Going to Bed Hungry in a Wealthy County

Williamson County, TN, is the wealthiest county in the state and the 17th wealthiest in the U.S., based on average per capita income.

However, this county is not exempt from job losses, foreclosures and recession which have affected Americans everywhere. 

I am researching this subject with the intention of producing a mini-documentary video that focuses largely on those who are newly needy or newly unemployed, newly foreclosed, newly poor or newly hungry.  Food stamp particpation has skyrocketed here and nationally, although I am hearing that the demand is starting to lessen now that the economy has regained some traction.  Regardless of trends or statistics, if you don't know how you are going to eat or sleep tonight, that is the only statistic that counts.

The Tennessean and WSMV-TV recently asked for my response to a Williamson County political leader who boasted about the county's No. 1 wealth standing and then ranted that we should not be providing free or reduced-cost breakfasts to hungry kids at public schools.   Following are the links:

Tennessean story Feb. 17, 2012

WSMV-TV story Feb. 17, 2012

Please CONTACT ME if you know of anyone or any families who would be open to telling their story of how circumstances led to their needs.  This is a "there but for the grace of God go I" story, but there are many people in our alienated society who will only believe it or care about it if they hear personal stories from real people. 

New Media Blackout, Maneuvering Outflank Old Media and its Paid Stooges

SOPA Protester Nadine Wolf in NYC
NYT Photo by Michael Appleton

Internet blackouts by web sites around the world, from heavyweights like Google and Wikipedia, to Redditt and Wordpress, forced Congress to spike the two Internet censorship bills that we had railed against on this site, in The Tennessean and on InternetEqualRights.com.
For background, see my post (below, Fighting for the Future of the Internet), which in a slimmer version The Tennessean used as an op-ed.

One thing we can say: The people en masse and the smart people who know and use the Internet totally throttled Congress corruption in the form of tech-clueless senators and representatives and their greedy, screw-everybody-but-me corporate sponsors. The movie industry, which had a fit years ago that the VHS recorder was going to ravage their business, and the recording industry were the big-money players behind these bills.

New media 1, old media 0.

For delicious details about the blackout and the power of the Internet and its users, including 4.5 million who signed a petition at Google, check out the links below.  Then, sober up with my interjection at the end of the links.

POLITICIANS WITHER AFTER WEB POWER PLAY:

http://www.savetheinternet.com/blog/12/01/19/web-blacks-out-senators-defect-update

HOUSE AND SENATE LEADERS WITHDRAW THEIR BILLS:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0112/71720.html

"ANONYMOUS" CALLS FOR STREET PROTESTS AND SHUTDOWN OF GOVERNMENT:

http://www.truth-out.org/blackout-strike-anonymous-calls-street-protests/1326918870

SOPA PROTEST RATTLES CONGRESS:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0112/71618.html

THE DAY THE INTERNET WENT DARK:

http://gigaom.com/2012/01/18/sopa-pipa-protest-gallery/

4.5 MILLION SIGNED GOOGLE PETITION AGAINST SOPA, PIPA:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2012/01/google-anti-sopa-petition.html

NYT STORY:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/19/technology/protests-of-antipiracy-bills-unite-web.html?_r=1

WORLDWIDE PROTEST:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2012/01/sopa-blackouts-inspired-protest-from-around-the-world.html

SOBERING NOTE TO END ON: While this blackout and orchestrated play by the Web movers and shakers was a resounding triumph, a slam dunk in your face, this was but a temporary win in a series of battles for control of the Internet. 

Rep. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, for instance, is another corporate puppet who will dance to any tune her campaign contributors sing. She has sponsored bills to wrest oversight of the Internet from the Federal Communications Commission, whose role is watchdog for the greater public interest, and hand over the Internet---lock, stock and barrel and free of charge--to the giant Internet Service Providers (and her donors) ATT, Comcast, Time Warner and Verizon. The ISP cartel will carve up the Internet to maximize their profits, and the public be damned. 

Let's not forget where the Internet came from:  It was developed by the U.S. government and thus paid for by U.S. taxpayers.   We are not giving it up.

'You Are My Network, My Only Network...!'

