Tennessee

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/08/this-tennessee-teacher-was-fired-for-teaching-a-ta-nehisi-coates-essay-were-not-challenging-our-students/

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Following the launch of a massive federal interagency task force in partnership with state law enforcement, Tennessee Republican Governor Bill Lee pledged that the “Memphis Safe Task Force” would be a permanent fixture.

Last month, the White House published a presidential memorandum titled “Restoring Law and Order in Memphis,” which orders thirteen federal government agencies and offices to coordinate. It states the “objective shall be to end street and violent crime in Memphis to the greatest possible extent,” and lists actions including “hypervigilant policing, aggressive prosecution, complex investigations, financial enforcement, and large-scale saturation of besieged neighborhoods with law enforcement personnel.”

Memphis is among the most violent cities in the country.

“The Memphis Safe Task Force began operations on September 29, with the National Guard joining efforts this past Friday,” Action5 News reported on Monday.

Governor Lee told reporters on Tuesday, “we’ve just begun,” and said the program will last “for months,” before stating that in some form it will continue “forever.”

IFrame Content

“We do know that this is gonna last for months, and we have just begun. In fact, I will tell you that it will last forever,” he said. “Because what we believe will happen is the numbers of law enforcement agents from different agencies will change, depending on the mission at the moment.”

He described a “collaboration that is happening right now between U.S. Marshal Service and the Memphis Police Department, and the FBI, and the DEA, and the Tennessee Highway Patrol.”

“That collaboration will be here from now on,” said Lee. “So this operation, in some ways, may never end.”

Critics blasted the governor.

“As I predicted,” noted authoritarianism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the “aim is a ‘domestic forever war.'”

The Atlantic’s Dr. Norman Ornstein, a political scientist, wrote: “Fascist. Pure fascist.”

Columnist and “recovering attorney” Wajahat Ali added, “Forever occupation, eh?”

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/pipeline-plans/

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'Triumph for environmental justice': Oil companies scrap pipeline plans amid grassroots pressure

Julia Conley and Common Dreams July 04, 2021

Community activists in Memphis, Tennessee and northwest Mississippi celebrated a grassroots victory on Saturday after two oil companies canceled plans to build a pipeline that would have run through wetlands and several low-income, majority-Black neighborhoods.

Valero and Plains All American Pipeline had long planned to construct the Byhalia Connection pipeline, which would have been 49 miles long and linked two pipelines that transport crude oil to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico.

The two companies announced they were canceling the project "due to lower U.S. oil production resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic," but opponents of the pipeline noted that the announcement followed grassroots organizing by climate action advocates, homeowners, and elected officials at the local and federal levels.

"This is a win for the entire community of Memphis, Tennessee, but especially those in the Black community who fought it courageously," Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign, tweeted.

Community members in Memphis neighborhoods including White Chapel, Westwood, and Boxtown objected to the pipeline project, which would have run over the Memphis Sand Aquifer—leading to fears that an oil spill would pollute the drinking water of about one million people.

Local organizations Protect Our Aquifer and Memphis Community Against the Pipeline (MCAP) led rallies and garnered the support of former Vice President Al Gore and Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), while the Memphis City Council weighed an ordinance to make it harder for the companies to begin construction.

MCAP leader Justin J. Pearson organized canvassers and lobbied the city council, and called Friday's announcement "an extraordinary testament to what Memphis and Shelby County can do when citizens build power toward justice."

A representative of the two oil companies sparked local outrage when they said South Memphis, where the Boxtown community was established in the 1860s by people who had been enslaved, had been identified as "the point of least resistance."

"We've shown them that we aren't the path of least resistance," said Pearson. "We are the path of resilience."

Lawyers for the two companies began legal proceedings against local landowners who refused to make deals with project officials; they planned to invoke eminent domain against the property owners.Last week, the Supreme Court ruled in a separate case in New Jersey that a company could use eminent domain to build a natural gas pipeline on state land.

"Their playbooks are the same everywhere," Pearson said on Twitter on Friday. "Find the poor. Appease the rich and politically powerful. Misinform the community. Make local leaders afraid to stop them. Exploit the poor. Reap billions in profits from the deaths of the poor and marginalized."

The Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), which helped landowners fight the two companies in the legal battle, called Friday's announcement "a triumph for environmental justice."

"We are so inspired by the people of Boxtown, Westwood, and White Chapel, and the work of our amazing partners MCAP and Protect Our Aquifer, for showing what is possible when a community stands together," said Amanda Garcia, director of the SELC's Tennessee office.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/tennessee/

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Trump administration approves Tennessee's 'reckless' plan to slash Medicaid as pandemic rages

Portrait of Seema Verma, President-elect Donald Trump's choice for Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator

Andrea Germanos and Common Dreams January 10, 2021

Healthcare advocates are criticizing the Trump administration's approval—amid overwhelming opposition, a global pandemic, and as the number of uninsured Americans grows—of Tennessee's plan to overhaul funding of its Medicaid program, calling the decision "reckless" and "irresponsible."

Joan Alker, executive director of the Georgetown Center for Children and Families, called it "a radical waiver that puts Tennessee's Medicaid beneficiaries at risk."

The state's Medicaid program, TennCare, covers 1.5 million people, or about one in five of the state's residents. The proposal would "fundamentally" transform how TennCare is managed and funded, The Tennessean reported. When Republican Gov. Bill Lee rolled out the plan in fall, the outlet added, the state received 1,800 written comments, of which just 11 were in support.

Kaiser Health News reported:

With just a dozen days left in power, the Trump administration on Friday approved a radically different Medicaid financing system in Tennessee that for the first time would give the state broader authority in running the health insurance program for the poor in exchange for capping its annual federal funding.

The approval is a 10-year "experiment." Instead of the open-ended federal funding that rises with higher enrollment and health costs, Tennessee will instead get an annual block grant. The approach has been pushed for decades by conservatives who say states too often chafe under strict federal guidelines about enrollment and coverage and can find ways to provide care more efficiently.

But under the agreement, Tennessee's annual funding cap will increase if enrollment grows. What's different is that unlike other states, federal Medicaid funding in Tennessee won't automatically keep up with rising per-person Medicaid expenses.

The approval, however, faces an uncertain future because the incoming Biden administration is likely to oppose such a move. But to unravel it, officials would need to set up a review that includes a public hearing.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced the approval Friday. "It's no exaggeration to say that this carefully crafted demonstration could be a national model moving forward," said CMS Administrator Seema Verma—a Trump appointed official who's pushed attacks on Medicaid and has been described as "the architect of Indiana's punitive restrictions on Medicaid patients."

Michele Johnson, executive director of the Tennessee Justice Center, said in response to the approval that "no other state has sought a block grant, and for good reason," and warned of its impacts to those "in nursing homes, those struggling with mental illness, diabetes, cancer, and countless other complex conditions."

"Tennessee is one of a handful of states still denying Medicaid to its working uninsured, and the block grant is just another example of putting politics ahead of healthcare during this pandemic," said Johnson. "It's a political gimmick that jeopardizes access to healthcare for hundreds of thousands of Tennesseans by creating a state budget booby trap."

