, who gave him a serious run for the money in this year’s party primary.
Though he did not attend the reorganizational meeting last Friday in Nashville, DeBerry was nominated for the Leader Pro Tem position by fellow Memphian Karen Camper, who was quoted as saying DeBerry, a House member for a quarter century, had been “on the sidelines” of party activity for some years and needed to be “pull[ed] back in.”
DeBerry’s opponent in the intra-party balloting was Rep. Sherry Jones of Nashville, whom he defeated in secret-ballot voting.
Representative Craig Fitzhugh of Ripley was reelected House minority leader by unanimous vote of the caucus. Also reelected unanimously was Representative Mike Stewart of Nashville as caucus chair.
Besides DeBerry, other Memphis Democrats and their caucus positions are: Joe Towns, assistant minority leader; Raumesh Akbari, House floor leader; Antonio Parkinson, caucus vice chair; Karen Camper, caucus treasurer; and Larry Miller, one of three Democratic members of the legislative joint fiscal committee.
Other party members elected were JoAnne Favors of Chattanooga, minority whip; Harold Love Jr. of Nashville, caucus secretary; and Johnny Shaw of Bolivar; and Brenda Gilmore of Nashville, the other two Democratic members of the legislative joint fiscal committee.
DeBerry was one of three General Assembly members in a “legislative roundtable” scheduled for Wednesday of this week in Memphis by the National Federation of Independent Business. The other legislators on the bill for the luncheon event, held at Regions Bank on Poplar, were state Senator Lee Harris of Memphis and state Representative Ron Lollar of Bartlett. Moderator of the event was to be NFIB state director Jim Brown.
• Two Republicans familiar to Memphians were among the three vying last Saturday for the position of state party chairman in Nashville. The winner, by a 33 to 26 margin over current state GOP executive director Brent Leatherwood of Nashville, was Scott Golden, a Jackson resident who has served as a district staffer for both outgoing 8th District Congressman Stephen Fincher and current 7th District Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn.
Running third in that contest was former Memphian Bill Giannini, now of Nashville, who served a term as chairman of the Shelby County Republican Party.
• The Shelby County Commission spent a good deal of time on Monday not making up its mind on pending business, but it did resolve one hanging matter — that of an ordinance to liberalize penalties for possession of small amounts of marijuana.
The ordinance, proposed by Van Turner and Reginald Milton, would have paralleled measures passed by the Memphis and Nashville city councils, giving law enforcement officers an option to misdemeanor charges — that of writing $50 tickets for possession of a half ounce or less.
On its third and final reading, the proposed county ordinance failed by a vote of four to six, with votes in support coming from Memphis Democrats Turner, Milton, Walter Bailey, and chairman Melvin Burgess.
One opponent, Republican Terry Roland of Millington, contended that a vote in favor would prejudice the chances of passing legislation favorable to medical marijuana in the General Assembly. Another, GOP member David Reaves of Bartlett, said that sentiment in favor of liberalizing marijuana penalties was growing, even in his suburban district, but his constituents opposed the measure.
In any case, state Attorney General Herbert Slatery has opined that state law would prohibit any local jurisdiction from proceeding with such legislation on its own.
Having to deal finally with a done deal, co-sponsor Milton got one matter off his chest. He proclaimed that the debate on the ordinance, from beginning to end, had largely been an “Alice in Wonderland” saga. He cited a ranking member of the Sheriff’s Department, who had told members that a half-ounce bag of marijuana (apropos of God knows what) would set a buyer back by $32,000.
Milton held up a cellophane baggie filled with chopped-up greenish leaves (presumably oregano) and wagged it as an example of the “fantasy” that “everybody here” knew better than. (In fact, one way or another, the going street rate for such an amount of marijuana would be closer to $200 than $32,000.)
“I’m right, and you’re wrong,” Milton declaimed to opponents of his measure. Then he let the baggie, and the matter, drop.
Four aspirants to succeed local Democratic Party Chairman Bryan Carson, who resigned under pressure recently (though his term was about to expire anyhow), made their cases Saturday in a forum at the IBEW Union Hall. They were
Reginald Milton, Jackie Jackson, Randa Spears, and Del Gill.
Party caucuses will be held on
March 14th, a party convention to name a new executive committee and a new chairman on March 28th.
Meanwhile, the Shelby County Republicans caucused at Bartlett Municipal Center on Monday night of this week, selecting delegates for their own convention at the Bartlett location on March 29th. There are two declared candidates for chair to succeed the outgoing Justin Joy: Arnold Weiner and Mary Wagner.
All the names mentioned here, be they sinners or saints, are committed activists, with personal histories that indicate that they possess the energy to acquit themselves well in the positions they are seeking. “Zeal” might even be a better descriptor in some cases. There’s the rub. Particularly if partisanship per se commands the electoral environment, the nature of our political debates is often nothing less than poisonous.
