Jerome Tucker
mentioned that it was
Willie Paulk who enticed MAGE SOLAR
to Dublin and Laurens County, Georgia.
She’s
president of the Dublin Laurens County Chamber of Commerce.
Here’s
a writeup in GeorgiaTrend
about what’s going on there.
Hm, instead of taking out $15 million in bonds to be paid back by the taxpayers, the community around Dublin joined together and made available just as much money: Continue reading
Jerome Tucker explained that there are jobs to be developed
in south Georgia for solar power, in
distribution, installation, and related industry.
First Jerome explained how he heard of MAGE SOLAR, and it’s pronounced Mah gay. He toured their facility and saw that they manufacture the panels in Dublin, Georgia, and this was impressive to him, who still has his kerosene lamp. He was especially impressed with MAGE SOLAR’s academy, which can train everybody from mom and pop operations to mega installers.
And with this industry there’s opportunity for engineers, there’s opportunity for electricians, there’s opportunity for plumbers, truck drivers, across the board.
MAGE SOLAR at Lowndes High School, 29 March 2011.
Videos by Gretchen Quarterman for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.
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Elizabeth Pran asks
Who Gets More Tax Dollars… Prisoners or School Children?
Of course, being Fox News, it advocates cutting prison
costs by reducing air conditioning for prisoners.
The real problem is the War on Drugs and Three Strikes.
She does at last manage to mention in passing “alternative programs
for non-violent offenders.”
Yes, like not locking up people for minor drug offenses in the first place!
And indeed, educating students today would cost less than locking them up later.
Meanwhile, privatizing prisons does nothing to solve these problems; it just lines some corporation’s pockets with tax money.
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She’s written a best-selling book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness, and she discusses the problem: Continue reading“More African American men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began,” Michelle Alexander told a standing room only house at the Pasadena Main Library this past Wednesday, the first of many jarring points she made in a riveting presentation.
Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2011 08:59:49 -0400Continue readingJames:
Thanks so much for sharing this and for your continued strong support of our client’s green renewable energy project. In addition to assisting the country in reducing our consumption of middle eastern fuel and improving the environment, this project will provide a much needed economic impact for landowners of every race, and the Industrial Authority will assist in the efforts underway to assist local farmers. Google “benefits of biomass electricity,”
© BrokenSphere / Wikimedia Commons.
Molly Duet
writes in the VSU newspaper today:
Protestors wearing respirator masks held signs reading “Biomass? No!” in front of the Valdosta City Hall building on Thursday. Members of the Wiregrass Activists for Clean Energy, the VSU student organization Students Against Violating the Environment, and other concerned Valdosta citizens showed up to protest the construction of the Wiregrass Power: Biomass Electric Generating Plant.The Spectator article quotes from two speakers for whom LAKE happens to have video, linked below. Continue reading“We already have solar power resources in place that we could be using and I feel like money should be directed towards that,” Ivey Roubique, vice-president of the Student Geological Society, said. “It wouldn’t be good for the community and even though I’m in college here it still matters.”
Here’s the video:I’m the president of Students Against Violating the Environment at VSU. I’m here representing 200+ members of SAVE, that consists of students, faculty, community members. We are deeply concerned with environmental issues and we are networking together to make this city a more humane and sustainable community for future generations.
As a student, I feel I have the right to be able to breathe clean air at the college I attend. With this biomass plant possibly being built here, the future for generations to come are in jeopardy, and we want to protect our fellow and future students’ health.
Please take into consideration the future health of this university and its community, and don’t sell grey water to the proposed biomass plant.
Erin Hurley, President of
SAVE, Students Against Violating the Environment, speaking at
Regular meeting of the Valdosta City Council, 24 March 2011,
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia.
Videos by Gretchen Quarterman for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.
She said who she was, who she represented, how many, what they were for, what they wanted, quickly enough that attention didn’t waver, slowly and loudly enough to be heard, and briefly enough to transcribe, with pathos, logic, and politic. Even the mayor looked up at “As a student….”
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West Georgia Tech,
the local technical college.
Here are the last three of those paragraphs:
The center “will educate a person to work in an advanced manufacturing plant,” Gilley says, just the kind of plants that are coming to Troup County over the next year or so. Using industry-standard equipment, students will be educated to meet the manufacturing community’s workforce needs.Hm, so the locals think the technical college has more to do with industry than the K-12 schools.In fact, the manufacturing community already is calling on the center. DaeLim, a supplier to Kia and Hyundai (the latter has a plant nearby in Alabama), expressed interest in students doing prototyping of plastic parts once the center, which opened June 1, is up and running.
“We’ve left a good platform on which to build. We have good faculty, good staff. I think we have good community relations,” Gilley says of his time at West Georgia. Then he looks to the future and what he’ll miss most about his job. “We offer programs that allow people to get better paying jobs. I’ll miss having the power to make decisions that change people’s lives.”
An article by Jeff Bishop in Times-Herald.com, Partnerships may develop between CEC, new hospitals, notes the connection between high schools and industry is through West Georgia Tech.
Hm, maybe Wiregrass Technical College could be important….
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Here is my response to James R. Wright’s questions about jobs and priorities. -jsq
Continue readingIt’s an opportunity for those of us who are not currently searching for our next meal to help those who need jobs, and thereby to help ourselves, so they don’t turn to crime. Like a burned-over longleaf pine, we can come back from this recession greener than ever, if we choose wisely.
Switchgrass seemed like a good idea five or ten years ago, but there is still no market for it.
Meanwhile, local and organic agriculture is booming, and continued to boom right through the recession.
Not just strictly organic by Georgia’s ridiculously restrictive standards for that, but also less pesticides for healthier foods, pioneered as nearby as Tifton.
That’s two markets: one for farmers, stores, and farmers’ markets in growing and distributing healthy food, and one for local banks in financing farmers converting from their overlarge pesticide spraying machinery to plows and cultivators.
Similarly, biomass may have seemed like a good idea years ago, but with Adage backing out of both of its Florida biomass plants just across the state line, having never built any such plant ever, the biomass boom never happened.
Meanwhile, our own Wesley Langdale has demonstrated to the state that
Here’s
an interview with Mayor Drew Ferguson IV of West Point, Georgia
by Larry Copeland in USA TODAY, 25 March 2010,
Kia breathes life into old Georgia textile mill town.
Nope, no mention of schools, education, or unification.
Nice picture of the mayor with a Kia, though.
Karen Kennedy published a lengthy article about the Kia plant in GeorgiaTrend in August 2008, LaGrange/Troupe County: The Kia Effect, in which the first mention of schools is for the period after the Kia plant opened:
The biggest need Mayor Ferg-uson sees in West Point right now is public education. “We have a wonderful elementary school.” But there is no middle or high school in the city limits. “The current formula for education funding is not working,” he says of the state’s approach, which bases money on students who are already in the system, not on students who will be coming through the system in the near future. “If you don’t have great education opportunities people will live far away and drive [to work]. Schools should be looked at as an economic driver.” They are a way to help recruit good strong families to an area, he adds.That’s right, after the Kia plant, there are big problems with the schools, and there’s not even any mention of unification.
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