New Con Same As…

the old one.  New money is apparently crowdsourced and cryptocurrency as shades of 2008 is on the horizon with the current inflated real estate market that in some areas are already starting to darken.

New York which had found itself in a boon again largely due to foreign real estate investment and little oversight made for very clean laundry for many oligarchs looking to clean house.  Since that time the luxury market is over saturated and in adjustment.  Sometimes cool baths are necessary after a hot one.   And Manhattan has needed a cool bath for some time.  And while the luxury market seems to have hit a peak their housing crisis has only risen with story after story about the neglect and malfeasance regarding both public and affordable housing.  Add to this the foreclosures of those low income buyers who purchased properties decades ago no longer able to maintain taxes and costs and finding their units being snapped up by investors looking for more affordable options.

This game is being played out across the markets of hot cities, such as San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle.  Vancouver Canada is also fighting this trend.  Nashville is no exception but the idiots who are doing this are clearly unaware that the prime industry here is hospitality and in turn the median wage is well under the areas median wage of 45-47K.  All they hear is a 100 people a day moving here, the “it” city designation and apparently nothing else as the city is in financial arrears, the schools are dumpsters, we have no adequate public transit leading the roads to be flooded during rush hour and speaking of floods, a city that flooded a decade ago with no plans in place to prevent this from happening in the present.

And when I read the article below my head nearly exploded.  Instantly I thought what a fucking scam but if they are smart and target the low income residents in the areas such as The Nations, North Nashville and East Nashville they are good to go.  These are cash poor, lowly educated, under employed people who are not able to continue to live in the city of it much longer.  They are being further displaced by those young, largely white who have come here and taken the service industry gigs that are now expanding at a rapid rate and in turn are not color blind.

I thought the experience I had with the current Carpetbaggers and their investment in the community of Lynchburg and in a new liquor will be something that I suspect will take decades to recoup and I wish them well I only hope their investors feel the same.

But of late Nashville has been descended upon with a new breed from the interwebs and much of it seems to be dark money.  The amount of commercial build, property flipping and few tenants to occupy them.  Then the endless cost of housing that has led to a serious problem overall with regards to housing.  Then there is the Real Estate Agency that I recently wrote about that buys your house if they can’t sell it and funds you money for improvements needed to sell and all for less than conventional agents and banks; Sounds legit or not.  And then there is this.

Nashville real estate snatched up by cryptocurrency and crowdfunded ventures
Sandy Mazza, Nashville Tennessean  Aug. 1, 2018 |

Flower beds frame the front door of a freshly renovated mint-green home for sale on a quiet West Nashville street.

New granite countertops, stainless steel appliances and wood flooring brighten the interior.

But beyond its facade, the Leslie Avenue fix-and-flip venture near the trendy Nations neighborhood is anything but ordinary.

California cryptocurrency firm Property Coin bought the property earlier this year and will devote sale profits to boosting the value of its brand of digital cash.
Tech-enhanced real estate deals

It’s one of a growing number of competing technology-based ventures flooding Nashville’s real estate market with millions of dollars.

“Our business is something people haven’t seen before,” said Andrew Jewett, co-CEO of Property Coin. “We are buying homes in both cash and cryptocurrencies. We love the Nashville market and want to buy $50 million in Nashville real estate in the next year.”

Atlanta-based Groundfloor, another online fix-and-flip venture, is also bullish on the Nashville market. The company wants to invest $1 million in Nashville real estate immediately as it expands nationwide. It’s offering loans for local partners to flip homes while accepting online investments in its renovated houses as low as $10.

“What’s special about Groundfloor is that the minimum investment is only $10,” said Groundfloor CEO Brian Dally. “This allows investors the opportunity to really diversify. With only $100, an investor could invest in 10 loans.”

Groundfloor’s website lists photos and descriptions of its properties, and allows people to pick and choose which to finance. The company is similar to Fundrise, Rich Uncles and RealtyShares — though they each have notable differences.

Unlike Property Coin, these online platforms accept cash and return any profits in cash within about a year.

In contrast, Property Coin owners can cash in anytime — provided they find an interested cryptocurrency buyer.

“The coin is a way for us to fund the acquisition of new properties. It represents fractionalized ownership of all the properties we buy,” Jewett said. “It provides far greater liquidity on the back end for investors.”

What is cryptocurrency?

Cryptocurrencies are decentralized, anonymous, internet-based financial transactions that eschew the government-regulated cash system. Bitcoin, perhaps the most famous brand, was the first digital coin when it debuted in 2009. There are now hundreds of them.

The encrypted codes are verified and secured so they can’t be altered, preventing charge-backs and counterfeiting. The transactions are also immediate, unlike bank cash transfers that can take days to process.

Property Coin investors are betting on the company itself rather than single properties, as with Groundfloor.