"State officials have an abysmal record of mismanaging programs that help those in need. The block grant will allow these same state officials to inflict further damage on Tennessee's healthcare system," she said.

The approval also drew outrage from a coalition of 21 patient and consumer groups including the American Lung Association, American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, and National Alliance on Mental Illness. They called the plan's approval "a reckless move that would reduce Tennesseans' ability to get needed healthcare" and urged the incoming Biden administration to halt its implementation.

"Our organizations have clearly and repeatedly voiced our deep concerns with Tennessee's proposal, as well as our strong opposition to block grants in Medicaid in general," the groups said Friday in a joint statement. "Per capita caps and block grants are designed to cap or limit the amount of federal funding provided to states, forcing them to either make up the difference with their own funds or make cuts to their programs reducing access to care for the patients we represent."

Such cuts, they warned, "will likely result in enrollment limits, benefit reductions, reductions in provider payments, or increased out-of-pocket cost-sharing for Medicaid enrollees. The approval specifically includes authority to limit prescription drug coverage, a dangerous proposal for patients."

Referencing the coronavirus pandemic, the groups added, "It is irresponsible to approve this waiver during this public health crisis, and especially to do so for an unprecedented 10-year period." Implementation of the plan stands to "limit Tennessee's flexibility in responding to recessions, pandemics, new treatments, and natural disasters," and thus "moves in the opposite direction of the lessons learned from 2020."

The Tennessean further noted:

The block grant approval, negotiated over about a year with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, still must get final approval from state lawmakers before it can be implemented. Lee now intends to present a joint resolution on the plan for the General Assembly's "immediate consideration," according to a news release.

The Tennessee Justice Center is urging its supporters to pressure lawmakers to block the plan.

"We are not surprised but are unsettled by this eleventh-hour action by the federal government during the height of the pandemic," said Jane Perkins, legal director for the National Health Law Program. "The approval raises so many issues," she said, "from the process the government used to approve this project to the specifics of how the government has cut into the healthcare safety net. Our legal team is investigating the enforcement and litigation options at this time."

Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over Medicaid, also sounded alarm.

"This is an illegal move that could threaten access to healthcare for vulnerable people in the middle of a pandemic," Pallone tweeted Friday. He also expressed hope the incoming Biden administration would "move quickly to roll back this harmful policy as soon as possible."

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https://theintercept.com/2020/08/27/black-lives-matter-protesters:{-terrorism:(style="background-color:#ffcc66ff"):}:-felony-charges

prOSECUTORS AND LAWMAKERS in several states have responded to mass protests against police brutality by charging demonstrators with committing felonies, including terrorism charges. The trend of criminalizing protest has been on the uptick since the 2016 protests against the Dakota Access pipeline at Standing Rock, during and after which numerous states upped charges for protests “near critical infrastructure” as felonies.

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Since 2016, 14 states have enacted new laws to restrict the right to peaceful assembly,a**ccording to the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, which tracks related state and federal legislation. But in the wake of the nationwide movement in support of Black lives, numerous states have increased the severity of criminal penalties for protesters along political lines and are prosecuting them more aggressively, as demonstrations continue with no sign of slowing down.

just last week, following more than 60 days of demonstrations outside the State Capitol, Tennessee Republican Gov. Bill Lee signed a law that made it a felony to participate in some types of protests, including camping out overnight on state property.Charges for the same activity were previously classified as a misdemeanor.In Tennessee, people convicted of felonies lose their voting rights — making the new law a tool for disenfranchisement.

Earlier this month, police in Muscatine, Iowa, apprehended two people they say were attempting to drive a vehicle into the city Public Safety Building and got stuck on a planter. They charged both men with numerous counts, including terrorism. That follows an Oklahoma district attorney’s pursuit ofterrorism chargesagainst five young people, including three teenagers and two people in their 20s. The fourth-term prosecutor also threw felony charges at numerous other people in relation to protests and damage to local and police property in late May.

The terrorism charges reveal a “false equivalency between people who kill, and people who commit acts of property damage,” said Kate Chatfield, policy director at the Justice Collaborative, a policy and media organization focused on mass criminalization and incarceration. “Maybe not a great thing.”

“To say that the power of the state will be wielded in this way against political enemies is incredibly frightening,” Chatfield said, drawing a parallel to the post-9/11 era, when many people who had never committed an act of violence were prosecuted for terrorism. “Let’s not ignore the fact that we have a history of this in this country. A very recent history. And a continuing history, unfortunately.”

The nationwide protests prompted by George Floyd’s killing have continued through the summer, though at a lower intensity over the last month — before picking back up this week. Streets across the country swelled with demonstrators after police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, shot 29-year-old Jacob Blake in the back seven times, in front of his children. Blake is paralyzed from the waist down, his father told the Chicago Sun-Times on Tuesday. Protesters burned down a state Department of Corrections building on Monday. The following night, armed white members of a militia group organized counterdemonstrations to protect local property. Video footage from Kenosha shows the militia members chatting with the police. Shortly after the video was captured, one member of the militia shot and killed two protesters, and left a third in serious condition. Police arrested 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse in Illinois on Wednesday and charged him with first-degree intentional homicide.

“When you hear our president talk about Black Lives Matter as a terrorist organization, or antifa as a terrorist organization, it is the kind of thing that — his statement holds no weight in law, but it sends a message to prosecutors like this that they’ll be supported,” said Thomas Harvey, justice project director at the Advancement Project, a non-profit civil rights group. “And even more frighteningly, I think it sends a message to people like the militia members we saw in Kenosha, and gives them the state and the latitude to commit even more violence than what we see on a daily basis in this country against black and brown folks.”

IN SOME STATES where police have charged protesters en masse with felonies, prosecutors have swiftly dropped them, calling into question the reasoning behind the original charges.

In Louisville, Kentucky, police arrested 87 protesters who had staged a sit-in on the lawn of a home belonging to state Attorney General Daniel Cameron last month — part of an ongoing call for accountability in the killing of Breonna Taylor, the 26-year-old EMT whom three Louisville police officers shot at least eight timesinside her home in March. (The officers were acting on a no-knock warrant in connection with a suspect who did not live at Taylor’s residence. The police department fired one of the three officers who were involved in June. Local activists including Louisville Black Lives Matter worked with Taylor’s family to develop a list of demands, including firing, charging, and convicting the three officers.) Three days later, Jefferson County Attorney Mike O’Connell dismissed the felony charges and said his office would consider misdemeanors and other violations for prosecution at a later date. On Tuesday, Louisville police arrested another 68 protesters and charged them with obstructing a highway and disorderly conduct, both misdemeanors.

Earlier this month in Washington, D.C., police arrested 41 protesters in the Adams Morgan neighborhood on charges of felony rioting and assaulting police officers. The Metropolitan Police Department said in a tweet on August 14 that it only arrested people “engaged in rioting behaviors.” Between May 30 and June 1, District police arrested more than 100 people on charges of burglary, destroying property, and violating curfew, including at least 40 charges of felony rioting.Prosecutorsdropped most of the charges in both sets of arrests.