Do you like the Internet?  Like how you can search anywhere you want for any information or viewpoint?  Like how you can post your information and opinions?   Take action now, or you could have your Internet as you know it today pulled out from under you.

Keep the Internet open for the people---we don't need to have everything run by the ISP cartel of ATT, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner.  The Internet is the last level playing field.  It is democracy's last stand.  It is our greatest driver of innovation, creativity and economic growth---as well as our best and most open source of information.

Many bills are in Congress by corporate stooges, such as Marsha Blackburn, to let corporations take over the Internet with only Wall Street greed as its guide. With corporate takeover and privatization of the Internet---and no government watchdog for the public interest---how will the next Google get out of the garage or the next Facebook get out of the dorm room?

U.S. taxpayers paid for and developed the Internet.  We expect to keep it!  Watch our little Internet jingle.

Occupy Movement Must Engage Labor to Succeed, Chomsky Says

`

MEMPHIS, Jan. 13, 2012--- The United States has "run far off the spectrum like a third-world country" and is being controlled by a "virtual senate of the wealthy," world-renowned author, intellectual and activist Noam Chomsky told an SRO crowd of about 900 students and members of the community Friday night at Rhodes College.

Chomsky said the "Occupy movement will prove to be of historical significance.  We have never seen anything quite like this.  But, to be ultimately successful, it must engage the mass population like the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements---and not just with people sympathetic  to it."

 Chomsky's speech was advertised as focusing on Occupy Wall Street, but he also laid out broad, thought-provoking  themes and epic forces for the audience, who frequently stood and cheered and many of whom came clutching one of Chomsky's more than 100 books.  Chomsky was in town also to speak at the Mid-South Peace and Justice Center banquet on Saturday, and he spoke to the press at the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel on the Saturday before the  Jan. 16 holiday to commemorate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was assassinated in Memphis in 1968.

Pass the Tennessee Scenic Vistas Protection Act---Call these Legislators!

For years, many Tennesseans have been trying to get our legislature to pass a simple bill that would preserve part of our state's beauty and health, which are under attack from corporate privateers and the elected officials who represent them over residents of Tennessee.

The Tennessee Scenic Vistas Protection Act is a straightforward bill that says mountaintop removal coal mining is prohibited for any elevations in Tennessee above 2,000 feet.

The Republicans in control of the state Senate and House are poised again to kill this bill, which has been around the legislature with no luck for a few years now. This bill is so innocuous, so inoffensive that only narrow, corporate interests oppose it; contrary to how Republicans want to talk about "job killing," mountaintop strip mining actually requires very few employees to operate the equipment. 

To make this a jobs-vs.-environment argument is baseless.


The State of Tennessee actually subsidizes the coal companies to the tune of more than $1 million a year, which far surpasses any economic impact of mountaintop removal and which should be cut off.  From the few meager jobs that involve Tennessee residents working on mountain top peel-away, the economic benefit to the state is way less than the coal industry subsidy. Let's quit subsidizing an industry that is not a good, patriotic corporate citizen and that abuses the privilege they have been given in pursuit of only bottom line, and the public be damned.  

 As if blowing up mountains, destroying habitat and making the state ugly were not enough, the worst human destruction in all of this is perpetrated upon people who live near these sites and their sludge pools of waste, and whose drinking water gets ruined and whose homes become uninhabitable and unsalable.

 The coal industry is losing market share to natural gas, and they are desperate to cherry-pick the cheapest, easiest way to get at coal deposits in order to regain a competitive foothold. This bill gives them a free pass up to 2,000 feet of rise above sea level---is 2,000 feet not enough for the coal companies?


Tennessee has only a handful of ravaged mountaintops at this point; but, Tennessee has been targeted.  The coal companies are poised to move in as they have in other states where blown-away mountaintops number in the hundreds.


Tennesseans value the beauty of our state as do the visitors we attract.  Our moral leaning to protect nature rises like the Appalachian range---dwarfing any rationale for scarring up our lands and lives. 

Contact information for the TN Senators and Representatives who are on the environmental committees and a text of the bill may be found by clicking this link:  http://www.realestatealacarte.org/CommunityLinksandNews 

Tell them: "Pass the Tennessee Scenic Vistas Protection Act--This Time!"