Jewett believes the $3 coins will get more valuable as the company amasses properties.

“We’re reinvesting 100 percent of profits with the effect of creating this natural upward pressure on price,” Jewett said. “There’s nothing really behind cryptocurrency other than a belief and a trust. But we’re putting real assets behind it.”

Property Coin’s parent company, Aperture Real Estate, uses new digital technologies to scour house listings around the country for the best deals. It owns a few dozen homes in Georgia, North Carolina, Indiana and Nebraska, and plans to quickly expand its Tennessee portfolio. It’s renovating three homes in Memphis.

The firm avoids costly high-risk markets such as San Francisco and New York City.

“We want to go to places that have much better affordability,” Jewett said. “The only limiter is capital. We need more money to buy houses. That’s the only reason we have 30 homes instead of 1,000.”
New and risky

Stock in new companies has historically been sold only to people dubbed “sophisticated investors,” meaning their incomes top $250,000. But the 2012 JOBS Act opened the door to crowdfunded startups that offer buy-in for as little as the price of lunch.

“Unless you’re one of the wealthiest 3 to 4 percent of people, you haven’t had equal opportunities to invest,” Dally said. “These are old rules in place since the Great Depression. We allow you to invest directly in the loans for the properties themselves.”

But these new low-cost investment opportunities exist in a murky regulatory area. The upstart industry is dogged with money laundering, scams and other fraud.

For now, Property Coin requires investors to have high incomes because the startup is complying with federal securities laws to limit risk. But next year the coins can trade freely to anyone with a few bucks.

The risks haven’t dissuaded many from the lure of low-barrier real estate stakes.

Investment in such startups is soaring despite the risk of lending money to untested, unregulated ventures. More than $11 billion has been entrusted in new cryptocurrencies this year, according to the Wall Street Journal. Billions more are raised by crowdfunding sites.

Joshua White, assistant finance professor at Vanderbilt Business School and a former SEC financial economist, emphasized the importance of doing research in the “cryptocurrency craze” before handing over money to any startup company.

“There was more money raised via initial coin offerings (for new cryptocurrency companies) than early-stage venture capital in 2017 despite the SEC’s elevated scrutiny, investor warnings and widely publicized enforcement of fraudulent initial coin offerings,” White said. “Advice for any investor is to read through all the documents to try to determine if this is a legitimate business that’s going to generate positive cash flows. This is a space where there’s been a lot of fraud so you want to double-check.”

Groundfloor and Property Coin issue statements to investors and the SEC about their profits and have teams with extensive real estate, finance and technology backgrounds.

Groundfloor said in its 2017 annual report it paid $1.6 million in interest to investors last year with an average return rate of 12.83 percent.

It also publishes warnings of the risks involved.

“We do not guarantee payment of the limited recourse obligations in the amount or on the time frame expected,” Groundfloor’s offering circular states. “We have the authority to modify the terms of the corresponding loans which could, in certain circumstances, reduce (or eliminate) the expected return on your investment.”

But Dally said the young company is delivering strong returns.

“The first thing we tell people is to make sure you spread out your investments over a lot of loans so your eggs aren’t in one basket,” he said. “Not every project works out. I think people are smart enough to make their own decisions. I don’t think you have to pay people money to invest for you.”

So Close So Near

In the summer of my sabbatical where I am doing everything I can to find personal growth, some type of happiness and in turn a sense of health and well being I realized everyone should find said time in which to do the same.  Irony that of course it is only something one of privilege can accomplish and The New York Times had an article about what they called a Creative Hiatus about those who were doing such from their busy well established lives.  But there are many ways those without said resources can find ways to take a break from what is the routine of a daily orchestrated life.

One of the many things I do is find a place that interest me, has a special and sign up for emails.  And viola that led to infrared saunas, reflexology, salt caves and other healthy optional choices that I have been doing.  From massage to walking in a park away from others is another.   That fancy 3×5 card you carry you can leave it at home.   Try reading a book or a newspaper cover to cover while listening to some classical music for one hour.   As I have been doing this all summer with the conclusion being my trip to Iceland in two weeks, I am fortunate I have the resources and time to do as such.  I get that I am of privilege in that sense but it in the pie of life is not the biggest slice.  But part of this was to finally get ahead of what had been putting in my holding pattern for years.  I had to finally put that behind me in some way that was firmly in the past.  But the past is often in the present and for some setting the record straight is just that way to move forward.

And that is where this story brings me to yesterday.  I stopped a week ago at the Omni to pick up a coffee for the walk home and on the counter was a card with a invite to the Dan Call Farm in Lynchburg Tennessee to learn about Uncle Nearest and the history behind this new brand of  Tennessee Whiskey.  Okay I love a field trip so I emailed them and walked up the street to the Corsair Distillery and jumped a bus to learn about what I thought was a day drinking adventure.  It was that and a lot “moore”. This is a pun as Lynchburg is in Moore County which is a dry county in Tennessee meaning that you cannot buy liquor nor consume it in public as in restaurants or bars.  In reality it is damp county but again in that true Southern Conundrum contradictory way it is the home of Jack Daniels and where that became legacy and history that is all about liquor.

