Southern Bookman

Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms' exit raises chances for white mayoralty

Embattled Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms' surprise decision to step down opens the door to white control of City Hall.

While white Buckhead despised the mayor as she gained national acclaim from MSNBC and the Democratic Party, she still held enough power to head off white challengers.

Dentons attorney Sharon Gay was the only white candidate for the post before Bottoms issued her bombshell with a Thursday night tweet, followed by a Friday morning press conference.

Instead of fielding a Great White Hope, Buckhead residents upset by violent crime and high taxes fomented a campaign to form a separate city.

Now, perennial candidate Mary Norwood, who narrowly lost to Bottoms in the last election, might run again for mayor instead of seeking an open Buckhead City Council seat.

Hawks executive Steve Koonin is another possibility, along with businessman Peter Aman, who ran a disappointing campaign four years ago. Former Atlanta City Council President Cathy Woolard might also crank up another run, although Gay appeals to the same intown progressive crowd.

Bottoms' leaving also fuels rumors that former Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed will seek another term. Unlike his protege Bottoms, who feuded with Gov. Brian Kemp over elections and Covid restrictions, Reed enjoyed cozy relations with former Gov. Nathan Deal and the Georgia Legislature. The imperious Reed also escaped the federal criminal investigations that ensnarled several members of his administration.

Black City Council President Felicia Moore, promising to cut crime and control spending, looked like Bottoms' strongest challenger before her curtain call.

But Bottoms held strong approval ratings and ample funds, boosted by an appearance with President Joe Biden, who reportedly offered Bottoms a position in his administration that she declined.

Retaking the mayor's chair has been the elusive dream of white Buckhead ever since Maynard Jackson swamped Sam Massell, Atlanta's last white mayor, in 1973.

After years of decline, the city of Atlanta's population has risen in recent years, with more white residents leveling the racial balance. Blacks no longer hold a significant majority of votes.

Electing a white mayor appealing to wealthy Buckhead property owners might blunt the drive for a separate city. The campaign has gained surprising momentum, with once moderate GOP leader Brandon Beach introducing a bill to begin the incorporation process.

A state senator who championed the expansion of mass transit and headed the North Fulton Chamber of Commerce, Beach swerved to the right to support Trump's untruthful bid to overturn Georgia's presidential election results.

Beach doesn't even live in Atlanta, and the bill likely won't receive the necessary support of the city's legislative delegation.

The proposal looks like the latest effort by GOP legislators to split North Fulton from the rest of the county, forming a new, white-dominated county that would be called Milton.

Including a new prosperous city of Buckhead, Milton County would stretch across the affluent suburbs of Sandy Springs, Roswell, Johns Creek and Alpharetta, insulating them from the messy black politics of the city of Atlanta and South Fulton.

Bottoms sincerely loves the city, but was beset by the Covid pandemic and racial turmoil following the killing of George Floyd. A rising number of murders and high-profile crimes such as the random slaying of a child at Phipps Plaza gave the impression of a city out of control.

At a press conference Friday formally announcing her decision, Bottoms said that the time had come to pass the baton. That time came earlier than expected for her.

 

 

 

Joe Biden and John Kerry seek to save planet for future generations

President Joe Biden and environmental envoy John Kerry led the global climate-change summit, two old men setting the economic course for future generations.

The 78-year-old Biden and 77-year-old Kerry called on world leaders to slash emissions and mitigate climate change's threat to the planet.

Biden pledged that the United States will cut CO2 discharges 50 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. That will bring a transformation in the U.S. economy, the New York Times reported.

Biden's administration is mobilizing the global campaign against climate change after years of inadequate response.

As U.S. senators and Democratic Party leaders since the 1960s, Biden and Kerry were members of a generation that refused to heed climate change warnings. Now, the world must act with urgency.

With carbon emissions soaring again as China and other Asian countries step up their demand for coal, even more drastic steps than Biden's plans will be needed, according to environmentalists.

The Biden effort to shift from a petroleum-based economy doesn't include a carbon tax, once considered essential in efforts to cut emissions.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said Friday that political opposition led to the shift away from the carbon tax. Krugman also claimed that technological innovation and lower costs for wind and solar power generation make the carbon tax less important, before conceding that the tax likely will be necessary in the future.