In Salt Lake City on Friday, a judge droppedpossible life sentence charges facing protesters who poured paint, broke windows, and posted signs at the District Attorney’s Office building, reducing some charges to lower-class felonies and misdemeanors. In June, West Valley police and FBI agents arrested two men in Salt Lake who had allegedly threatened officers and were headed to protests armed with multiple weapons. Prosecutors later charged one man with terrorism.

Also in early June, police officers in Columbia, South Carolina, arrested more than 80 protesters and charged three men with instigating a riot, typically a low-level felony or misdemeanor.

Elected officials participating in the protest have also been caught in the crackdown.In Portsmouth, Virginia, on Monday, sheriff’s deputies delivered a summons charge to the vice mayor, after a resident pressed misdemeanor criminal charges against her for calling on the Portsmouth police chief to resign. Earlier this month, police brought felony charges against the Virginia State Senate pro tempore, a local school board member, local NAACP leaders, and public defenders for injury to a monument and conspiracy, in relation to the destruction of confederate statues in June.

Federal authorities have also carried out their own crackdown on demonstrations, arresting protesters in Portland, Oregon, and New York City in recent months. The FBI has opened some 300 domestic terrorism investigations since late May. Last year, according to the agency, most federal arrests for domestic terrorism involved white supremacy, though the FBI’s Domestic Terrorism Analysis Unit has also investigated a fictional “black identity extremists” movement. The FBI has also quietly investigated white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement in recent years, The Intercept reported.

AMONG THE MOST serious recent charges against protesters are those of terrorism in Oklahoma. There,Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater charged three teenagers and two other people in their 20s with terrorism related to their alleged activity during protests in late May.

“We found it especially inappropriate — and unconstitutional — because it was made with the explicit purpose of silencing protesters who are standing up for Black lives,” American Civil Liberties Union of Oklahoma Staff Attorney Megan Lambert told The Intercept, regarding the recent terrorism charges. “We didn’t even see terrorism charges for the Murrah bombing,” she added, referring to the 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City.

Read Our Complete CoverageProtests for Black Lives

The terrorism charges, which were filed in June and July, stem from allegations that protesters set fire to a sheriff’s van and caused damage to a local bail bond business. Last month, Prater charged two other teenagers with terrorism in connection to demonstrations at the end of May, bringing the total to five. The DA also charged multiple people with rioting, assaulting officers, andat least five others for incitement to riot for painting murals in the city’s downtown area in June.

Oklahoma Democratic Party Chair Alicia Andrews, the ACLUof Oklahoma, and Oklahoma City Black Lives Matter founder and Executive Director Rev. T. Sheri Dickerson slammed Prater’s move, saying that the charges of terrorism were far too harsh. During a press conference early last month, Andrews said she didn’t condone vandalism or destruction of property but that Prater was using the charges to silence protesters. “‘Use your First Amendment right in a way that we don’t like, and we will ruin your future.’ These charges are an attempt to send a message, ‘We’re tired of hearing about Black lives,’” she said.

Prater took office in 2007 and is currently serving his fourth term as DA. His current term ends in 2023.He started his career in law enforcement at age 19 as a deputy sheriff, according to his bio. “These people are speaking out against violence that Prater himself has largely been complicit in,” Lambert said. “This is just another example in a pattern from David Prater’s office of upholding white supremacy.” Prater’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Last May, Prater declined to charge officers who killed 17-year-old Isaiah Lewis, who was in the middle of a mental health crisis when police shot him in Edmond. Over the last few months, local activists have brought renewed attention to Lewis’s killing, which has been a focus of some demonstrations in the area. Other cases have gotten less attention, Dickerson pointed out. Derrick Scott, 42, died last May after being apprehended and restrained by Oklahoma City police. In video footage of the arrest released in June, Scott tells officers he can’t breathe and asks them repeatedly to give him his medicine. An officer replies, “I don’t care.”

“The Scott family is not receiving any justice,” Dickerson said, adding that Scott’s killing was eerily similar to Floyd’s. Earlier this month, police shot 32-year-old James Harmon in the head, saying that he had a weapon in his hand (Oklahoma is an open-carry state). Harmon is still in the hospital.

“Systemic racism, institutional racism, and white supremacy is so deep-rooted,” Dickerson said, agreeing with Lambert’s characterization of Prater’s office. “There’s really nothing more Oklahoman than that.”

“This was a state that was formed basically for them to literally lump Natives and Blacks here together,” she said. “And so it has always been very intentional and deliberate, for us to be victims of what I consider state-sanctioned violence and state-targeted violence.”

For the Oklahoma City teens and young adults facing terror charges, “what’s next is they fight for their lives,” Lambert said. The statute carries a maximum of life in prison. “Many of these charged protesters are young teenagers. … So they are facing spending their entire lives in prison simply for, in some cases, attending a protest to try and hold police accountable.” Criminal defense attorneys are still working to get those charges dropped or significantly reduced.

“Some of the young people were saying, ‘We should go to Kenosha and stand with the young people there,” Dickerson said. “And I was like, ‘How do you choose?’”

this White House task force member using the pandemic to bankroll his Senate campaign?

Roger Sollenberger / SalonMay 27, 2020

Bill Hagerty, a former U.S. ambassador to Japan who is now a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Tennessee, has secured campaign funds from a number of people and corporate entities…

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...NOBODY PAID MUCH ATTENTION last summer when an upstart group called the Tennessee Black Voter Project began dispatching canvassers across Memphis, Nashville, and countless small towns to register voters for the midterm elections. After all, few states are as deep-red as Tennessee, a one-time Democratic bastion in the South where Donald Trump bested Hillary Clinton by a margin of more than 25 percent in 2016. A decade’s worth of voter-suppression tactics, including mass purges of mostly black voters from the rolls and a Voter ID law that made it impossible for many college students to vote, has seemingly convinced many Tennesseans to the left of Trump that voting is no longer worth the bother. The state ranked 50th in turnout in 2016, and a sad 45th in voter registration. A band of millennial African Americans with clipboards and pens would surely be powerless to change that state of affairs.

Tequila Johnson, co-founder of The Equity Alliance and a manager in last year’s elections for the Tennessee Black Voter Project, speaks to reporters, Tuesday, April 2, 2019, at the Cordell Hull legislative building in Nashville, Tenn., after a news conference in opposition to a bill that would stiffen penalties if voter registration groups violate new restrictions. (AP Photo/Jonathan Mattise)]

But organizers like Tequila Johnson, co-founder of the civil rights group The Equity Alliance and manager of the Black Voter Project, saw “both a need and an opportunity,” she told me. They’d seen what happened when black voters had been fully engaged in Alabama the previous December, boosting Democrat Doug Jones to a shocking win in a U.S. Senate special election, and they knew that Stacey Abrams’s New Georgia Project was registering hundreds of thousands and threatening to upend the politics of one of Tennessee’s near neighbors. They also knew that even though people weren’t voting, they certainly weren’t happy and content; as Republicans accrued near-absolute power over the last decade, they’d moved one of the South’s traditionally moderate states further and further to the right, even gutting the state’s popular and progressive health-care program, TennCare.