When I first moved here in 2016 the New York Times had just printed an article about the slave who was the original master and distiller of what became Jack Daniels No 17.  And I was not the only one who read the article and in that time since the legacy and story behind this has dramatically changed and I met one woman who was clearly determined to ensure that it stayed that way.

A slave taught Jack Daniel how to make whiskey. She’s made telling his story her life’s work.      Jessica Bliss, USA TODAY NETWORK – Tennessee Published  Feb. 23, 2018 |

All Fawn Weaver could imagine was the sound of a gun being cocked over and over again.

On their second night in Tennessee’s whiskey capital, Weaver and her husband, Keith, stood at the edge of a 10-foot hole that looked petrifyingly like a freshly dug grave.

It was after sunset. The field around them was tree lined and dark.

The man who led them there was a self-declared redneck.

“We were sure we were going to be shot or buried alive,” Weaver recalls.

A profile of author Fawn Weaver, the history-changing woman behind Uncle Nearest Whiskey whose diligence and research almost single-handedly altered Jack Daniel’s story of its beginnings. Shelley Mays/The Tennessean

But as Weaver soon discovered, nothing in this small Southern town was exactly as it seemed.

More: How Jack Daniel’s Whiskey fits into Black History Month

More: Distillery, music venue slated for Tennessee walking horse farm

She had come to Lynchburg to research the roots of a former slave named Nathan “Nearest” Green, the man who some believed had taught the famous Jack Daniel to make whiskey more than 150 years ago.

Weaver’s husband never wanted to set foot in the place, objecting as a black man to visiting any town with the word “lynch” in its name. He preferred Paris for his wife’s 40th birthday.

But Weaver, an intrepid entrepreneur, investor and New York Times best-selling author from Los Angeles, had a mission — and a research trip to Lynchburg, the home of world-renowned Jack Daniel Distillery, was her celebratory request.

More: Ex-slave who trained Jack Daniel gets new recognition

So the couple flew across the country, ready to explore the back roads and back issues in a potentially backward town.

What they uncovered was an unexpected friendship between a black slave on loan to a wealthy preacher and a white teenager who worked at that preacher’s grocery store — a relationship that launched a multibillion-dollar whiskey company and contradicted what many assume about race relations in the South.

It was only by chance that they were there at all.
Jack Daniel’s ‘hidden ingredient’

It began with a trip to Singapore and an article in the International New York Times.

Overseas on a business trip in June two years ago, Weaver unfolded the Times and was met with a surprising headline.

Jack Daniel’s Embraces a Hidden Ingredient: Help From a Slave

The story revealed a complicated and long-concealed tale.

For more than a century, Daniel’s distilling prowess had been credited to a man named Dan Call, the local preacher and grocer understood to have employed a young Daniel on his farm and taught the boy everything he knew about whiskey.

But last year, the company came forward with a possible new twist — Daniel didn’t learn to distill from Call, it said, but from a man named Nathan “Nearest” Green, one of Call’s slaves.

A man who would become Daniel’s teacher and mentor and friend.

Weaver read the details and gasped. The slaves of the segregated South were generally treated as property, not people — objects transferred like deeds upon a white owner’s death.

Green’s unlikely story, built on oral history and a tenuous trail of archives, disputed that.

“This story will never be accepted unless it is indisputable,” Weaver thought, wanting to know more.

She Googled Green’s name. Her search returned nothing but a newly created Wikipedia page referencing the book “Jack Daniel’s Legacy.” She ordered it.

The next day, while traveling to Malaysia, Weaver received tragic news. Her 26-year-old niece had been killed by a distracted driver while she rode her motorcycle.

As quickly as it arrived, Green’s story became an afterthought.

She rushed home.

Top secret whiskey tasting

“I’m not a griever; it’s not how I am wired,” Weaver admits. “If I have to grieve, I will be a mess. So I replace it with work.”

For two weeks, she focused on celebrating her niece’s life. In the aftermath, Jack Daniel’s biography became her coping distraction.

And she read it voraciously, tagging every page where Green and his sons were mentioned. There was more than 50.

For a book published in 1967, that was significant.

The ’60s marked the contentious apex of the civil rights era. Sits-ins. Selma. Assassinations.

Lynchburg, Daniel’s home, was just 50 miles to the east of Pulaski, where six Tennessee veterans of the Confederate Army established the Ku Klux Klan.

And yet, here was a biography that candidly detailed a relationship between “Little Jack” and “Uncle Nearest” — at a most unlikely time.