Claims that Biden didn't include a carbon-tax proposal because of political opposition are puzzling, since Biden didn't worry about the lack of GOP support in passing his massive Covid stimulus act. Petroleum companies now support a carbon tax, and even some Republicans might accept such a proposal.

Democratic Party progressives and environmentalists apparently have shifted away from the carbon tax, which would put a price on the production of carbon. Long supported by Times columnist Thomas Friedman, the carbon tax should remain a fundamental pillar of the campaign to reduce emissions. Under proposals by Friedman and others, the tax would not burden American households.

Democratic Party supporters hope Biden and Kerry remain active and witness the transformation of the U.S. economy they envision. But by 2030, a younger generation of Democratic leaders such as Vice President Kamala Harris, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will be in command. A younger, even more progressive generation will be emerging.

Perhaps the science-denying and reactionary Republican Party will by then shift course and join in the battle against climate change, along with conservative parties around the world. Once, GOP stalwart John McCain called for ambitious cap and trade legislation and a 60 percent reduction in emissions. That was in 2007, before the GOP turned to ignorance.

GOP intransigence on climate change and social reform makes the 2022 congressional election and 2024 presidential election vital for the nation and the world's future. Biden's climate change proposal is another ambitious effort to place the Democratic Party in the vanguard of the future, while the GOP remains mired in the past.

Both Biden and Kerry have overcome hardships and major political defeats to lead the world's efforts to survive climate change. They are atoning for decades of negligence, hoping to save the planet for unborn generations.

 

 

 

 

Globe returns to disastrous increase in carbon emissions

The gorgeous days of a late April cold snap counter the dire warnings of climate change.

Brisk wind, sunshine and a perfect blue sky mask our abuse of the Earth.

Last spring, during the worst days of the pandemic's lockdown, the sky appeared even bluer, as emissions plunged.

That progress has been washed away as the economic recovery accelerates.

Emissions will increase 5 percent this year, eliminating 80 percent of last year's carbon reduction, according to a report by the International Energy Agency. During 2021, a total of 33 billion tons of carbon will be spewed into the Earth's fragile atmosphere.

As emissions again rise to alarming levels, President Joe Biden on Thursday will lead a virtual climate change summit of world leaders, with a pledge for the United States to reduce carbon emissions 50 percent by 2030.

Chinese President Xi Jinping will participate. Biden's energy adviser John Kerry recently reached an agreement with China for joint action on climate change, a plan predictably blasted by the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

Rising coal demand in Xi's China, along with other Asian countries, is a major cause of the resurgence in climate emissions. At the same time, China is stepping up renewable energy production.

Biden's summit demonstrates a return to American leadership of global climate change efforts. A return of GOP control of Congress and the presidency would shatter that progress.

 

Not so blue skies: Carbon emissions rise during pandemic

Carbon emissions rose during 2020, barely slowed by the covid pandemic.

The amount of CO2 in the earth's atmosphere has reached its highest level in 3.6 million years, according to a  new report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a Salon article said.

While the Covid economic shutdown impeded carbon emissions, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere rose to 412.5 parts per million, an increase of 2.6 parts per million over the year. Scientists say that the carbon level must be reduced to 350 parts per million if the world is to escape the worst effects of climate change.

The Biden administration seeks zero admissions by 2050, but that will not prevent damages from the carbon already in the air. Biden's massive infrastructure plan calls for a shift to electric cars and more efficient buildings, without seeking major changes in the U.S. economy. But the current economic model is no longer sustainable.

A total of 300 corporate executives representing companies ranging from Apple to Johnson & Johnson and McDonald's sent an open letter to Biden calling for the United States to double emissions-reductions standards by 2030 and move to zero emissions by 2050.

The letter appeared on the same day that corporate leaders and entertainment personalities signed an ad in The New York Times and Wall Street Journal opposing Republican voter-suppression laws.

Those actions indicate that the Trump-dominated, climate-change denying GOP is further divorced from corporate and mainstream America.

Representing a shrinking minority of American voters, the party keeps its stranglehold on power through constitutional manipulation and voter suppression.

Yet the divorce is not yet final: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce demanded that the Senate reject the Democratic Party's voting rights legislation. That position conflicts with the prevailing views of American companies.