Fighting for the Future of the Internet

          Tis the season for your Senators and Congress members to hand out presents to their constituents. 

       No, not you, silly! 

Their REAL constituents---the corporations who have paid them much more money than you are even allowed.

Special-Interest Bills Would Cripple Free Speech, Innovation on the Internet

(An edited version of the following ran as an op-ed in The Tennessean Sunday Dec. 18, 2011, opposite a piece by Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and alongside an editorial by The Tennessean's Ted Rayburn)

By Gary Moore

If you were alarmed when you saw SWAT teams ridding public parks of the First Amendment in the form of "Occupy Wall Street," you will be sick when your Internet is blocked after a powerful Congress-Corporate SWAT team clears cyber space of the First Amendment.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was argued last week in a two-day markup session of the House Judiciary Committee. Rather than being "marked up," the bill should be shredded. The bill might better be called the "Shut Off Practically Anyone" Act or the "Stop Online Privacy Act." A counterpart bill is in the Senate.

The stated intent of the legislation, which is being pushed by the motion picture and music industries, is to supersede existing laws that protect copyright holders from those who would illegally sell movies and songs over the Internet.

Unfortunately, the bills are so broadly written that they swing a medieval ax that chops down the First (free speech), Fourth (privacy) and Fifth (due process) Amendments. Under the House bill a copyright holder could go to court and, without a hearing, get the government to block web sites, even over materials put there by a third party, like users posting to Facebook. The burden could be on YouTube to monitor its about 24,000 postings an hour for such things as kids singing a Beatles song.

The bill further provides for cutting off credit card and PayPal payments to allegedly offending sites. What would that mean to eBay? And, the bill knocks down the privacy door as it allows snooping on what users write, read and seek.

Opposition to the bill is more grassroots and can afford fewer lobbyists. It ranges from venture capitalists to technology interests to First Amendment lawyers.

"Our State Department can't push for Internet freedom abroad if we pass SOPA at home," said committee member Zoe Lofgren (D-CA).

Authoritarian regimes are intently watching this bill, which they view as a free pass from the U.S. to engage in censorship, spying and electronic revolt-crushing. The technology prescribed by SOPA is substantially the same that China uses to enforce the Great Internet Firewall of China.

Investors fear the broad liability cast by these bills would stifle the robust economic force of the Internet. Future Facebooks would stay in the dorm room, and future Googles might not get out of the garage.

Judiciary committee chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) is pushing his bill as if it were a Christmas gift for corporate sponsors. The movie/TV/music industry is Smith's top campaign contributor by industry rank, just as it is of the bill's other principal sponsor, Rep. John Conyers (D-MI). Not surprisingly, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN 7^th district) has signed on as a co-sponsor.

Further entwining the Corporate-Congress marriage is the fact that former Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd now serves as CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America, and he recently hired a Congressional staffer who had worked on the bill. Imagine this on a resume: "I helped the United States pass new laws to benefit you at the expense of the public interest."

The Internet is the last level playing field, where there is equal opportunity to post and search, even if you are a budding entrepreneur or a dissenting political voice. The spirit of the Internet must prevail in America against the narrow interests that would throttle it.

Gary Moore is public information director of Citizens for a Free and Open Internet PAC.

Despite GOP Claims, U.S. Health Care Nowhere Near ‘Best’ in the World

This article was published at NationofChange at: http://www.nationofchange.org/despite-gop-claims-us-health-care-nowhere-near-best-world-1322497805

By Wendell Potter

A little more than a year ago, on the day after the GOP regained control of the House of Representatives, Speaker-to-be John Boehner said one of the first orders of business after he took charge would be the repeal of health care reform.

"I believe that the health care bill that was enacted by the current Congress will kill jobs in America, ruin the best health care system in the world, and bankrupt our country," Boehner said at a press conference. "That means we have to do everything we can to try to repeal this bill and replace it with common sense reforms to bring down the cost of health care.”

Boehner is not the first nor the only Republican to try to make us believe that the U.S. has the world’s best health care system and that we’re bound to lose that distinction because of Obamacare. I’ve heard GOP candidates for president say the same thing in recent months, charging that we need to get rid of a President who clearly is trying to fix something that doesn’t need fixing, something that isn’t broken in the first place.