“To have another family, a black family, mentioned that many times is insane,” Weaver says now. “That’s how I knew the story was a little more special.”

And so the journey began. The Weavers booked a cross-country flight to Tennessee and rented a place to stay near the Lynchburg town square.

They kept the reason for their trip a secret, telling their family only that they were going on a “whiskey tasting” in the South.

‘He didn’t have to tell us we were equal; we just were’

When Weaver first entered the unfamiliar community to research Green and forever alter the story of Jack Daniel Distillery, she did it with no fear. No worries about racism, no feeling of danger.

A vibrant and relentless businesswoman with bright hazel eyes and a loud, joyful laugh, Weaver has always focused on finding the positive.

“I’m not a fearful person like that,” she says, navigating her sporty white BMW down the tree-lined two-lane roads of Lynchburg. “The way I look at it is if someone is racist it’s their issue, not mine.”

She came to that from her father, a man who had been kicked out of Southern University for participating in a sit-in decades ago. Frank Wilson took a one-way ticket from Baton Rouge to Los Angeles and went on to become a legendary Motown Records producer and a minister.

He didn’t preach segregation to his children.

“We all grew up never seeing black and white differently,” Weaver says. “He didn’t have to tell us we were equal; we just were.”

That attitude guided Weaver the day she set foot in the Moore County Public Library, searching for traces of Green and his family. As she scanned the rows of books, her first thought was the town had been “whitewashed.”

“The only place you saw black people in that entire library was in the deed books —because they were property,” Weaver says.

At the nearby Moore County archives, she found what she was looking for.

The small space just off the town square held documents dated back to December 1871. Loose records filled archival folders, and boxes of tax and court records lined the shelves. Weaver scoured it all searching for birth certificates, genealogies, anything with a paper trail.

“It was a fascinating story to be able to find little tidbits,” says Christine Pyrdom, the county archivist. “People can walk through the door and have only a name — and that name forms into a complete person, eventually. It’s very fulfilling to see somebody be so excited.”

What Weaver began to discover was that Lynchburg, at the time of Jack Daniel and Nearest Green, was perhaps a more progressive place than most — surrounded by the South’s racial tension, but in some ways, less susceptible to it.
‘We were like family’

Without question, there were troubled stories in its past. In 1903, one newspaper reported a story about “a mob that wanted to lynch a negro” and assailed the Lynchburg jail. The sheriff fired on the mob, killed one man and captured three others.

The mob, however, reached its victim and shot him to death in jail.

But that type of event did not define the town. In the decades before desegregation, whites and blacks worked, lived and played together, according to Green’s descendants and Weaver’s research.

“Lynchburg is a unique town, no doubt,” says Debbie Staples, Green’s great-great-granddaughter. “Were there things that happened? We’re talking about the South. Did I face racial discrimination or racial tension? No.”

And, Staples adds, “I don’t think my grandmother did either.”

Staples grew up in Lynchburg in the ’60s, raised by her grandmother, her Mammie. She would often sit on the front porch at Mammie’s modest white home on the corner of Elm Street. From there, one could see out to the hollers and up to where the Jack Daniel’s warehouses stood. It was a place where the town gathered to gossip.

Mammie would recline in her rocking chair, looking out at the small valleys between the hills, and tell stories.

“My granddaddy made the whiskey for Jack Daniel,” Mammie would say.

“Oh, yeah?” her grandchildren would respond skeptically. “OK.”

But maybe this place, this town, did have something different about it.

There were only two businesses in town — the pharmacy and a place called the Coffee Cup — that followed Jim Crow laws, forcing black patrons to enter through the back. The Green descendants would often go downtown to get a snack at the cafe or an ice cream without any trouble, Staples’ brother Jeff Vance recalls.

They didn’t go into some restaurants or the swimming pool. “It wasn’t like they said we couldn’t come,” Staples says. “We just knew.”

But down the road from Mammie’s house, at the home of a white family where Staples’ Auntie worked, all the grandchildren — white and black — sat and ate dinner at the same table together.

“We were like family,” Staples says.

And that, it seemed, was like what Nearest Green was to Jack Daniel, too.
Bigger than Lynchburg, bigger than Jack Daniel’s

Nearly two years after her first research trip to Lynchburg, Weaver stands in a room at Dan Call’s farm — the place where Daniel and Green first began making whiskey together — and marvels at its contents.

Photographs of Green’s descendants, well-dressed men with bow ties and ladies in brimmed hats and lace, cover the walls.

Dozens of handwritten letters between Daniel’s descendants lay on the tables, their contents detailing the comings and goings of “Uncle Jack.”

In one corner of the wood-paneled room hangs the complete family tree of Nathan “Nearest” Green.

And on the mantel above the fireplace stand bottles of Tennessee’s newest brand of whiskey, Uncle Nearest — a company created by the Weavers to honor the original master distiller.