President Biden has made reversing climate change a top priority, yet his ambitious plans remain too small. Corporate leaders and journalists such as The Times' Tom Friedman and Paul Krugman believe that the growth-oriented global economy can keep accelerating after a shift from carbon. That's increasingly doubtful.

 

Ken Burns' Hemingway documentary condemned for ignoring FBI surveillance of writer

Ken Burns' Ernest Hemingway documentary is drawing fire for neglecting the FBI's surveillance of the writer.

Journalists David Talbot on his web site and David Masciotra in a Salon article berated Burns and Lynn Novick for ignoring longtime FBI director J. Edgar Hoover's vendetta against Hemingway, which worsened the anguish that led to the author's suicide.

The Hemingway series' avoidance of the FBI harassment is all the more glaring when several Academy Award-nominated films examined the FBI's surveillance of black civil rights leaders and entertainers and white leaders of the antiwar movement during the 1960s.

Hemingway attracted the FBI's attention with his support of Republican anti-fascist forces while reporting on the Spanish Civil War. Never a communist, Hemingway also sympathized with Fidel Castro's Cuban revolution.

Burns and Novick have been accused of distorting and even falsifying history in their PBS documentaries.

Critics claimed their Civil War series romanticized the Confederacy, especially historian Shelby Foote's glorification of Nathan Bedford Forrest and other Southern leaders.

The film-makers' Vietnam series was condemned for its rosy view of the American escalation of the war.

Burns and Novick’s series on baseball, jazz, country music and World War II were marred by broad, sanctimonious generalizations, which I found less prominent in the Hemingway series, also written by longtime Burns and Novick collaborator Geoffrey C. Ward.

Avoidance of the FBI's persecution of Hemingway is puzzling for film-makers known for exhaustive research. The FBI campaign to destroy the writer's reputation is well-documented in several books.

Masciotra cites more than 100 pages of FBI documents, 15 of them redacted, that were released in the 1980s after a Freedom of Information request by Hemingway biographer Jeffrey Meyers.

The file included Hoover's orders to monitor Hemingway, plans to tap his phones, and even the disclosure that Hemingway's Mayo Clinic doctor gave the agency reports on the writer's deteriorating physical and mental condition during his final years.

Masciotra also faults Burns and Novick for discounting mental illness as the cause of Hemingway's worsening abusive behavior.

While the series cites Hemingway's multiple concussions, Masciotra blasts Burns and Novick for not interviewing a neurologist about how such injuries affect personality changes, such as occur with pro football players.

The last episode of the series cites a vignette in which Hemingway says he is being watched by two men in a Ketchum, Idaho restaurant. Hemingway also believes that bank employees are working after hours to alter his account. Hemingway's wife, Mary, rejects Hemingway's beliefs as paranoid delusions. Masciotra and Talbot demonstrate that Hemingway's suspicions were plausible.

Burns gave several publicity interviews before the program's broadcast, but has not been asked about why the FBI's Hemingway probe was not included.

Whatever justification Burns might eventually give, the absence is another of his serious violations of history.

 

Keep Masters free from politics

I've been amused by the misguided campaign for a Masters protest of Georgia's voter suppression law.

Even sophisticated writers like the Atlantic's Jemele Hill have the misconception that the PGA tour runs the Masters, as Major League Baseball does the All-Star game. The PGA has nothing to do with the tournament. The annual "tradition like no other" is put on by the private and exclusive Augusta National Golf Club.

Some even called for the Masters to be moved, as Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred switched the all-star game from Atlanta to Denver. That will never happen. The Masters would no longer be the Masters if not played at Bobby Jones' hallowed course.

No sporting event is more defined by its venue than the Masters is by Augusta National. The U.S. Open, PGA and British Open move to different courses each year. The Masters is always played at Augusta National. The tournament is intertwined with the Amen Corner, the Green Jacket, legendary holes like the par 3 12th.

Masters Chairman Fred Ridley at his news conference Wednesday supported voting rights without directly opposing Georgia's law. Like voting rights advocate Stacey Abrams, Ridley also opposed boycotts. As Ridley said, many average Augusta residents benefit from the tournament. Some pay their mortgages by renting their homes for the week.