“People look at Tennessee and say, ‘It’s red and it’ll never change,’” Johnson says. “The state actually hasn’t been red for all that long, but people increasingly thought, ‘my vote doesn’t matter,’ and our Democratic Party has not done a good job of outreach.But people are suffering from these right-wing policies. And millennials like me, including in rural parts of the state, are more open to change and accepting differences than the generations before us.”

So the Black Voter Project got to work. Canvassers set up shop outside church services, jails, and courthouses; they snagged grocery-shoppers and signed up club-goers; they went to housing projects and “100-percent immigrant communities,” as Johnson says. By October, they’d submitted more than 90,000 registration forms to stunned election officials, mainly in Shelby County (Memphis) and Davidson County (Nashville). The new voters weren’t enough to tilt the balance of power statewide, but black turnout soared—from 31 percent in 2014 to 45 percent in 2018—and helped Democrats recapture a majority on the Shelby County Commission while ousting a Republican county mayor and sheriff. In Nashville, where turnout nearly doubled from four years earlier, new voters helped pass a ballot initiative to create a community oversight board for police.

Johnson knew what to expect next. “We weren’t naive enough to think that our voter-participation numbers had happened by mistake,” she says. Tennessee had recently reduced early-voting periods and required proof of citizenship at the polls. “We knew it was by design. For us to be radical enough to say, ‘We’re gonna register people,’ for us to be bold enough to call ourselves the Tennessee Black Voter Project—we knew there would be a push-back.”

Sure enough, when Republican lawmakers convened in Nashville this winter, they were determined to snuff out this “radical” voter-registration effort in its infancy. Citing inflated figures of erroneous forms submitted, implying that mass voter fraud was underway, and echoing complaints by overwhelmed county election officials, Republican lawmakers like Rep. Mike Carter called the Black Voter Project a “debacle,” claiming that it had somehow prevented “honest voters” from being able to cast their ballots.

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In April, Tennessee’s GOP majority passed a sledgehammer of a bill, making it a crime for groups with paid canvassers (as opposed to volunteers) to submit incomplete or inaccurate registration forms: Up to $2,000 in fines will be assessed for each county where an organization submits more than 100 deficient forms, and up to $10,000 if the number exceeds 500. Organizers also face criminal sanctions if they don’t attend training sessions run by local officials, or if they fail to mail in voter-registration forms within 10 days—a short window by most states’ standards. (A lawsuit against the measure, which has kept it from being enforced thus far, continues to move through the courts.)

While other states have imposed regulations on voter-registration drives, there’s never been anything like this law. For Black Voter Project co-founder Charlane Oliver, the upshot was plain to see: “They don’t want black people to vote.”

They don’t want black people to vote.

CHARLANE OLIVER, BLACK VOTER PROJECT]

Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, which works to engage African Americans in the South and assisted the Tennessee project in its start-up phase, says the Republicans’ aim was to keep voter-registration drives small and localized. “They know it’s very hard to do large-scale voter operations without paying canvassers. You can’t make a dent in a state like Tennessee with some mom-and-pop organization that relies on volunteers. The people who wrote this legislation don’t mind ad-hoc efforts. But they don’t want to see 90,000 people registered in one cycle.” The legislation, he says, will make it harder for groups to sign up paid canvassers going forward. “People will be reluctant to take that chance,” he says. “It’s intimidation, period.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/gop-lawmaker-cut-the-mic-on-black-womans-facts-but-let-white-men-spew-lunacy-and-lies-report/

VOICES: Tennessee governor and Volkswagen give middle finger to workers

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee recently led an anti-union meeting at Chattanooga's Volkswagen plant, where last month workers petitioned for an election to join the United Auto Workers. The public and journalists were shut out of the event, which showed how government officials and corporations in the South work together to bust unions. (5/3/2019)

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https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/04/26/koch-brothers-and-dark-money-gang-up-on-nashville-transit-referendum/

Koch brothers are at it again in Nashville.

Three years after funding a campaign to sink the city’s high-profile BRT project, the world’s richest climate deniers are paying their minions to wage a vicious fight against Nashville’s potentially transformative $5 billion transit referendum.

Transit policy experts view the package of bus and light rail improvements as a breakthrough that will deliver on its promise to create service people will want to use. On May 1, voters will decide whether to proceed with expanded bus service, new light rail and bus rapid transit routes, and pedestrian safety improvements, to be funded mainly by a sales tax bump.

As the election draws near, Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity Tennessee and a swarm of opposition groups funded by dark money have mounted a vicious disinformation campaign to prevent the proposal from passing, undermining years of public consensus building.

A single group, “NoTax4Tracks,” raised about $950,000 in three months to fight the transit package, reports the Tennessean. Most of it — $750,000 — was from a separate dark money organization whose donors are secret.

Meanwhile, the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity has been phone banking, sending opposition mailers, and organizing against the transit referendum.

The closer the election gets, the dirtier the tricks.

One of the transit opposition groups goes by the confusing name “Better Transit for Nashville.” The Tennessean recently published an op-ed submitted by the group, but was forced to print an apology after it was revealed that the byline was fake.

In another display of absolute shamelessness, the same group posted on Facebookthat approving the transit referendum would “bring crime” like the Waffle House shooting, in which four people of color were killed by a 29-year-old white man with an AR-15. According to the Tennessean, the shooter arrived by truck.

Nora Kern, director of Bike Walk Nashville, which is one of 130 groups backing the referendum, says the debate has definitely taken an ugly turn in the last few weeks.

“The transit for Nashville side is trying to explain a really complicated infrastructure referendum,” she said. “The opposition just needs to make people confused or scared and they win.”

But Kern thinks the optimistic message from the pro-transit coalition can carry the day. Supporters expect the vote to be close and the outcome to come down to turnout.

“Our city desperately needs transportation options,” she said. “If you don’t have a car in Nashville you’re a second-class citizen. The only way we’re really going to move our city forward is to have dedicated funding for transit and walking. This is our city’s opportunity.“

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https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/04/nashvilles-transit-fight-just-got-weird/559085/

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Nashville's Transit Fight Just Got Weird

STEVE HARUCH APR 27, 2018

On May 1, voters will decide the fate of a massive regional transit overhaul. And things are getting ugly.

On May 1, Nashville voters are set to decide the fate of a $5.4 billion transit plan known as Let’s Move Nashville. It’s a potentially transformative proposal, one that could reshape Music City for generations. If passed, the plan will create five new light rail lines totaling 26 miles, a 1.8 mile downtown transit tunnel, 19 transit centers around the city, four new bus rapid transit lines, four new crosstown bus routes, and a slew of signal, sidewalk, and bike infrastructure improvements. Thanks to a legal opening created by some creative political work, funding will come from raising four city taxes. The bulk of the revenue will come from an increase in sales tax, which by 2023 will go up a full point to 10.25 percent.