The story wasn’t new to Green’s descendants. It wasn’t new to Jack Daniel’s either.

In the 1990s, the company uncovered a photo of its own — one taken in the late 19th century, where a black man, Green’s son George, sits next to Daniel.

“Historians will tell you that is unusual for a photograph not just in the American South but for the United States at that time period at the turn of the century,” says Nelson Eddy, who works as in-house historian for Jack Daniel’s.

“You looked at it and said, ‘Wow, I wonder what the story is there.’ “

Through its own research, the company began to embrace Green’s role as a master distiller. It planned to unveil the discovery in 2016 as part of its 150th anniversary celebration, but the racial strain before the presidential election changed that.

“I thought we would be accused of making a big deal about it for commercial gain,” Mark I. McCallum, president of Jack Daniel’s Brands at Brown-Forman, said in an interview with the New York Times.

And so the story remained bottled up. And it might have stayed that way had Weaver not arrived on her 40th birthday.

Since then, Weaver has interviewed more than 100 people and collected more than 10,000 original documents from across six states — all to support the Lynchburg lore that Green was the one who first manned the whiskey still. A legend somehow forgotten over time.

Perhaps surprisingly, the community and Jack Daniel’s have embraced it. The distillery has recognized Green as its first master distiller and incorporated mentions of Green in all its tours, consulting Weaver’s research.

And though there is no known photo of Green, one of his son now hangs on the master distiller wall of fame.

Weaver never expected it to be this way. When she first came to Lynchburg, she fully believed that she would tell one version of Jack Daniel’s history and the company would tell another. Instead, they have worked hand in hand.

“I think it’s really important,” Eddy says of Jack Daniel’s inclusion of Green. “And I think it’s a wonderful story.

“It’s bigger than Jack Daniel’s and it’s bigger than Lynchburg, Tennessee. At a time when there might be divides, it’s a story in a very difficult time of two people coming together and color not being as much a part of that relationship as we might have expected it.”

Two legacies — not just one — now emerge.
Inspiring humanity

Weaver’s love for Daniel, for Green and for the town where they made history has kept her in Tennessee much longer than she planned.

Lynchburg is now home.

She and her husband live in the tiny carriage home next to the historic Tolley House, where several generations of Jack Daniel’s distillers once resided and which they now own.

Keith, who is an executive vice president at Sony Pictures Entertainment, travels back to L.A. for work. Fawn, who loves horses almost as much as history, throws on her jeans and farm boots and revels in country life.

They own, too, the 313-acre Dan Call Farm, with the trickling spring that once fed a grist mill and a pair of sweet herding dogs. And plank by plank, they are carefully restoring the old wooden farmhouse, where the old walls are marked with brand burns for D.H. Call whiskey and flaking wallpaper reveals newspaper from 1898 underneath.

Neighbors know them by name. They check in when strangers visit. They repair a fence post when it’s broken.

“I am embarrassed, in a way, to share I had a bias against some towns in the South,” Keith Weaver says. “What you may perceive in terms of a person or a place may not be true.

“The humanity that has been uncovered through this story and the relationship ultimately between Nearest and Jack can be inspiring.”

Fawn Weaver feels that, too. As she drives through town, she points out the home of Green’s descendants. She slows to look at the land purchased to create the Nearest Green Memorial Park, which will be nestled right next to Mammie Green’s house.

And then she stops at the cemetery where Green is buried.

It’s less than a football field away from Daniel’s final resting place, a massive headstone where tourists from all around the world leave flowers and shot glasses. But, until recently, Green’s gravesite was obscured, secluded in the segregated part of the cemetery.
In December, as part of the rededication of HighviewBuy Photo

In December, as part of the rededication of Highview Cemetery in Lynchburg, Tennessee, a new cemetery entrance was built and a towering stone memorial was erected for former slave Nathan “Nearest” Green. (Photo: Shelley Mays / The Tennessean)

In December, as part of the rededication of Highview Cemetery orchestrated by Weaver and the Nearest Green Foundation, a new cemetery entrance was built and a towering stone memorial was erected for Green.

“Now you can see Nearest from Jack,” Weaver says with a smile.

Weaver isn’t finished spreading Green’s story just yet. There is the whiskey, a pending book, maybe a movie, and next up, a soon-to-be-built distillery in Shelbyville.

The Nearest Green Distillery will stand on the 270-acre Sand Creek Farms, a historic Tennessee walking horse farm and event center. In time, they plan a 3,500-barrel rickhouse, a gift shop and a tasting room.

The 600-seat show arena on the site will be reimagined and double as a private concert venue.

When Weaver talks about the next stage, making her way through the barns and petting the elegant walking horses that will remain on the property, she glows.

Then, standing in the performance ring of the show barn, Weaver reflects on all that has happened in the last two years.