There's no doubting Augusta National's continuation of the Southern plantation myth. Founding Chairman Cliff Roberts, a notorious racist, resisted inviting black players to participate in the tournament for years. The club also fought efforts to open its membership to blacks and women, once putting on the tournament without TV commercials to head off corporate boycotts.

I've poked fun at the club's pretensions, like calling the fans "patrons" and mandating CBS Television's reverent coverage.

But I've loved the tournament since childhood. A bunch of wealthy Republican 1-percenters run the event, deigning to let us plebeians watch it on television. But the tournament celebrates golf, sportsmanship, competition. The Masters is an arcadian fantasy of true sport, which should be free from politics.

Collier's magazine of Gellhorn, Hemingway flourished during publishing's golden age

Ken Burns' Ernest Hemingway documentary on PBS mentioned that Hemingway and his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, served as war correspondents for Collier's magazine.

Gellhorn covered the Spanish Civil War and World War II for Collier's, and she brought Hemingway to the magazine to cover the liberation of Europe from the Nazis after D-Day, as the series relates. Hemingway's ham-handed undermining of Gellhorn at the magazine led to their divorce.

The program’s reference to Collier's bade me to do some Internet research about the magazine.

Founded in 1888 by Peter Fenelon Collier, the once popular publication was a trailblazer in investigative reporting, fiction, photography, layout and printing technology. The magazine published leading authors, reporters and cartoonists, reaching a circulation in the millions before World War II.

Collier's was a hybrid of Life, Look, Time, the Saturday Evening Post and more intellectual magazines like the Atlantic and Harper's. Its Wikipedia entry makes it appear most like the New Yorker.

As Americans turned to television during the 1950s, Colliers began bleeding circulation, closing in 1957. Over the years, once flourishing publications like the Saturday Evening Post, Saturday Review of Books, Life, Look, Redbook, MacLeans, True and Mademoiselle joined Collier's in the magazine cemetery.

In Hemingway and Gellhorn's glory years, magazines supported prosperous careers of multiple journalists, fiction writers, cartoonists, editors and photographers.

Although fewer Americans had even high school educations, the population read an astonishing variety of magazines and newspapers through the early 1960s. While general literacy might have been lower, people had a deeper basic knowledge of science, literature, civics and public affairs.

All in all, the once glowing promise of Internet publishing dims as consolidation and layoffs mount. The golden age of magazines will never return.

 

 

 

 

GOP's suppression of black voting rights leaves limited options for MLB All-Star Game site

Moving major league baseball's all-star game out of Atlanta brought the "midsummer classic" its largest national attention in years.

Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred made the right choice in moving the All-Star game because of Georgia's law to suppress black voting rights.

Sadly, the baseball all-star game's interest among sports fans has dwindled for years. Once the National League and American League all-stars competed to win, but now the event is a meaningless exhibition.

Manfred's announcement contrasted with the NBA's insistence on holding its all-star game a month ago in Atlanta, against the initial trepidation of LeBron James and other stars.

The NBA game was played without fans and the usual onslaught of visitors. The Georgia Legislature had not yet approved the voting legislation, which Gov. Brian Kemp quickly signed into law. However, even more restrictive voter suppression bills were circulating, met by the NBA's silence.

Baseball traditionalists remember when the all-star game lineups were filled with black stars, like the NBA showcase is now. But fewer and fewer blacks play in the major leagues, making the game a nearly all-white affair.

Manfred and MLB must choose among a dwindling number of suitable states because of the GOP’s national effort to strike out black voters. That’s the Republican cancel culture.

Kansas City has the black baseball museum, but Missouri might approve its own anti-voting law. Texas, Michigan and Florida are out too. Some suggested Mobile, the home of perennial all-stars Willie Mays and Hank Aaron, but Alabama is the reddest of states, and Amazon battles a union push by mostly black workers in Bessemer, Ala.

To honor Jackie Robinson, Brooklyn would be appropriate, but the site of Ebbets Field is now a housing complex. Robinson would have hated for Yankee Stadium to be awarded the game, but the Mets have claimed the Brooklyn Dodgers' legacy, along with that of the Dodgers' bitter foe, the New York Giants.

For a more direct connection, Brooklyn's Cyclone Field, the home of the borough's minor league team, would be an off-beat choice.