The referendum has ignited a passionate, often downright strange public debate, one that’s in keeping with the plan’s sweeping ambitions and serious price tag. (The plan is also referred to as a $8.9 billion transit plan, since Nashville’s Metro Council voted to include both dollar amounts on the ballot; the larger number includes interest and operating expenses.) There’s only one thing people seem to agree on: This is the biggest decision to come down the pike, so to speak, in Nashville for a long time.

“I can’t think of a single more important moment for the city expressed as an election,” says Nashville Metro Council member Freddie O’Connell, “maybe since the city and county consolidated.” That happened in 1962.

The terms of the debate are generally being framed on starkly ideological and geographical lines, with progressive urbanites squaring off against conservatives in the suburbs. On the pro side, boosters of the plan have posited the plan as the logical next dot on the city’s timeline on forward progress, rhetoric befitting the city’s image as a liberal haven in a deeply conservative state. In an op-ed in The Tennessean, Dave Goetz, a finance commissioner under former Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen, compared the moral weight of this moment to desegregating the city’s lunch counters and voting down an anti-immigrant English-only ordinance in 2009.

Not surprisingly, opposition to the referendum has hopped on the same metaphor, but in the reverse direction. “It really is a look back,” according to Jeff Eller, senior advisor for the No Tax 4 Tracks PAC, which has been the biggest and most visible opponent of the plan. The group balks at the proposal’s high price and lack of utility for non-city residents, and insists that the additional taxes will place a burden on seniors and small-business owners. “We think you’ve got to start on May 2 having a conversation about things that work now, using new technology and different ideas than the light rail scenario of the past.”

Amid considerable fanfare, Nashville Mayor Megan Barry introduced the plan to the public in October 2017. Barry was then considered a rising Democratic star, and the plan was hailed as a politically audacious bid to secure a lasting legacy. But just four months later she was out of office. The mayor resigned on March 6 after pleading guilty to felony theft, related to $170,000 in overtime paid to her head of security, with whom she had admitted in January to having an extramarital affair. It’s unclear how much the resignation affected the chances of the referendum she championed. But it’s worth noting that among the candidates to formally replace her in the May 24 special election, only Barry’s interim successor, David Briley, supports the plan.

The Barry scandal definitely added a twist to the public debate over the transit referendum, which frankly didn’t require any further drama. Indeed, it only got weirder as May 1 approached.

In recent weeks, referendum-related stories have utterly dominated the local media, especially on the opinion pages of The Tennessean, Nashville’s daily paper, where you can find op-eds describing the transit plan as, variously, “a bold step forward,” the product of “funny math and flawed reasoning“ and “the only option.” Other recent op-eds claim the plan “will improve our health,” “can help economically disadvantaged,” “would create gridlock“ and “will not stop gentrification.” Still others claim the plan “fixes the right problem the wrong way“ and that it “won’t fix traffic congestion, but that’s not the point.”

The Tennessean also unwittingly became part of the story when it published a piece by a local writer named Matt Johnson headlined “Five reasons to oppose Nashville transit plan.” One problem: Matt Johnson does not exist. In a follow-up, Tennessean reporter Adam Tamburin explained that a self-described volunteer advocacy organization—confusingly called Better Transit for Nashville—used “a fake name and a misappropriated photo.”

In the wake of this, David Plazas, The Tennessean’s opinion page editor, published a soul-searching editorial that asked “Why can’t we be more civil on the Nashville transit debate?“ (The paper’s editorial board has since endorsed the plan.)

Alas, things only got uglier. Hours after the Waffle House mass shooting on April 22, in which four people were killed in the Nashville neighborhood of Antioch, Better Transit for Nashville referenced the killings on its Facebook page. “[W]e are sorry to post this, but ‘transit’ will bring more crime like this,” said the post, which was later deleted.

Steve Cavendish

@scavendish

Looks like the Better Transit 4 Nashville folks have deleted this utterly horrific post ...

9:29 AM - Apr 23, 2018

21 people are talking about this

Twitter Ads info and privacy

A spokesman for the group, Jim Harwell, told The Tennessean that the page has many admins, and that the post was “made by one volunteer and does not represent what our group stands for.” But the implication that improving mobility would be a conduit for urban mayhem brought swift rebuttals from transit advocates nationwide.

Jarrett Walker

@humantransit

Let me be clear: If you say that your fear of crime justifies preventing others from moving around the city, you're advocating incarceration without evidence or trial. Being unable to travel is a limitation on freedom, just as prison walls are. #Nashville

Jarrett Walker

@humantransit

This is not a campaign against transit. In claiming we can prevent crime by preventing people from moving around the city, it's attacking the whole idea of freedom. https://twitter.com/StreetsblogUSA/status/989554799476723712 …

On the other side, a group called Nashville for Transit, which supports the referendum, has also been outspoken about the larger political currents running underneath the proposal. One recent mailer describes the referendum’s opponents as using “Trump-Style Lies” and counting among their ranks “far-right donors and out-of-state special interests—including one bankrolled by the oil billionaire Koch Brothers.”

AG 180 DACA:

In July 2017, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton led a group of Republican Attorneys General from nine other states, including Marshall, plus Idaho Governor Butch Otter, in threatening the Donald J. Trumpadministration that they would litigate if the president did not terminate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy that had been put into place by president Barack Obama. Tennessee Attorney General Herbert H. Slatery, III subsequently reversed his position and withdrew his participation from the proposed suit on August 31st. Slatery went further to urge passage of the DREAM Act.^[5][6] The other Attorneys General who joined in making the threats against Trump included Lawrence Wasden of Idaho, Leslie Rutledge of Arkansas, Derek Schmidt of Kansas, Jeff Landry of Louisiana, Doug Peterson of Nebraska, Alan Wilson of South Carolina, and Patrick Morrisey of West Virginia.^[7]

http://kdvr.com/2017/02/13/tennessee-bill-would-make-drivers-immune-from-civil-liability-if-they-hit-protesters-blocking-street/

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — A Tennessee state representative wants to stop protesters taking to the streets, WSMV reported.

State Rep. Rep. Matthew Hill has filed a bill that says if a driver hits a protester who is blocking traffic in a public right-of-way, then that driver would be immune to civic liability if the demonstrator is hit and hurt, as long as it wasn’t intentional.

“If you want to protest, fine, I am for peaceful protesting, not lawless rioters,” Hill said. “We don’t want anyone to be hurt, but people should not knowingly put themselves in harm’s way when you’ve got moms and dads trying to get their kids to school.”

When protesters took to the sidewalks in Nashville after the executive order from President Trump calling for a travel ban, they say they made a decision to be peaceful and stay on the sidewalk as people drove by.

But things took a turn when safety volunteers say they were hit by a car that rolled through a crosswalk.

“These people were legally in a crosswalk at the time that they had the permission to go,” said Julie Franklin, who said she witnessed the incident.

Franklin said the volunteers, who were wearing orange safety vests, were struck while ushering demonstrators across the street in the crosswalk. She said they’d been waiting for the walk signal to maintain safety.

Franklin said volunteers jumped on the hood of the man’s car when they were struck, trying to get him to stop. But the man kept driving.