She recalls that fearful experience when she and her husband first arrived — the panic that she might be buried alive — and she laughs.

It was the middle of their second long day of research. The Weavers were getting dinner at a local barbecue restaurant and making conversation with the owner, Chuck Baker.

Muscular and bald, Baker had an intimidating build but a friendly presence. Knowing they were new to town, he invited the couple for drinks after he finished work.

Keith Weaver was cautious, but Fawn saw it as a research opportunity.

Being from L.A., they expected to meet Baker at a bar or another spot in town. Instead, they found themselves following Baker’s truck down unfamiliar Tennessee back roads behind the distillery as the sun set.

Twenty minutes later they were pulling down a long dirt road driveway to Baker’s house. After hanging out on his front porch with some beers, Baker said, “Hey, I want to show you something.”

He went out back, to a place beyond the house lights, and stopped in front of a freshly dug pit. That’s when terror truly set in.

“For the first time in my life, I was certain I was going to die,” Weaver says. “This was my final resting place.”

But, as Weaver would uncover many more times in the next two years, the situation was not as it seemed.

Baker had dug the pit for a photo shoot of his pigs, which were featured in the Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Squire calendar.

“A photographer had climbed into the pit and taken pictures of the pigs looking down over the side,” Weaver says with a boisterous laugh.

Baker is now one of the couple’s closest friends in Lynchburg.

As Weaver has learned, people can often surprise — in positive ways.

Jack Daniel’s certainly has.

“We have the enormous responsibility of raising up one legend without harming the legacy of another,” Weaver says. “Because I have no doubt if Nearest was here he would be raising a glass to Jack and Jack would be raising a glass to Nearest.”

Yesterday I toured all of that and tried the whiskey.  Lunch was not a the BBQ joint but at another legacy place called Mary Bobo’s.  The food was very Southern, very average but all of the stories that I heard that day were well above. 

The purpose of the trip was to encourage all food and beverage servers to push the Uncle Nearest Whiskey that again is limited in release but steeped well into history and tradition in a place that values both as they do Church.  And there was a great deal of preaching yesterday and given Ms. Wilson’s own family tradition this was not surprising. Her husband is an amazingly gracious patient man who clearly embraces what has become not just a vision but a calling for these two.  I see that their own legacy is tied to Nearest in ways that in the South is usually confined to the genetic markers that Ms. Wilson spent endless hours unraveling to find the history behind Nearest.

What was left out of the story was the finances and money tied to buying all of this.  To see the farm and the acreage was amazing and could have been the entire lineup on HGTV rehab shows.  The money and time vested for what will ostensibly be the historical counterpoint to the Daniels home and business just up the road.  The distillery will be up in what was once clearly a magnificent horse walking farm and training center back in the day.  The best part of yesterday was not only were two of Nearest descendents there, a local couple joined us as well, lending their perspective and history to each revelation and tale.   Hell there was even a Pony!  Yes we saw the few remaining horses that are still being trained in this unique walking style known for this breed in the area. 

The largely young and service industry personnel that were on the trip were duly impressed. The were all like me newcomers to the area, all of them living here two years or so (irony on irony that we all arrived at peak climax for Nashville, including Fawn, 2016) and all working in hospitality.  I had a conversation with a man who was from Seattle visiting and said that all the young people moving here had to be changing the conversation about politics and the culture that dominates the region. I laughed and said, “That has to be educated and well compensated people in which to do that. When you are making minimum wage (which in Seattle is 11 dollars here  its the federal min of $7) and working your ass off to make it work no, no you are not.   Most are under educated themselves and have come from shitholes themselves so this is an improvement. Some will stay and absorb the culture to fit in and belong but most will go as that is what that industry does. Highly transient and very tribal in their own way, this is just another road stop on the highway of life.”  He was surprised as I pointed to the kids in the shop and said all these kids are deeply engaged in religion and the one or two that are not are few and far in between.  He was amazed and not surprised as there is no industry or employer here that offers opportunity and growth.  No, this is the home of Dollar General and it is here that every dollar matters.

The two “older” men on the tour were from L.A. and they were in shock about the money, the grand plans and the area where all of this is transpiring.  They had no idea we were close to Nashville but here it was worlds away as many folks rarely if ever drive two hours or one to do anything other than work and that the largest employer is Nashville.  Yes the city is the driver of that train.   And I too wondered how these two were funding all of this.   And true that is not my business but as I watched all of this, from budding distillers, to land owners, to entertainment facilitators I could not believe how this was funded and who was actually funding it.   I suspect their legacy and story is now intertwined with Nearest and in turn their success is his and his recognition is theirs.  These two are now very Southern.  I have not seen that before and that is what defines the real Carpetbagger.  They are very much reminiscent of another Southern legacy.  I wish them the best and I may come back to visit when it finishes.  Or not. But I loved seeing the beginning of this story and the end is not near but it may be close but what is the ending?  I am not sure they even know.