Strong feelings have always been a feature of political life in Shelby County, but only since the mid-1990s, when first the Republicans and later the Democrats adopted partisan primaries as a means of selecting preferred candidates for local office, have local political contests become as divisive as they are today, at least at the level of countywide elections. Until the advent of local partisan primaries, it was the rule, not the exception, for various components of the body politic to form coalitions behind this or that candidate. Blacks, whites, Democrats, Republicans, atheists, Christians, and Jews, plus whatever other categories come to mind — the more different sectors of the community were accounted for in a political campaign, the greater the likelihood for that campaign to succeed.
These days, that situation is reversed. One of the questions asked of the Democratic chairmanship aspirants at Saturday’s forum was how each of them would deal with the flight of white former-Democrats into the Republican Party. One of the candidates rejected the question as irrelevant. He was in error, as would have been demonstrated by a look at Monday night’s GOP caucus crowd — almost entirely white, though there is presumably some variance in their political complexion. That configuration was an inverse mirror image to Saturday’s predominantly African-American Democrat crowd.
This is not a suggestion that either of the county’s parties avows or practices racism, as such. The increasing racial polarization of the local parties is largely a result of the primary process — which has magnified ethnic and social differences that have always existed and assigned them to opposite ends of the spectrum.
Contrast this troublesome phenomenon with the city elections — including the one to be held this fall — where the absence of party affiliation will, as it always has, encourage some serious coalition-building across party and ethnic lines.
In the long run, we’d like to see local partisan primaries done away with as detriments to the political process. In the short run, we would merely express a wish that whichever of the chairmanship candidates mentioned above actually ends up at the controls of our two major parties understand that we all are — or should be — a single community.
Taylor Berger (left) and Kyle Veazey (right) opened the forum for discussion from speakers.
On a chilly Wednesday night, a mishmash of locals concerned about the future state of the old Fairgrounds property gathered in a Midtown theater. At the Circuit Playhouse, local entrepreneur Taylor Berger and his organization Make Memphis hosted a moderated forum of speakers to provide some public input into the potential of the old Fairgrounds and the Mid-South Coliseum redevelopment.
The forum, moderated by politics reporter Kyle Veazey of The Commercial Appeal, mostly focused on the Fairgrounds’ proposed $233 million redevelopment and the idea of turning that area of Midtown into a Tourism Development Zone (TDZ). By designating the three-mile area as such, the city can use the excess sales tax that would come from a revitalized Fairgrounds — and its surrounding areas, including Overton Square and Cooper Young — to pay off the $176 million public revenue bonds, over 30 years, that would be required to fund its redevelopment.
It was mentioned multiple times throughout the night that the city administration had been invited, but there was no appearance from anyone in city government in the audience except Wanda Halbert, the Memphis City councilmember who represents District 4 and the area that includes the Fairgrounds. Shelby County commissioners, on the other hand, were plenty.
In his designated few minutes, Shelby County Commissioner Steve Basar mentioned the interest of the bond that would occur over the time it takes to repay the loan, taking away $55 million away from the city during that time.
“[$233 million] is not the total tax dollars going into the project,” Basar said. “It doesn’t include the interest. So when you’re all done, you’re talking about a $300-million project plus. You’re tying up this revenue stream for 30 years.”
The current plans proposed for the old Fairgrounds would include an amateur sports complex, hotel, and retail space spanning over 400,000 square feet. Getting approval from the State Building Commission is the next step for the city to move forward on the project.
“I’m here to support whatever it is you want to do,” said Reginald Milton, Shelby County commissioner. “If you don’t want to do this, that’s fine. If you do want to do it, that’s fine. I just don’t want us to be the ones to affect what you want out of this.”
Other county commissioners pledged to keep an eye on the project and listen to citizens speaking about the issue.
Non-elected officials also spoke at the forum, including Shawn Massey, who works with the Shopping Center Group.
“Midtown is under-retailed from a retailer’s perspective,” Massey said. “It’s a great community. It’s got lots of density, but there’s a lot of leakage. There’s a lot of Midtowners going and shopping in other parts of Memphis and not shopping at their home.”
Charles “Chooch” Pickard, an architect who is running for city council this year, asked if other ideas besides youth sports may be more viable for the old Fairgrounds.
“Wouldn’t a tourist destination based on music and sports history be a bigger draw?” Pickard said. “I’d rather we base the TDZ on authentic Memphis history tourism, of which there are still a lot of untapped options.”
Mike McCarthy, a proponent to save the Mid-South Coliseum, gathered over 3,000 signatures to save the building itself from demolition, surpassing the goal his group had set earlier in the month.
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