Southern Bookman

Georgia's shameful incentive package for Amazon

Georgia's outrageous incentive plan for Amazon treated owner Jeff Bezos like the king of the universe. Perhaps he is. 

Bezos, the richest man in the history of the world, received lucrative packages from New York City and Crystal City, Va., to establish Amazon outposts there.

But J-Bez rejected an even more lavish package of perks offered by the state of Georgia, which struggles to give its teachers pay raises, limits funding for health care and eagerly enacts welfare programs for wealthy white men.

The Peach State's $2 billion gift bag for Amazon included a private airport lounge for Amazon execs, a publicly funded private academy for Amazon workers and some kind of special Amazon car on MARTA trains, according to The AJC. The outlandish package is again bringing Georgia national ridicule, including an incredulous New York magazine article.

Despite the grandiose Georgia offer, Amazon rejected Atlanta for a headquarters site outside of Seattle. Perhaps Georgia's offer was so fantastical that Amazon refused it out of an uncharacteristic sense of corporate shame.

Amazon likely realized that accepting the Georgia deal would have brought an outpouring of protest in Atlanta even greater than that now erupting in New York City over the incentive package that lured the company to Long Island City in the borough of Queens, best known as the home of Donald Trump, Archie Bunker and the New York Mets.

In a rare occurrence, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal joined in condemning the Amazon incentives given by New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio and New York Gov. Andrew "Amazon" Cuomo. Rupert Murdoch's WSJ and Fox News even united with New York socialist and U.S. Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in opposing the Amazon deal.

Even more heated opposition would have risen in Atlanta if Amazon had accepted Georgia's package. Surely Fortune 500 companies that have made Atlanta their headquarters for years without such governmental largesse would have howled at the special airport lounge and free parking offered Amazon. 

Imagine the ire of Coca-Cola, Southern Co., Home Depot and UPS execs. Longtime prominent Atlanta company Delta Air Lines has a special club at the airport for its most frequent passengers, who must pay for the privilege. Delta, which is likely to get a tax break on jet fuel in the current legislative special session, presumably doesn't receive free space for its lounge. The Amazon lounge would put Delta at a competitive disadvantage to other airlines used by Amazon execs.

The offer of a special academy providing college-level courses and lifetime learning to Amazon employees is outrageous. Georgia students have to pay tuition to attend the University of Georgia, Georgia Tech, Georgia State and other universities. They need to receive high grades to be eligible for Hope scholarships. Many Georgians aren't even accepted by flagship state schools. Yet Amazon employees would have received unlimited free access to higher education, and a boost to career advancement.

If the Amazon academy paid better salaries, it would draw top professors from Georgia and Tech, depriving students at the state schools of the best educational opportunities.

The state-funded academy would give Amazon an edge over other corporations in attracting top talent. Amazon's monopoly on the best workers would cripple efforts to develop high-tech startups.

Out of all the offered perks, the special Amazon car on MARTA trains was the most ludicrous. The AJC report was vague on details. Such a plan seemed more the ill-conceived product of some bureaucrat's overactive imagination  than a well-thought-out proposal.

Already suffering from overcrowding, each MARTA train apparently would have had to include a special Amazon car, subsidized by the transit system's sales taxes. Would the special car have been off-limits during rush hours or when trains are packed for sporting events? How would the car have been used in "distributing" Amazon products? The plan doesn't seem very efficient for home deliveries, already provided for the company by the postal service.

Outgoing Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal has refused Medicaid expansion, claiming it would be too expensive for the state. Apparently his administration had no qualms about wrecking the state budget for Amazon.

 

Amazon jilts Atlanta, as Nashville receives plum

Not only did Atlanta lose to New York City and Northern Virginia for Amazon's new headquarters. The Seattle capitalist giant chose Nashville over Atlanta for a new regional operations center.

Why Nashville, which has repeatedly rejected mass transit that Amazon professes to love? Atlanta has MARTA and a new commitment to regional transportation. Atlanta has the world's busiest airport, and, according to its civic boosters, a highly educated tech workforce. Go Dawgs!

Atlanta has.....the ignominy of losing out to Queens.

Music City boasts the hip factor that Atlanta has been losing. The Tennessee capital also has a site under construction for Amazon, while Atlanta's downtown Gulch project is still undecided.

The Georgia GOP legislators'  rash decision  to cancel Delta's fuel tax break probably played a role in Amazon rejecting Atlanta, along with the presumed new Gov. Brian Kemp's shotgun ads and support of "religious freedom" legislation.

But Tennessee is also controlled by GOP conservatives. Far-right loony Marsha Blackburn was recently elected as U.S. senator in Tennessee. She makes Kemp look like Abraham Lincoln.

Nashville over the last few years has become one of those gilded cities that receive frequent national media attention for its food, hip stores and bars, and cool neighborhoods. It's a boomtown, drawing thousands of new residents.