Spencer DesAutels said he was one of the volunteers who was hit.

“They saw me. They looked right at me,” said DesAutels, who said he was hit by an older man who was driving with his wife past the protesters. “They stopped, and then they decided that they didn’t want to stop anymore and they just drove through me.”

DesAutels said the man drove with the volunteers on the hood of his car until police made him stop.

“My reaction was I don’t want to be caught underneath this car. It was a big car, so I got up on the hood of the car to say I’m not going to get run over any further than he hit,” DesAutels said.

“I am not advocating anyone being hurt or run over. That’s very, very silly that anyone would think that,” Hill said. “Peaceful protesters have nothing to be concerned about. … This is an attempt to have some public safety and inject some common sense.”

Still, DesAutels, Williams and Franklin feel it opens the door for other drivers to possibly hurt protesters.

“I think it’s inhumane to treat human beings like they’re just traffic cones that you just don’t want to abide by, and that’s exactly what that man did,” Franklin said.

Williams and DesAutels believe the move is politically motivated.

“I think this bill shows that they’re scared. That they know that the people have a voice and it’s being heard, and they don’t like it,” Williams said.

Hill and Sen. Bill Ketron, who is the co-sponsor, defended the measure in written statements.

...

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Tennessee_ALEC_Politicians

Sen. Bill Ketron (R-13), ALEC State Chair,^[17] ALEC Energy, Environment and Agriculture Task Force^[9] and Tax and Fiscal Policy Task Force member,^[8] attended 2011^[18] and 2015 ALEC Annual Meetings.^[15]Ketron told The Tennessean that 6 other senators and 22 Tennessee legislators attended the 2015 ALEC meeting.^[15]
Sen. Jim Kyle (D-28)^[19]

https://theintercept.com/2016/02/16/greatest-threat-to-free-speech-in-the-west-criminalizing-activism-against-israeli-occupation/

...This attempt to formalize suppression of anti-occupation advocacy on college campuses is long-standing and widespread. The New York state legislature actually passed “a bill that would suspend funding to educational institutions which fund groups that boycott Israel.” Such legislation is becoming commonplace, as the group United With Israel boasted just last month:

Florida became the fifth state in the U.S. to introduce a resolution to confront the anti-Israel BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement when it passed a law on December 21, similar to the first anti-BDS legislation introduced in Tennessee last April.

By doing so, Florida has joined Tennessee, New York, Indiana, and Pennsylvania. Another 35 states are reportedly considering similar legislation.

The commendably consistent pro-campus-speech group FIRE, while expressing some criticisms of the BDS movement, has repeatedly documented and denounced attempts to suppress BDS advocacy on campus:...

kingston tva coal slurry spill

https://www.facingsouth.org/2010/05/disaster-in-east-tennessee.html

http://www.alternet.org/personal-health/5-most-dangerous-states-live-and-5-safest

According to the study, the five safest states to live in are Massachusetts, Vermont, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Hawaii.The least safe states to live in are New Mexico, Tennessee,Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Mississippi. Massachusetts is the state with the lowest share of residents who lack health insurance, the second fewest number of fatal occupational injuries, and the second lowest rate of fatal automobile accidents.

3/15 altnernet

A segment of Tennessee Republican lawmakers are crusading for a bill that would override local regulations against allowing guns in public parks. Yesterday, House Republicans held a press conference where the gun issue arose, giving reporters a chance to peppers lawmakers with questions about the bill.

At one point, a reporter asked if they have any concern about accidents, which make up a large percentage of injuries from guns. The lawmaker replied that he isn't all too worried about this because bicycles in parks arejust as deadly [3]:

Reporter: I’m not trying to debate, but these are the questions that we’re being asked about this. And one of the things that keep getting pointed out to me, is you guys keep talking about criminals, but there are accidents. Permit holders have accidents.

McCormick: Certainly.

Reporter: So, if there’s an accident and a permit holder is in a park, there’s a high chance it’s going to hit a child.

Casada: There’s accidents with bicycles in parks. Should we outlaw bicycles?

Reporter: Yeah, but bikes very rarely kill people.

Casada: That's not true, I disagree with that statement.

Reporter: Guns are weapons. Are you saying a gun is as safe as bicycle?

Casada: If used properly I am. If used properly.

Reporter: In the event of an accident, which is more likely to kill someone?

Casada: Now we're back in theoretical. I think in Tennessee we're dealing with a lot more questions than guns in parks. I think this is a minor thing in the scope of what we're doing good in Tennessee.

Reporter: If someone is hit accidently with a bullet, you guys are fine defending this bill?

Casada: If someone gets run over by an automobile accidently, there's nothing I can do about that. These are things beyond, they're called acts of God, they're beyond our control.

For what it's worth, in 2012 around 726 Americans [4] were killed while using their bicycles. Annual gun deaths are closer to 30,000 [5].

The guns-in-parks bill continues to move at the state legislature, and one Senate Democrat successfully attached what may end up being a poison pill to the bill: an amendment [6] that would allow guns into the state capitol itself. “If we're going to pass a law that requires local governments to have guns in their parks, we should apply the same standards to ourselves,” said Senator Jeff Yarbro.

http://www.alternet.org/corporate-accountability-and-workplace/comcasts-worst-nightmare-how-tennessee-could-save-americas

AlterNet [1] / By David Sirota [2]

Comcast’s Worst Nightmare: How Tennessee Could Save America’s Internet

July 18, 2014 |

The business lobby often demands that government get out of the way of private corporations, so that competition can flourish and high-quality services can be efficiently delivered to as many consumers as possible. Yet, in an epic fight over telecommunications policy, the paradigm is now being flipped on its head, with corporate forces demanding the government squelch competition and halt the expansion of those high-quality services. Whether and how federal officials act may ultimately shape the future of America's information economy.

The front line in this fight is Chattanooga, Tennessee, where officials at the city's public electric utility, EPB, realized that smart-grid energy infrastructure could also provide consumers super-fast Internet speeds at competitive prices. A few years ago, those officials decided to act on that revelation. Like a publicly traded corporation, the utility issued bonds to raise resources to invest in the new broadband project. Similarly, just as many private corporations ended up receiving federal stimulus dollars, so did EPB, which put those monies into its new network.

The result is a system that now provides the nation's fastest broadband speeds at prices often cheaper than the private competition. As the Chattanooga Times Free Press noted a few years back, "EPB offers faster Internet speeds for the money, and shows equal pep in both uploading and downloading content, with Comcast and AT&T trailing on quickness." Meanwhile, EPB officials tell the Washington Post that the utility's telecom services have become "a great profit center" -- an assertion confirmed by a Standard & Poor credit upgrade notice pointing out that the utility "is now covering all costs from telephone, video and Internet revenue, as well as providing significant financial benefit to the electric system."

This is great news for local businesses and taxpayers -- but it is terrible news for private telecom companies, who not only fear being outcompeted and outperformed in Chattanooga, but also fear the Chattanooga model being promoted in other cities. In response, those telecom firms have been abandoning the standard argument about the private sector. Indeed, as the Times Free Press reported last week, rather than insisting the private sector has inherent advantages over the public sector, the firms have gone to court insisting "that EPB, as a public entity, would have an edge when competing against private companies, which would be at a disadvantage when facing an entity owned by taxpayers."