Last year's all-star game in Los Angeles was canceled because of Covid, and Los Angeles hosts the game next year, which likely will preclude the home of Robinson's franchise from having the game this year. Forgotten is that the Dodgers destroyed the Mexican Chavez Ravine neighborhood to build Dodger Stadium.

It's sad that outside of a dying number of baseball traditionalists, few fans would care if the game were canceled this year as well. Or forever.

Washington Post columnist Kevin Blackistone, who began the push to move the all-star game from Atlanta, acknowledged on the ESPN gab-show "Around the Horn" that the newspaper he writes for is owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who's brutally sought to crush the Bessemer union movement. 

Blackistone so far hasn't called for a boycott of Amazon.

 

 

 

 

"Pro-business" Republicans' repressive voting law displays hostility toward black professionals

Georgia Republicans' law to suppress minority voting comes as high-tech companies increase their presence in Atlanta, attracted by black STEM workers.

Those black professionals sought by Microsoft, Google, Apple, and other companies will be hampered from voting because of the petulant GOP Legislature's law imposing state control over  local election boards and limiting absentee ballots.

The legislation even makes it a crime to give food and water to voters waiting in line. Those good Christian legislators must have forgotten the Bible story about Jesus asking the Samaritan woman at the well for a sip of water. She would have gone to jail if Jesus had been voting in Georgia.

Republicans' oft repeated pro-business mantra doesn't extend to high-tech companies' desire to recruit black workers.

While high-tech corporations cite the presence of grads from Morehouse, Spelman, Morris Brown and Clark Atlanta, they also want to attract workers from other cities, adding to the demographic changes that led to Joe Biden winning Georgia's presidential election and Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock capturing Senate seats.

The voting law will discourage young black professionals from moving here from other cities.

Black corporate executives from around the country are urging prominent Atlanta companies like Delta and Coca-Cola to speak out against the law, which they weakly opposed before the legislation's passage.

The law is not as oppressive as earlier proposals, but is still damaging, especially in ending the secretary of state's election authority and allowing the Legislature to remove local elections officials if it doesn't like the results.

An effort to persuade Major League Baseball to move the All-Star game from Atlanta is also gaining force.

The game will honor the late Henry Aaron, known for his quiet civil rights activism and heroism in breaking Babe Ruth's career home run record while receiving volumes of hate mail from white fans.

Enhancing the remembrance of Aaron's legacy, and that of Rep. John Lewis, would send a strong message and not punish Atlanta fans for the actions of an aggrieved political coterie.

Taking more than symbolic action, the NAACP and other voting rights groups have filed federal lawsuits against the legislation.

But the suits' chances are uncertain following the high number of conservative judges taking office during the Trump administration.

Republicans in passing the law show that they're not so pro-business after all. They'd rather suppress black voting power.

 

 

 

Doublethink rules: Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. to buy publisher of George Orwell

Rupert Murdoch seeks to own George Orwell.

Murdoch's News Corp. announced on Monday a $349 million deal to purchase Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's book publishing unit, whose massive backlist encompasses Orwell's "1984" and "Animal Farm."

If the deal goes through, big-lie purveyor Fox News Network will be in the same stable as Orwell's novels. Newspeak will co-exist on Fox broadcasts and the pages of "1984."

Murdoch's Harper Collins will also gain rights to J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy, Virginia Woolff's novels and Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men." 

When envisioning Willie Stark and the corruption of populism, Warren might not have imagined the Republican assault on democracy fueled by Fox News. But his examination of political power and its abuses remains valid. 

Murdoch, in owning the work of Orwell, Woolf, Tolkien and Warren, shows a cynical contempt for the power of ideas. The aging media mogul and political manipulator likely believes that the lies of Fox News will prevail. "Who controls the past controls the future," Orwell warned. "Who controls the present controls the past."

The deal, following the announcement of Penguin Random House's $2.2 billion acquisition of Simon & Schuster, will bring further consolidation of the book-publishing industry. The Harper Collins-Houghton Mifflin Harcourt coupling raises familiar fears about a chill on new voices and unorthodox ideas.

Big brother will be watching even closer. Already in charge of the Wall Street Journal, New York Post, London Times and other British newspapers, the Times Literary Supplement and Fox News, Murdoch will own even more of the media industry.

All publishers will be equal, but some will be more equal than others.