While Atlanta also keeps attracting newcomers, its national hip factor has lagged. Kemp, with his ham-fisted efforts to claim the governor's office over Democrat Stacey Abrams and blatant voter suppression tactics while secretary of state, has generated national derision for Georgia.

Who lost Amazon? Atlanta will be better off without having to pay millions in tax incentives to Jeff Bezos, and will be spared from rising housing costs, worsening traffic and other disruptions.

But Nashville looks to be gaining on Atlanta's status as the Southeast's leading city.

 

Georgia secretary of state win vital for Democrats

While Stacey Abrams' battle for the Georgia governorship draws national attention, state Democrats can take control of the secretary of state's office and curtail suppression of minority voters in future elections.

Incumbent Secretary of State Brian Kemp's voter suppression tactics glare in the national spotlight as he claims a narrow win over Abrams in the governor's race. As Abrams vows legal action over the counting of remaining absentee and provisional ballots, the importance of the secretary of state's office in overseeing fair elections rises. 

As Abrams forges onward, Democratic Secretary of State candidate John Barrow is headed to a runoff Dec. 4 against Republican Brad Raffensperger. If Barrow wins, the former congressman would have the power to curtail Kemp's voter suppression policies and increase the number of Democratic voters.

A Barrow victory would ease the pain of a Kemp win without a runoff.  Meanwhile, the Democrats made major inroads in the state, most notably Lucy McBath's impressive win over GOP incumbent Karen Handel in the suburban 6th congressional district. Handel beat Democrat Jon Ossoff in a nationally watched race in 2017.

The party also cut into the GOP's dominance in the Georgia Legislature. Locally, I was pleasantly surprised by incumbent Jen Jordan's victory in the Georgia Senate's sixth district and Democrat Betsy Holland's win over GOP incumbent Beth Beskin in the 54th House District.

After Jordan won a special election in the sixth district against a divided Republican field, state political observers expected her to lose to Republican front-runner Leah Aldridge. The GOP thought it had safely gerrymandered the district, but Jordan took advantage of shifting suburban demographics with an energetic campaign and local connections as a University of Georgia law school alum. Jordan also crafted a successful constitutional amendment to equalize  property taxes for Atlanta schools.

Holland's support in intown neighborhoods of Lenox Part and Morningside and new city areas around Emory gave her a solid win over Beskin, who lost support of Democratic members of Atlanta's legislative delegation and was unable to capitalize on her sponsorship of a successful constitutional amendment to cut property taxes for senior citizens.

These gains brighten Democratic hopes for the future even if Abrams fails in her effort to overcome Kemp. A Barrow win would further strengthen Democratic plans to make Georgia a blue state.

 

 

Democratic blue wave fizzles

The Democrats won the House, but Donald Trump keeps gloating.

Why not? He now has a huge cushion in the Senate to counter any Democratic moves against him. The GOP looks to control the Senate for years. Conservative judicial nominees and Trump cabinet stooges will have an easier path to confirmation.

Trump's re-election campaign is in high gear. In contrast, the Democrats have a woebegone list of Senate scolds, doddering political has-beens and media flashes-in-the pan who don't win elections. Tim Kaine was listed as a Democratic possibility in a Politico article. Tim Kaine? If he's nominated, the White House might as well be rebranded as a Trump hotel.

Looking at the prospective Democratic presidential candidates named by Politico, I was excited by one only- Andrew Cuomo, New York governor. I don't like Cuomo, but he's a political street fighter who could mix it up with Trump.

The rest of them - Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, etc. - make Mike Dukakis look like FDR. 

Meanwhile, gubernatorial candidates Andrew Gillum in Florida and Stacey Abrams in Georgia and U.S. Senate candidate Beto O'Rourke in Texas are the latest Democratic national media darlings who excite the MSNBC pundits but fail to win.

Gillum, Abrams and O'Rourke decried Trump and the GOP's lies, racial slurs and buffoonery and tried to run "positive" campaigns. They lost. 

One of the worst moments was seeing MSNBC's yellow checkmark of victory flash besides Martha Blackburn's name in the Tennesee Senate race. The state once represented by Al Gore Sr. and Jr., Estes Kefauver and Howard Baker elected an ignorant, bigoted Trump suckup as U.S. senator. Martha Blackburn gives me heartburn.

The Trump re-election clock is ticking. Do the Democrats even know what time it is?

 

 

 

Remembering Malcolm Lowry and "Under the Volcano" on the Day of the Dead

On a rainy Friday morning, the Day of the Dead, I remember Malcolm Lowry.

Lowry's relentlessly obsessive novel of self-destruction," "Under the Volcano," takes place in Mexico on the Day of the Dead. I read the book, and a biography about Lowry, an incurable alcoholic like his protagonist Geoffrey Firmin, while traveling on trains through Europe. 

