Category Archives: Activism

VSU Spectator announces Occupy Valdosta

Mikayla Beyer wrote today, Occupy Valdosta,
The Occupy Wall Street movement may have started far away in New York, but Valdosta’s citizens are rallying to join the growing movement, with the hope of bringing change to their own community.

“We have the right to peacefully assemble,” Erin Hurley, senior anthropology major, said. “It’s time to take back our country and put it in the hands of the people, not just one percent.” She is one of the organizers of Occupy Valdosta, which will be protesting on Friday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

The organization has a Facebook page with over 150 followers, about 75 of whom are expected to join the protest, according to Hurley, who is one of the organizers of the event.

Occupy Valdosta held a meeting on Wednesday, which both students and community members attended, to discuss their plans for the protest and what they hope the movement will achieve for the community and the nation.

The Spectator didn’t publish any pictures, but here’s one:


Occupy Valdosta Organizational Meeting, Drexel Park, Valdosta, 12 October 2011.
Picture by John S. Quarterman for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.

That’s Mikayla Beyer on the right with the backpack, at last night’s organizational meeting.

The Spectator included this interesting quote by a professor who wasn’t there: Continue reading →

It is important to give our children wings and roots. —Barbara Stratton

Received today on CUEE radio ad helps alienate Black Crow radio host. -jsq
CUEE can attribute the source of this ad to another committee all they want to. I know that I personally overheard Rusty Griffin telling Myrna Ballard about the ad last Thursday night at the CUEE Education Task Force meeting which I attended as a concerned citizen. Rusty was very excited about the ad & said he expected it to greatly enhance their campaign to unify the black community for consolidation. I told Sam Allen what I heard, but neither of us knew what would be in the ad until it aired Tuesday. Rusty said he had to get a final OK so I was hoping that person would be smarter, but evidently not. Another thing I noticed at the meeting where everyone but me was part of the task force only two people out of the fifteen were from the black community. How does that represent the diversity they preach?

I personally appreciate all the times over the past months

Continue reading →

VDT announces Occupy Valdosta

In the paper paper today, David S. Rodock wrote, “Occupying Valdosta: Protesters to hold rally in Drexel Park Friday.” The pullquote top center of the page is:
“We initially wanted to go out and target corporate greed and get the corporations out of the government. There needs to be a separation.”
Erin Hurley
Occupy Valdosta event coordinator.
You can see it here, thanks to Michael Noll:

Y’all come:

“Basically, we want to exercise our right to peaceably assemble,” said Hurley, “We want everyone to join in and let their voice be heard. I feel a lot of people have lost that sense of freedom we once had.”
Meet at Drexel Park before noon. The VDT got the route wrong, but just come along and you’ll get there. If you aren’t able to walk a few miles, head directly to the Chamber of Commerce around 1:30 PM, and we’ll meet you there a bit later.

Yes, I’m one of the organizers, in case I haven’t said that before. Here’s the Facebook event.

I’d like to add my usual plug for Continue reading →

CUEE radio ad helps alienate Black Crow radio host

About that CUEE radio ad, Rob Harder wrote for Valdosta Today today, “Morgan Freeman” CUEE Ad Fires Up Debate
A new radio ad from the Community Unification for Educational Excellence, Inc (CUEE) has sparked a lot of controversy in the few days it has been running in local media.

…

The ad, voiced by an actor who sounds like Morgan Freeman but is not, encourages Valdosta city residents to vote “Yes” on school consolidation November 8th. The commercial claims that Valdosta schools are “once again segregated” and ties the success of the vote to Dr. Martin Luther King’s vision.

Callers to the Chris Beckham Show, which airs from 3PM to 6PM each weekday on WVGA 105.9 FM, were overwhelming in their condemnation of the ad.

Yes, that’s what Chris Beckham told me when I talked to him today. I’ll be on his radio show on WVGA 105.9, tomorrow, about 4PM.

You can hear the radio ad in the Valdosta Today article.

The article contains this priceless quote by the real Morgan Freeman, Continue reading →

Vote No for the Children helps Occupy Valdosta

Seen today on Vote No! for the children. -jsq
Opportunity to March: Occupy Valdosta will be assembling at the Chamber of Commerce this Friday. Please contact Bobbi Hancock bahancock@valdosta.edu or Erin Hurley ephurley@valdosta.edu if you have questions. All of us need to support one another, these college kids were crucial in the efforts to get rid of the Biomass incinerator. Please help get the word out and join up if you can. The Chamber needs to see that we are all united! We’ll post times and places as soon as they are confirmed.