Dig A Hole

Across Nashville are massive holes that are pending construction or are just holes much like the people here.   But with the unrelenting belief, bullshit and grandiose dreams the city seems to be planning to become the new Manhattan but without the sophistication, diversity and intellect that dominate the New York persona.  So when I read the thoughtful editorial by a local Architect I thought he was gracious but had a serious point about how the development of the city landscape is largely being determined by outside resources and forces that have the checks and the backing by again undetermined financial backers which LLC and REIT’s allow.  

My favorite park in Nashville is Bicentennial Mall as it connects a once ignored and dilapidated area of town, Germantown, with the city core, the Farmer’s Market runs along one side and soon will be joined by both the Tennessee State Museum and the Building of Records which will undoubtedly be remarkable as many public projects are.  

Now what also runs between the park and Germantown is Jefferson Street and that is the street that marks the area of town that defined North Nashville and what defines largely the African American/Black area of town.   This part of town has had an amazing history and has been sorely neglected if not again marginalized by the development of the highway that cuts through it and in turn led to the economic downturns for which it has yet to recover.  But now with more gentrifiers and outside money men passing through re branding and building this corridor is ripe for growth and that could have been accomplished by putting the African American History and Music Museum right there in the middle of the area that landmarks the location, is close to all the bells and whistles and would enable a thoroughfare to thrive as it leads to the TSU Campus and could enable others to explore the area where Fisk/Meharry is located and in turn build more for those long neglected. But hell to the no on that. Instead it appears it will sit in the middle of the Country fest across from Bridgestone Arena that eight short years ago was flooded.

This is not mentioned in his piece but from what I gather this Museum will sit on flood level and I am not sure any remediation is set into the building plan to accommodate any rush or flow of water into ostensibly what would be a collection of artifacts and pieces of value that could be ruined if per chance a flood would could occur in the future.   This is naturally a larger issue that faces the city and once again has been kicked down the road like a cheap beer can.  And one wonders how Nashville has made the list of worst run cities doesn’t it?

The other insane projects that have come gone and not been mentioned again and those hard at work are not much different than this insane project at 5th and Broadway. The Nashville Yards is another and the Rolling Mill which is supposedly planned to have accessible greens space and walkability.  If they mean for the general public that is yet to be clear let alone who is occupying these spaces, residents with six figures to purchase the luxury units to tenants to pay top rents in spaces yet built.  On my walk today I passed three buildings totally empty and two others largely vacant and in need of occupants.  Who What Where is a game I play daily on my walkabouts in the city.   The speak of all the apartments, the housing and the buildings built but the real question is who is in them?  

But if they spoke to the people and actually listened to them we might be able to provide the answers and in turn actually make Nashville a city of its own design.  Ah fuck that we gots shit to build and money to burn. 

Broadway blunder; How Nashville leaders whiffed on a grand public plaza | Opinion
Kem Hinton, Guest Columnist Published The Tennessean July 17, 2018
Kem Hinton, a Nashville architect, was the lead designer of the Tennessee Bicentennial Capitol Mall.

Preparations are underway for the $10 million demolition and excavation of the old Nashville

A key local outfit proposed a unique public plaza to front the historic Ryman Auditorium.
The proposal was roundly ignored.

For the next few months, citizens and visitors in Music City will have a rare visual treat: an unobstructed view of one of Music City’s most symbolic and beloved buildings, the Ryman Auditorium.

In the early-1980s, government officials cared little about the then-aging Gothic Revival structure, and the new Nashville Convention Center was erected across Fifth Avenue with almost no acknowledgement of the adjacent auditorium.

Built in 1892 as a revival tabernacle, the Ryman had achieved its fame as home of the Grand Ole Opry, but when this popular country music show moved to a new facility at Opryland in 1974, its former location closed.

Fortunately, the Ryman’s assumed destruction was delayed by popular outcry over the increasing loss of historic buildings. The majestic structure was restored, reopening in 1994 to become one of the most celebrated performance venues in the nation.

Today, while construction is underway across Fifth Avenue, the edifice is fully visible. From a distance, the otherwise imposing Ryman appears almost delicate, striving to retain a respectful physical presence on the downtown skyline.

In 2005, the Nashville Civic Design Center proposed a large plaza facing the historic masterpiece. This public space would visually honor the Ryman while accommodating concerts, festivals, celebrations, broadcasts and civic gatherings.

In late 2013, the Metro Council received proposals for a public/private arrangement to transform the now-useless convention center property into something exciting and tax-generating.

Included in the winning mixed-use collection of retail, office, and entertainment components was the long-awaited National Museum of African American Music. This potentially awesome cultural destination was shown as a multi-level facility on Broadway. Although the developer knew of the Ryman plaza concept, it was ignored and not part of the presented plan.