Out of print before Lowry's mysterious death, "Under the Volcano" received posthumous recognition as one of the 20th century's greatest novels. The 1947 book about Firmin's doomed relationship with his wife, Yvonne Constable, has the ornate language of the 17th or 18th century. It denotes the last cry of a British culture smashed in the wars of the 20th century.

Like Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow," it was a cult novel extolled by wild-eyed enthusiasts in dark corners at parties. In his reaction to modernism, Lowry looked back to earlier novelists like Laurence Sterne, Anthony Trollope and Charles Dickens. Yet, its immersion in a foreign culture and its colonial themes recalled Conrad's modernist landmark,"A Heart of Darkness."

Lowry depicts the Mexican customs and rituals as primitive and uncaring about Firmin's civilized trappings. Yet Lowry doesn't condescend to the culture. Firmin's betrayal of his spiritual and intellectual endowment brings his downfall.

When I was a  young man traveling through Europe and discovering Lowry in the early 1970s, the world appeared on the cusp of a new age. Sure, rock had died, disco was ascendant and oppressive forces were gaining power. 

It was still the best of times. Environmental consciousness was rising, and my generation was bursting with creativity. 

The world lurched forward. Reagan ushered in years of conservative hegemony. Greed and raging capitalism beat back the Earth's last wild places. Religious fundamentalism and a neocolonial American foreign policy begat a series of ugly wars. More and more abandoned faith in science, literature, the theater, music. 

"Under the Volcano" has receded as well. Lowery sounded a prescient warning for the world to come.

Lucian K. Truscott IV collars Trump's wag-the-dog scheme

Salon's Lucian K. Truscott IV is one of a small group of 1960s-bred writers whose work remains vital in the distressing 21st century.

The son and grandson of distinguished American generals, and a direct descendant of Thomas Jefferson, Truscott writes with sharp progressive outrage and a deep understanding of American history and military tradition. 

Along with his writing career, Truscott has battled injustice, fighting his Jefferson kinfolk to bring recognition to Jefferson's black descendants.

Truscott, in a column Thursday for Salon, exposes the folly of Trump's lunatic plan to send up to 15,000 troops to the U.S.-Mexican border on a dubious mission against a ragtag caravan of Central American refugees. 

Raising questions that have been ignored on cable TV, Truscott marshals strategic-grounded facts to demonstrate the idiocy of Trump's scheme.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis draws Truscott's condemnation for approving the plan. Further besmirching his reputation as a military leader and scholar, Mattis robotically condoned Trump's fantasies by ordering more than 5,000 soldiers to head to the border.

Now, Trump has pulled out of the sky a further escalation to 15,000 troops. As Truscott points out, that is about 15 times the number of personnel that invaded Afghanistan following Sept. 11. 

If he had any regard left for the military, Mattis would resign. As the Nazi vanguard said after World War II, he's just following orders.

Wildlife dying at alarming rate, WWF report finds

We're killing the natural world.

That means we're killing ourselves.

In the latest doomsday report, the World Wildlife Foundation finds a 60 percent decline in the Earth's mammals, birds, fish and reptiles since 1970. Here's a Guardian article. 

While the loss of natural beauty and animal life is distressing, human life and civilization depend on nature, as a WWF spokesman pointed out.

Other reports have found similar mass extinction of insects such as bees, necessary for our food.

Coral reefs are also dying. 

The extinction is accelerating at a dizzying speed. Just four years ago, the wildlife death rate since 1970 was 52 percent.

The causes are an interrelated roll-call of disaster. Deforestation. Water degradation. Ocean acidification and pollution by plastic. Climate change. The loss of habitat. Overpopulation.

A telling fact: South and Central America have suffered an 89 percent loss in vertebrates.

That's a fundamental reason behind the migrations of refugees from Honduras and other countries. 

As South and Central America's environmental destruction reaches the point of no return, Trump wants to slash aid. He's sending an Army that once won world wars to terrify poor moms and babies. 

Now a right-wing thug elected president in Brazil wants to pave over the Amazon, which has already declined by 20 percent. That'll be the last gasp in the fight against climate change.

Perhaps we deserve to be extinct as well. 

 

At Dealey Plaza in Dallas, where the world changed forever

Dealey Plaza basks in warmth and sunlight late Sunday morning, the day after the slayings of 11 innocent people at a Jewish synagogue.

Setting aside the news from Pittsburgh for a while, we explore the place where John F. Kennedy's open convertible approached adoring crowds lining a tight cluster of streets in downtown Dallas. Then rifle shots rang out, and the president slumped forward in a spray of blood. 

The setting of John F. Kennedy's assassination in Dallas seems much smaller than I'd imagined.

It's all so close together: the darkened window of Lee Harvey Oswald's aerie, the crude white x on Elm Street marking the spot where the first shot hit the president, the grassy knoll, the place where Zapruder shot his film. The location of that history-changing moment had lived much larger in my imagination.