To date, those court cases have been thwarted by EPB. However, it is a different story in state legislatures. Once again abandoning the business lobby's typical call for less government intervention, telecom firms have successfully pushed 20 states to pass laws limiting the reach of community-owned utilities like EPB.

That's where Washington comes in. With Census figures showing more than 1 in 5 Tennessee residents having no Internet connection, EPB is now proposing to offer its ultra-fast services to new communities. But it needs the Federal Communications Commission to preempt the Tennessee statute prohibiting the utility from competing with private telecom companies outside its current market.

For EPB, the good news is that FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has repeatedly pledged that in the name of competition and broadband access, he will support preempting state laws like Tennessee's. However, in a capital run by money, EPB may still be politically overpowered. After all, as a community-owned utility in a midsized city, EPB does not have the lobbyists and campaign cash to match those of behemoths like Comcast and AT&T. What the utility does have is a solid track record and a pro-consumer, pro-competition argument.

The question is: Will that be enough to prevent Wheeler from backing down or being blocked by Congress? The future of the Internet may be at stake in the answer.

See more stories tagged with:

telecommunications [4],

competition [5],

corporations [6],

tennessee [7]

---

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/corporate-accountability-and-workplace/comcasts-worst-nightmare-how-tennessee-could-save-americas

Links:

[1] http://alternet.org

[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/david-sirota-2

[3] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on Comcast’s Worst Nightmare: How Tennessee Could Save America’s Internet

[4] http://www.alternet.org/tags/telecommunications

[5] http://www.alternet.org/tags/competition-0

[6] http://www.alternet.org/tags/corporations

[7] http://www.alternet.org/tags/tennessee

[8] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

5. Tennessee Outlaws High-Speed Mass Transit

A proposed high-speed bus system in Nashville got on the bad side of the Tennessee legislature last month. But rather than fix or alter the suggested plans, Tennessee senators solved the matter by passing a bill against high-speed mass transit altogether.

The Amp was designed as a 7-mile high-speed bus line connecting various parts of Nashville, which would make it Tennessee’s first mass transit system [9], and had the support of the business community. With Nashville’s congestion getting worse and a million residents expected to move to the city over the next twenty years, the plan seemed like a no-brainer.

But to work, the high-speed bus systems needed a dedicated line and traffic signal priority. This angered drivers. Wealthier residents began complaining [10] of the undesirable elements the transit system could bring through their neighborhood, with one expressing the fear that it could bring “burger flippers” through her neighborhood. Then a major auto-dealer began sponsoring lawn signs opposing the plan, fearing a functional mass transit system could hurt sales.

That’s when the Koch Brothers got involved. Americans for Prosperity-Tennessee sprung into existence, staffed entirely with lobbyists and blessed with an undisclosed budget. Shortly thereafter, a bill appeared in the Tennessee legislature making it illegal “for buses to pick up or drop off passengers in the center lane of a state road”—effectively outlawing the Amp and any transit system like it. The bill’s sponsor said [11] he worried parking spaces might be sacrificed to make room for the line—the ultimate expression of a car-centered culture bewildered by the need, to say nothing of the desire, for public transportation.

The bill passed the state Senate without much opposition. But in the end, this was too much, even for Tennessee. The single-lane legislation was ultimately rendered irrelevant [12] when the Tennessee legislature negotiated a deal to allow the project to go forward with greater oversight from the legislature.

But the Kochs had shown how easy it could be to derail a city’s much-needed mass transit project with a friendly congressman and an indomitable fear of taking away a single parking space.

===

http://www.salon.com/2014/04/01/why_are_the_kochs_trying_to_stop_a_transit_project_in_nashville/ afp

In other words, AFP suggested the bill and a friendly legislator sponsored it.

According to Ogles, Americans for Prosperity-Tennessee was founded nine months ago, with a “sizable” undisclosed budget and three employees (two of whom are registered lobbyists). Why Tennessee, a state that the Kochs have no personal interest in? Well, it’s just a good environment for their agenda:

“With supermajorities in both houses,” [Ogles] said, “Tennessee is a great state to pass model legislation that can be leveraged in other states.”

So, this is not “the Kochs” doing this, in the cartoonish sense of David or Charles calling up a henchman and saying “kill that new bus line in Nashville,” and then cackling and dipping an orphan in fracking runoff and using it to light a cigar. But this is the story of how billionaires dedicated to advancing an agenda at every level of government can do so with practically no one noticing until they’ve already won. Because a couple of energy moguls are constitutionally opposed to mass transit spending based on a very self-serving definition of “liberty,” Nashville, a city neither of them spends any significant amount of time in, may not get a new bus line. “All politics is local” means something a bit different in this age of unregulated free-for-all political spending.

2010

Rep. Phil Roe (R-TN-01): Many believe greenhouse gas emissions are contributing to the gradual warming of our planet and changing of our climate. While there are many questions surrounding the science of the issue, it seems to me like we could develop a solution that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions without inflicting catastrophic damage on our economy. [source]

Rep. John Duncan (R-TN-02): John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel, called global warming “the greatest scam in history.” Richard Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at MIT, said global warming alarmists “are trumpeting catastrophes that couldn’t happen even if the models were right.” [source]

Rep.-elect Diane Black (R-TN-06): The far left-wing elements of this administration foresee a near future with carbon regulated as a pollutant and heavily taxed to discourage consumption and generate revenue. We must resist all of these radical approaches all geared to raise energy prices on American families and businesses. [source]

Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN-07): Also absent from the discussion in Copenhagen is the climate-gate scandal. Recently leaked e-mails reveal climate scientists have a long track record of manipulating data to hide scientific evidence that contradicts the global warming establishment. And why? To bully citizens and lawmakers into supporting job-killing energy tax schemes. This scandal raises serious questions about the Democrat’s climate control plans, questions that deserve a transparent investigation, not a rush to judgement by the bureaucrats in Copenhagen. [source]

Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN): He was not overly alarmed, recalling that in any earlier climate cycle potatoes were grown in Greenland and that it had gotten its name for a reason. [source]

2009

Scores of the Tennessee delegation

Senator Lamar Alexander(R) 27%

Senator Bob Corker (R) 9%

Congressman Phil Roe (R)-1 7%

Congressman Jimmy Duncan (R)-2 7%

Congressman Zach Wamp (R)-3 14%

Congressman Lincoln Davis (D)-4 64%

Congressman Jim Cooper (D)-5 93%

Congressman Bart Gordon (D)-6 100%

Congressman Marsha Blackburn (R)-7 0%

Congressman John Tanner (D)-8 57%

Congressman Steve Cohen (D)-9 100%

The full 2009National Environmental Scorecardcan be found at http://www.lcv.org/scorecard

===

2010

Tennessee

Incumbent Reps. Phil Roe (Tenn.-01) and John Duncan (Tenn.-02)both try a variation on “teaching the controversy (that we just manufactured)” used by creationists: their websites don’t state their own views, but do cite the views of the few scientists, usually industry shills, who doubt global warming. Don’t fall for the appearance of neutrality — these representatives are Climate Zombies.