Well, those guys need to get out more. Out of the country, in fact. They need to travel to at least one of the many countries that are doing a much better job of delivering high quality care at much lower costs than the good old USA.

Scott Walker Is Run Out of Town in Franklin, TN

Redneck Party and Beer Party Protest Republican Party Debate

GOP's 'Cheap-Labor Conservatives'
Can No Longer Take the South for Granted

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Jeana Brown of Redneck Party: "Whose side are you on?"

SPARTANBURG, S.C.---"The South shall rise again!" will be the rallying cry of the Southern-based workers' rights Redneck Party and the Beer Party when they picket the Republican presidential debate beginning at 5 p.m. ET Saturday Nov. 12 at Wofford College.
 

Though whimsically named, the Redneck Party and the Beer Party are dead serious about waking up Southerners to who is behind their loss of jobs, homes, income and quality of life.

CHEAP-LABOR CONSERVATIVES, GO HOME

"We want to run these cheap-labor conservatives back home," said Jeana Brown, co-founder of the Redneck Party, a pro-labor coalition. "We want folks across the nation to know that we in the South might be so-called 'right-to-work’ states, but we know right from wrong. Taking away collective bargaining rights of teachers and fire fighters all over America is wrong.

Wall Street Spies on Protesters at Taxpayers' Expense

For those people who get riled over thinking they saw somebody on food stamps driving a too-nice car....Open your eyes to the real welfare in America, the big-time corporate welfare, which taxpayers are funding and which loots our U.S. Treasury and runs on the backs of those who are barely making it.

Wall Street Firms Spy on Protesters
in Tax-Funded Center

By Pam Martens, CounterPunch
Posted on October 26, 2011, Printed on October 28, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/152875/wall_street_firms_spy_on_protesters_in_tax-funded_center

The following article is original to CounterPunch.

Wall Street’s audacity to corrupt knows no bounds and the cooptation of government by the 1 per cent knows no limits. How else to explain $150 million of taxpayer money going to equip a government facility in lower Manhattan where Wall Street firms, serially charged with corruption, get to sit alongside the New York Police Department and spy on law abiding citizens.

According to newly unearthed documents, the planning for this high tech facility on lower Broadway dates back six years. In correspondence from 2005 that rests quietly in the Securities and Exchange Commission’s archives, NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly promised Edward Forst, a Goldman Sachs’ Executive Vice President at the time, that the NYPD “is committed to the development and implementation of a comprehensive security plan for Lower Manhattan…One component of the plan will be a centralized coordination center that will provide space for full-time, on site representation from Goldman Sachs and other stakeholders.”

Redneck Party Says: 'Carpetbagger, Go Home'

Redneck Party and Williamson Countians Decry

Wisconsin Governor's Fundraising Trip to Franklin 

FRANKLIN, TN---It won't be a Civil War reenactment, but the appearance of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker at a Republican fund-raiser on Tuesday will be met with a peaceful protest from Williamson County residents and the Southern-based Redneck Party, workers' advocates who will trek to Franklin to act in solidarity with Wisconsin teachers and workers.

Walker, whose 2010 election was bankrolled by Tea Party funder David Koch and other extreme, neo-conservative special interests, will be raising money in Franklin for his recall election.  The following day, Walker will be in Iowa for a fund-raiser; so his journey south to get money from the locals and then scurry back northward with his bounty mimics the Northern carpetbaggers, who came south after the Civil War to meddle in politics and exploit Southern states. 

          Walker will be the keynote speaker at the Williamson County Republican Party annual Reagan Day Dinner at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday Oct. 25 at Embassy Suites in Cool Springs.

Sign and Pass Around this Online Petition to Repeal Jim Crow Law

Sign this online petition to repeal the Tennessee voter suppression law.

Or print out some and carry them around, so that you will have some petitions handy to pull out for friends, strangers, co-workers, cashiers, others in the doctor's waiting room, people waiting in line, anywhere. 

After Lifetime of Proudly Voting, Woman Is Shut Out by Tennessee's New Law

96-year-old Woman Barred from Voting!

....because her birth certificate did not prove her married name..!  Huh?  That is what our Tennessee knuckleheads told her.