Now, we've come to the place where the president's motorcade turned, gunfire erupted from the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository, blood and pieces of brain splattered the horrified first lady, the Secret Service agent leaped on the convertible's trunk, and the limousine sped beneath the overpass, headed to Parkland Hospital. 

I've experienced the same feeling at Pearl Harbor, Gettysburg, Antietam, the World Trade Center in New York City: the dual sense of dislocation and recognition, of history seen anew. 

The close-packed space in downtown Dallas is infested with street preachers and ragged vendors pushing assassination trivia and conspiracy theories.

With the line too long and the day too beautiful for us to ride up to the old depository's sixth floor museum, we decided to tour the outside sites, Kennedy's stations of the cross. 

The day before, I'd made a whirlwind trip to Austin, where in 1966 Charles Whitman added a new twist to Oswald's model, shooting numerous people at random from atop the University of Texas tower.  Whitman murdered 17 people before police ascended the tower and killed him. 

Little did the shocked nation know that Whitman would be the progenitor of a long line of hate-infested killers, murdering regular people in public places of worship, education and entertainment.

As we sit on a bench in the brilliant sunlight after our Kennedy assassination tour, the Dealey Plaza fountain soars behind us, the water's soaring rhythm speaking of beauty, healing and ancient rituals. Recalling that moment in 1963 when the world changed forever, I read the names of the 11 slain at the synagogue, people who sought peace and goodness.

Nearly 55 years after Kennedy's death, violence engulfs the nation. Kennedy's words etched on Dealey Plaza monuments recall his lost age of optimism, eloquence and political courage. Like those slain at the synagogue did during their lives, let us choose that message of hope over despair.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NewYork magazine's Ed Kilgore brings Georgia perspective to Stacey Abrams-Brian Kemp campaign coverage

New York magazine columnist Ed Kilgore's coverage of the Georgia governor's race comes with local perspective that most national writers lack.

A native Georgian and former communications director for former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn, Kilgore brings a deep knowledge of the state's political history to his work. Kilgore, a well-known Democratic activist and writer before joining the magazine's staff, is a graduate of Atlanta's Emory University and the University of Georgia's Law School.

Kilgore's analysis of Tuesday night's debate between Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams and Republican Brian Kemp shows how Kemp's efforts to keep minority voters from the polls have deep roots in Southern history.

Earlier this week, Kilgore wrote the best piece on the report that Abrams as a college student participated in a 1992 demonstration to support removing the Confederate battlefield symbol from the Georgia state flag.

In contrast to a distorted New York Times article on the flag-burning ceremony, Kilgore gave in-depth background on the lawful protest. His strong perspective was informed by the fact that he was present at the Georgia State Capitol on the day of the protest. He mentions that the flag-burning likely fizzled because of a steady rain that day.

As Kilgore points out, Abrams and the other protesters acted in support of then-Gov. Zell Miller's opposition to the use of the Confederate symbol. The Civil War insignia, added in the 1950s by white supremacists opposed to school integration, was eventually removed under Gov. Roy Barnes, a factor in his defeat. 

Kilgore's versatility is admirable; he also wrote a searching essay Wednesday on the dangers of political violence following the discovery of bombs sent to George Soros, Hillary Clinton, former President Barack Obama and CNN.

With Kilgore, Frank Rich, Jonathan Chait, Rebecca Traister and others, New York magazine has an admirable lineup of progressive political writers. I could do without weekly columnist Andrew Sullivan, but he gives balance with his conservative outlook.

Nation's Joan Walsh stirs hope for Stacey Abrams

My optimism is rising that Stacey Abrams can win the Georgia governor's race.

Her Republican foe, Brian "Jethro" Kemp, has brought the state national horror and derision for his heavy-handed voter suppression efforts as secretary of state, a post he refuses to relinquish as he runs for governor.

Although Kemp would be much worse than GOP incumbent Nathan Deal and predecessor Sonny "Bass Farm" Perdue, I've agreed with longtime observers of Georgia politics that the state's vaunted demographics shift would again crash.

My optimism about Abrams' campaign was stoked by a strongly reported article by the Nation's Joan Walsh, who accompanied the candidate on appearances throughout the state, from rural hamlets to metro areas like Valdosta and Savannah.

While Walsh is a committed progressive writer, her piece is based on objective, fact-based reporting. She makes a convincing case that Abrams, in visiting all 159 Georgia counties, is not only reaching minority and white progressive Democratic voters, but rural white small-business owners and suburban residents who typically vote Republican. 

Walsh also shows that Abrams has boosted the commitment of black women volunteers and women who're also running for office. 

The article moves me to think that those old political hacks might be wrong, and that Abrams is forging a new political vision for Georgia democrats that might overcome Kemp's reactionary tactics.