Incumbent Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (Tenn.-03) (he favors drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge), Scott DesJarlais (Tenn.-04), or David Hall (Tenn.-05); the latter two signed the Koch/AFP pledge, so are presumed to be Climate Zombies. Diane Black (Tenn.-06)complains about regulating “carbon as a pollutant.” Stephen Fincher (Tenn.-08) likewise wants to drill here, drill now, is a Tea Party type, and has taken the Koch/AFP pledge. I think Charlotte Bergmann (Tenn.-09) (“America should become energy independent. We have the resources! Tax laws should be used to encourage more use of our own resources in a clean, effective way.”) is more loopy than an actual denier. I also don’t have information on the attitude toward science of gubernatorial candidate Bill Haslam.

Semi-final score: three clear Climate Zombies, five presumed to be infected, and two (Tenn.-09 and gov.) about whom I don’t have enough information to make a call.

===

education:

Tennessee

Tennessee's House bill, H.B. 368, essentially a replica of the ALEC model bill, overwhelmly passed the House in April 2011, but its Senate-version cousin, S.B. 893, failed to pass. As the Los Angeles Times article makes clear, efforts to push the bill through are far from over.

Key clauses of that bill read,

"[T]eachers shall be permitted to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught."

"[P]ublic elementary and secondary schools…[should]…respond appropriately and respectfully to differences of opinion about controversial issues."

These excerpts match, almost to a "T," bullet points one, three and four of the ALEC model bill.

Nine of the 24 co-sponsors of the H.B. 368 are ALEC members, according to CMD's ALEC Members database.

In addition, these nineALECmember co-sponsors received $8,695 in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry combined in the 2008 and 2010 campaign cycles, according to FollowTheMoney.org. The other 15 sponsors of the bill, while not members of ALEC, received $10,400 in their campaign cofffers in the 2008 and 2010 campaign cycles combined.

S.B. 893, on the other hand, was sponsored by Sen. Bo Watson (R-11), a recipient of $1,800 in oil and gas industry money in the 2008 and 2010 election cycles combined.

Translation: between the 25 of them, on top of a model bill handed to them by corporate oil and gas industry lobbyists, they were also furnished with $20,895 in campaign cash by these industries with the expectation to do their legislative bidding.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/22/sherwin-smith-tennessee-terrorism_n_3480930.html?view=print&comm_ref=false

A Tennessee state official reportedly told residents who were concerned about dirty drinking water that complaining about water quality could be considered :{"an act of terrorism.:(style="background-color:#fff200ff"):}:"

The controversial comment was made by Sherwin Smith, the deputy director of the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation's (TDEC) Division Of Water Resources, during a May 29 meeting organized by Tennessee state Rep. Sheila Butt (R-Columbia).

"You need to make sure that when you make water quality complaints you have basis," Smith said, according to audio obtained by Statewide Organizing For Community eMpowerment (SOCM), a Knoxville-based civic action group. "Because federally, if there's no water quality issues, that can be considered, under Homeland Security, an act of terrorism."

The comments came during a discussion over poor water quality in Tennessee's Maury County, where residents have said people have gotten sick from drinking the water.

...

===

Recently an ag-gag bill died in California, while bills in Arkansas and :{Tennessee :(style="background-color:#fff200ff"):}:inched closer to approval. No matter, according to Potter and Stepanian — activists still won. In mobilizing to address a common enemy, activists have forged unlikely but powerful alliances.

update 5/13 http://grist.org/news/ag-gag-bill-chokes-in-tennessee/

t appears ag-gag bills can’t even hoof it in farm country: Tennessee joins a roster of states who are strangling ag-gag bills before they can reach the killing floor.

Tennessee lawmakers had narrowly approved a bill that would have required anybody who filmed animal abuses to turn over the footage to law enforcement within 48 hours or risk being fined. That would have prevented undercover animal activists from documenting systematic animal abuse by agricultural workers, helping factory farms get away with cruelty.

But Gov. Bill Haslam (R) called BS on the bill and said that he plans to veto it. From a statement issued by the governor on Monday:

First, the Attorney General says the law is constitutionally suspect. Second, it appears to repeal parts of Tennessee’s Shield Law [which protects journalism] without saying so. If that is the case, it should say so. Third, there are concerns from some district attorneys that the act actually makes it more difficult to prosecute animal cruelty cases, which would be an unintended consequence.

For these reasons, I am vetoing HB1191/SB1248, and I respectfully encourage the General Assembly to reconsider this issue.

Ag-gag bills have been spreading through the U.S. faster than mystery disease at a Chinese swine farm. Some have become law, but others are being withdrawn, defeated, or vetoed. Grist’s Susie Cagle produced this interactive map last month to provide an overview.

---

Monday evening, a new bill (SB 893) was approved by the Tennessee Senate that will protect teachers who wish to promote "alternate" scientific theories, essentially allowing anti-evolutionists and climate change deniers a voice in the science classroom. A similar version of the bill (HB 368) passed in the House about a year ago. Advocates of the bill claim that it improves academic freedom, while its critics see it as an open door to the promotion of pseudoscience and religious doctrine within the public school system.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/20/tennessee-evolution-scopes-education_n_1368636.html?ir=Green&ref=topbar

4/12

===

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/mar/21/tennessee-bill-teachers-evolution-climate-change

The state legislature of Tennessee has given legal cover to public school teachers to challenge the science of evolution and climate change, in a move that looks set to deepen a debate about politicisation of the classroom.

The bill passed in the Tennessee Senate this week provides legal protection to teachers who personally do not believe in evolution or the human causes of climate change, and instead want to teach the "scientific strengths and weaknesses of existing scientific theories".

It comes at a time when science associations are increasingly concerned by moves to inject religious or ideological beliefs into science teaching ahead of the release next month of a new set of education standards which give a central place to climate change.

The new standards, based on recommendations from the National Research Council, are not mandatory for all states. But they have already provoked a backlash from states, such as Utah, which have officially ruled climate change is not settled science. An unauthorised release of documents from the rightwing Heartland Institute last month revealed an ambitious plan in 2012 to discredit existing teaching on climate change.

The Tennessee measure, which passed by 24-8 votes, was strongly criticised by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Centre for Science Education, who called it a step backward. The house approved a similar version of the measure last year.

Bloggers called the move a throwback to the Scopes monkey trial of the 1920s, when a Tennessee public school teacher was convicted and fined for teaching evolution.

===

Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn.

“Yes, it’s happening. A lot of scientists say that it is.… I’m not a scientist, and I generally accept what the great body of scientists say.… But I don’t think there’s anything [in Congress] that’s going to be dealing with climate change in the near future.”

Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn.

“Is climate change happening? Yes. I don’t know how much [man-made emissions contribute], but the national academies of science of all the industrial countries say it’s a significant amount. So let me put it this way: If it were a house, I’d buy fire insurance.”