Videos of Candidates Forum by VLCoC last night

Videos of the Candidates Forum put on last night by the Valdosta-Lowndes County Chamber of Commerce (VLCoC) are starting to appear in this playlist. The three Valdosta Mayoral candidates are there already (in order of appearance): There’s one more candidate video to come.

Here are the videos so far:


Candidates Forum, Valdosta-Lowndes County Chamber of Commerce (VLCoC),
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 11 October 2011.
Videos by John S. Quarterman for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.

-jsq

Chamber opposes hidden taxes while proposing taxation without representation

Chairman Tom Gooding of the Valdosta-Lowndes County Chamber of Commerce said that the Chamber was opposed to government adding hidden taxes, and Roy Taylor can be heard going “Amen!”. Yet both of them back the Chamber and CUEE’s school “unification” referendum, which would raise taxes for everyone in Valdosta and Lowndes County plus making conditions more difficult for business. None of the school consolidation proponents seem to see the irony.

Gooding’s talk about the Chamber’s Government Affairs Committee spelled out the Chamber’s theory of local government, which is all about helping business, and apparently not about anything else. He didn’t say a word about government providing public benefits for the common good. Which is the tail and which is the dog?

Also, Gooding promised at least three times (1 2 3) that Continue reading →

Reinstating Glass-Steagall

Reinstating Glass-Steagall appears to be a very popular possibility, although all I can find is an unscientific online poll (87% for). You may wonder: what is Glass-Steagall?

Here are extracts from a timeline by PBS’s Frontline, The Long Demise of Glass-Steagall,

“In 1933, Senator Carter Glass (D-Va.) and Congressman Henry Steagall (D-Ala.) introduce the historic legislation that bears their name, seeking to limit the conflicts of interest created when commercial banks are permitted to underwrite stocks or bonds. In the early part of the century, individual investors were seriously hurt by banks whose overriding interest was promoting stocks of interest and benefit to the banks, rather than to individual investors. The new law bans commercial banks from underwriting securities, forcing banks to choose between being a simple lender or an underwriter (brokerage). The act also establishes the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), insuring bank deposits, and strengthens the Federal Reserve’s control over credit.”
66 years later, after numerous weakenings: Continue reading →

Occupy Valdosta Flyers

Already more people have signed up to march Friday than showed up at the Chamber’s event last night. Here are some flyers. There’s an Occupy Valdosta organizational meeting tonight; more in the blog after that. The traditional media are starting to flock around, as well.

-jsq

Do we want a Gladiator School prison in Lowndes County?

Remember FBI investigating CCA “Gladiator School”, the CCA-run private prison in Idaho the FBI was investigating last year? Well, it hasn’t improved much. Cutting corners for private profit endangers prisoner safety and public safety. Is that what we want in Lowndes County, Georgia?

The same reporter, Rebecca Boone, wrote again for AP Sunday, almost a year later, CCA-run prison remains Idaho’s most violent lockup

BOISE, Idaho (AP) — In the last four years, Idaho’s largest privately run prison has faced federal lawsuits, widespread public scrutiny, increased state oversight, changes in upper management and even an ongoing FBI investigation.

Yet the Corrections Corp. of America-run Idaho Correctional Center remains the most violent lockup in Idaho.

Records obtained by The Associated Press show that while the assault rate improved somewhat in the four-year period examined, ICC inmates are still more than twice as likely to be assaulted as those at other Idaho prisons.

Between September 2007 and September 2008, both ICC and the state-run Idaho State Correctional Institution were medium-security prisons with roughly 1,500 inmates each. But during that 12-month span, ICC had 132 inmate-on-inmate assaults, compared to just 42 at ISCI. In 2008, ICC had more assaults than all other Idaho prisons combined.

By 2010, both prisons had grown with 2,080 inmates at ICC and 1,688 inmates at ISCI. Records collected by the AP showed that there were 118 inmate-on-inmate assaults at ICC compared to 38 at ISCI. And again last year, ICC had more assaults than all the other prisons combined.

What improvement there has been is because multiple inmates filed lawsuits.

Even so, Idaho renewed and even increased its contract with CCA. With one small improvement: Continue reading →