Far from sunny Southern California, this thread greets you from Nashville! I had "hot chicken" for lunch today. I ended up stuffed. My sinuses ended up un-stuffed.
- On the subject of Tennessee...here's a local issue I came across shortly after landing. Krystal, a well-known fast food chain founded in Chattanooga, is leaving the state behind and moving to Georgia instead. Why?
The company first announced it would leave Chattanooga in fall 2012, saying that it could not affordably and reliably support its 350 restaurants in 11 states from the Chattanooga Airport. Transporting executives to the company's far-flung locations was simply too costly and time-consuming, officials said.
"The Chattanooga Airport has direct connections with three of Krystal's cities, while Hartsfield has direct access to all of their markets," Derryberry said.
Nearby access to the MARTA rapid transit system will enable employees to ride to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, which is especially important as the company opens up 13 new restaurants in five states this year, said Pendergast.
Hmm. As local commentator Southern Beale writes:
Wow, didja hear that, Gov. Haslam? Chattanooga’s crappy airport and lack of rapid transit — not gun laws, state tax rates, immigration laws, or the 10 Commandments on the courthouse walls — cost Tennessee an iconic, native employer. Imagine that.
Yep, we’re talking big, socialist, government-funded infrastructure projects like a larger airport and high speed rail. The kind of big-dollar projects that create tons of jobs when you’re doing them and keep employers in the state when you’re done. The kind of projects that build communities.
Apparently government doesn’t create jobs, but government inaction sure loses them.
It's just another piece of proof that when we talk about big ideas and big infrastructure projects, it's not a question of whether we can afford to--it's a question of whether we can afford NOT to.
- The City of Los Angeles is cutting coal completely by 2025, and Al Gore had a big press conference about it:
Former Vice President Al Gore joined Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa at the L.A. Department of Water and Power Friday to celebrate LA's plan to go “coal free” within the next 12 years.
“What you have done, Mr. Mayor, and what your team and the people of Los Angeles have done, is to not only take a dramatic and inspiring step to help solve the climate crisis," Gore said. "You’re also inspiring hope that democracy works in America, and that with leadership we can do great things.”
The Sierra Club's "Beyond Coal" campaign was a huge proponent of this. It's nice to see this kind of work lead to positive results.
- Jim Arkedis has an excellent writeup about what the Democratic Party needs to do to maintain its edge in the era of Republican turmoil. It's all good, but here's my favorite part:
Fourth, the party has to push digital and organizing innovations down-ballot. Pouring money into Congressional races is (comparatively) sexy, but what does it matter if Democrats are in the House minority by 17 rather than 22 seats? Not much. State legislatures are the key to controlling redistricting, and that's the key to controlling Congress. National Democrats' massive digital and organizing edge will be wasted if they are not shared with and adopted by candidates running for state legislatures.
A-freakin'-men.
- More from The Atlantic, this time on why the rich don't give to charity:
But why? Lower-income Americans are presumably no more intrinsically generous (or “prosocial,” as the sociologists say) than anyone else. However, some experts have speculated that the wealthy may be less generous—that the personal drive to accumulate wealth may be inconsistent with the idea of communal support. Last year, Paul Piff, a psychologist at UC Berkeley, published research that correlated wealth with an increase in unethical behavior: “While having money doesn’t necessarily make anybody anything,” Piff later told New York magazine, “the rich are way more likely to prioritize their own self-interests above the interests of other people.” They are, he continued, “more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, assholes.”
Sounds roughly right.
- Mark Kleiman has some things to say about Glenn Greenwald's hagiography of Noam Chomsky.
- Continuing on a theme, because, well, why not: Salon, on how rich moochers are ruining America:
That’s the Rentier Agenda, then — low tax rates on unearned income flowing to passive investors, replacing public utilities with private toll-charging monopolies, and pursuing policies that deter inflation, even at the risk of prolonged, mass unemployment and idle factories. It is no exaggeration to say that the private sector rentiers are not only the real “moochers” and the real “takers” but also are the greatest threat to productive industrial capitalism, in the United States and the world.
What we need is an Anti-Rentier alliance. Such a coalition would scramble the usual patterns of politics. Progressives and conservatives alike would have to distinguish between productive businesses, which we should encourage, and rent-extracting parasites that need to be dealt with. Pro-manufacturing liberals and Main Street conservative populists should unite against what the progressive economist Michael Hudson calls “the tollbooth economy” in alliance with what James K. Galbraith calls “the predator state.”
- digby won't let the hypocrisy of Tucker Carlson go down the memory hole.