about the Renewable Sustainable Energy Network.
Note that word Sustainable that they’ve added since
last I spoke with them.
They’re moving along the idea of a series of meetings or workshops
of Chamber members together with an online forum.
The next step is for the Chamber Board of Directors
to decide whether to approve the project or not.
They’re talking to various people and organizations around the community;
if you want to get involved, please contact
ReKasa Deen.
-jsq
Writes Douglas Stanglin today in USA TODAY,
According to whom?“The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world,” says the Report of the Global Commission on Drug Policy in its opening statement. “Fifty years after the initiation of the U.N. Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, and 40 years after President Nixon launched the U.S. government’s war on drugs, fundamental reforms in national and global drug control policies are urgently needed.”
The 19-member commission, a private venture chaired by ex-Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, includes George Schultz, President Reagan’s Secretary of State; Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group; former U.N. Secretary General Koffi Anna; George Papandreou, prime minister of Greece; Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Javier Solana,former EU foreign minister.Here’s their full report.
What do they recommend? Continue reading
Jeremy Redmon wrote in the AJC 27 May 2011, Governor asks state to probe farm labor shortages
State officials confirmed Friday that they have started investigating the scope of Georgia’s agricultural labor shortages following complaints that the state’s new immigration enforcement law is scaring away migrant farmworkers.Gov. Nathan Deal asked for the investigation Thursday in a letter to Agriculture Commissioner Gary Black. Deal wants Black’s department to survey farmers about the impact Georgia’s immigration law, House Bill 87, is having on their industry and report findings by June 10.
The labor shortages have sent farmers scrambling to find other workers for their fall harvests. Others are making hard choices about leaving some fruits and vegetables to wilt on their fields.
Proponents of HB 87 say people who are in the country legally have nothing to worry about concerning the new law. They hope the law that takes effect July 1 will deter illegal immigrants from coming here and burdening the state’s taxpayer-funded public schools, hospitals and jails.
However, I have seen suggestions that the state send taxpayer-funded
prisoners to do the agricultural labor.
Should we go back to slave labor on plantations?
Better: we don’t need a private prison in Lowndes County. Spend that money on education instead.
-jsq
Migrant farmworkers are bypassing Georgia because of the state’s tough new immigration enforcement law, creating a severe labor shortage among fruit and vegetable growers here and potentially putting hundreds of millions of dollars in crops in jeopardy, agricultural industry leaders said this week.Who could have predicted such a thing?
Anyway, how is it going? Continue reading
AP wrote May 20, 2011, Immigration crackdown worries Vidalia onion county:
Signs point to an exodus in Vidalia onion country. Fliers on a Mexican storefront advertise free transportation for workers willing to pick jalapenos and banana peppers in Florida and blueberries in the Carolinas. Buying an outbound bus ticket now requires reservations.
While most states rejected immigration crackdowns this year, conservative Georgia and Utah are the only states where comprehensive bills have passed. With the ink barely dry on Georgia’s law, among the toughest in the country, the divisions between suburban voters and those in the countryside are once again laid bare when it comes to immigration, even among people who line up on many other issues.
Guess who wanted this crackdown even though rural south Georgians didn’t:
The crackdown proved popular in suburban Atlanta, where Spanish-only signs proliferate and the Latino population has risen dramatically over the past few decades. Residents complain that illegal immigrants take their jobs and strain public resources.That’s right: Atlanta, not content with lusting after our water, now scares off our workers.
Do immigrants really take jobs from locals?
Such claims never seem to have data to back them up.
I tend to agree with
Carlos Santana:
“This is about fear, that people are going to steal my job,” Santana said of the law. “No we ain’t. You don’t clean toilets and clean sheets, stop shucking and jiving.”In south Georgia local people won’t pick Vidalia onions for the wages immigrants will, and the wages locals want the farmers can’t afford.
Remember who profits from this crackdown, at the expense of Georgia
farmers and taxpayers:
private prison companies and their investors.
We don’t need a private prison in Lowndes County. Spend those tax dollars on education instead.
-jsq
PS: Vidalia onion story owed to Jane Osborn.
And Sicilia had a stern judgment to make — as King did in his time — about the U.S. government: “Since the war was unleashed as a means to exterminate (drug trafficking), the United States, which is the grand consumer of these toxic substances, has not done anything to support us.”This was about Javier Sicilia and the war on drugs in Mexico.
MLK? Harsh? Maybe the writer is thinking about this speech, Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence:
One year later to the day Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead. This is what he died for: Continue readingMy third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years — especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.
Here’s his letter to the editor of the Gratiot County Herald of 12 May 2011:
Continue readingDear Governor Snyder,
In these tough economic times, schools are hurting. And yes, everyone in Michigan is hurting right now financially, but why aren’t we protecting schools? Schools are the one place on Earth that people look to to “fix” what is wrong with society by educating our youth and preparing them to take on the issues that society has created.
One solution I believe we must do is take a look at our corrections system in Michigan. We rank nationally at the top in the number of people we incarcerate. We also spend the most money per prisoner annually than any other state in the union. Now, I like to be at the top of lists, but this is one ranking that I don’t believe Michigan wants to be on top of.
Consider the life of a Michigan prisoner. They get three square meals a day. Access to free health care. Internet. Cable television. Access to a library. A weight room. Computer lab. They can earn a degree. A roof over their heads. Clothing. Everything we just listed we DO NOT provide to our school children.
This is why I’m proposing to make my school a prison.
According to the
Intergovernmental Contract between VLCIA and Lowndes County:
WHEREAS, the Authority and the County propose to enter into this Contract, pursuant to which the Authority will agree, among other things, to issue the Bonds, and the County will agree, among other things, to pay to the Authority amounts sufficient to pay the debt service on the Bonds.So it seems the Lowndes County Commission committed the county, that is, we the taxpayers, to pay the debt service on $15,000,000 in bonds issued by VLCIA.
Still, what did VLCIA want $15 million in bonds for when it already gets $3 million a year in its own tax millage?
WHEREAS, the Authority proposes to acquire and develop one or more parcels of land located in the County for potential economic development purposes (the “Project”);To buy land to trade to new industries as they come in. A variation on what Brad Lofton got fired for doing in Effingham County. Continue reading
The animal shelter story isn’t just about animals.
It’s also about mismanagement.
It’s even about prison labor competing with local labor.
After Susan Leavins read from her statement to the Department of Agriculture about a starving horse, pigs castrated without pain relievers or antibiotics, and maggots in wounds, Chairman Paulk advised her she had one minute left. Then she got to her main point: Continue reading
Remember, much of the discussion already happened the previous morning in the work session.
Continue readingLOWNDES COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS
PROPOSED AGENDA
WORK SESSION, MONDAY, MAY 23, 2011, 8:30 a.m.
REGULAR SESSION, TUESDAY, MAY 24, 2011, 5:30 p.m.
327 N. Ashley Street – 2nd Floor