In the spring of 2015, control of a major portion of the redevelopment was quietly transferred from local developers to a San Diego entity, OliverMcMillan. This group was known in the competitive national retail market, and with them came the West Coast office of the mammoth design firm Gensler.

The original layout, shown to the city when it bestowed the public dirt to the redevelopment team, was significantly altered by these new drivers. Asked again to incorporate a large plaza in the scheme, the developer brushed it aside.

The revised redevelopment plan contained a wide L-shape street bisecting the otherwise unified, multi-level urban form. When looking eastward from this internal road, the view would sideswipe the Ryman. The layout included a recessed area facing the landmark, but this and the new road entry created a lopsided spatial response to the symmetrical landmark.

Equally surprising in the revised plan was that the 55,000-square-foot music museum was now shown in a different position, with only a tepid entrance on the steep stretch of Fifth Avenue between Broadway and Commerce. Most the museum was now below grade with little visibility.

The lack of a large plaza facing the Ryman and this new museum location revealed the giant project’s greatest shortcoming for Nashville citizens: its freedom to proceed without public review or public approval.

A petition was signed in mid-2016 by 80 statewide architects and urban designers who recognized the impending urban design stumble. It urged the mayor and her smart team to encourage (or force) the developer to establish the public space championed by the Civic Design Center. The developer would not be moved.

Thus, the dream of a new public space fully exalting the Ryman simply died.

Concerns arose in 2016 from a group of black activists, artists, musicians and several council members over the music museum’s revised location and diminished visibility. At-large Council member Erica Gilmore and 36 others were worried about the city’s promised $10 million investment, and they presented a petition insisting on a full review.

Gilmore appeared to be pressured to drop her demand, but bravely did so only when the developer provided a modest, second museum entry on Broadway.

Yet who would get the best seats and exposure on the main drag? It was reportedly the hip clothing store H&M, which in mid-2018, is reportedly closing many locations and may be unraveling.

Music City will finally receive a new national cultural facility showcasing African American music. Long overdue, it should be fabulous.

The grand plaza opportunity is now dead, so wave goodbye to a generous view of the Mother Church.

Soon the facades of Fifth+Broad will rise to overwhelm the adjacent landmark.

It may be just fine, yet the failure to provide a spacious, engaging public plaza fully honoring the iconic Ryman Auditorium may rank as the worst urban design blunder in modern city history.

Music City

When I found this article buried in the Nashville Business Journal I was not surprised as it is not laudatory and panegyrical in the least, two words no one in Nashville would use let alone know what they mean.

There are some accurate points made and an analysis of the style and type of City governance that Nashville Mayors possess, qualities that have enabled them to climb the ladder of political strategies that another Mayor from another “it” city that never gets mentioned, Chattanooga, has that enabled his rise to national politics, Bob Corker.   There is a stupidity that they call believe demonstrates reflectiveness or intelligence that comes from the expression, “it is better to let people think you are stupid than to open your mouth and prove you are stupid”

The other day I kept thinking about the show Petticoat Junction and wondered if they still aired them on some cable channel and viola I found it.  That is what Nashville reminds me of, the village of idiots and others who aspire to do other things and others who like it just the way it is.   Fear of change and fear of discovery dominates the culture in shows like that, Green Acres and Beverley Hillbillies where they had the fish out of water shoved in with the rubes to try to figure out survival skills.   I am in all three shows simultaneously as a guest appearance.

The author does make note of the role of the Chamber of Commerce and their indefatigable role in defining the city, from ensuring who is elected to the public schools and the roles business plays in defining the city scape. They work with the Office of Tourism to ensure massive tax cuts that have allowed Nashville to become a large conference draw to the massive events from CMT to the 4th of July fireworks.   The massive city events that literally close down the core of the city and the costs of such are in fact paid for by the city coffers to the point that those overtime hours were the reason that drew attention to the Barry “affair” in the first place.   It was the news channel 4 investigative reporter, Phil Williams, who had been tipped about overtime of certain officers and through that found the number one offender of this – the slatterns bofo/bodyguard.

Then we have the hotels all with huge tax breaks that run for decades all engineered by the true power behind the throne, Rich Reibling, who has since retired/resigned/fired or pushed out after being the architect of all of this through the last three Mayors.  The writer neglects to mention him and his role in all of this.   As for Briley’s election that it was not just he and Carol Swain running, it was large motley crew of Reverends, Activists, City Council folks and one white male conservative other than the current white male in charge, Briley.  It was like watching people come out of a clown car during the debates.  

Then we have the City Hospital and their scandals, with board members resigning, and questionable payments made to an individual and raises approved without review for the CEO which has now led to the medical school, Fisk-Meharry, to layoff staff to meet budget demands.  A very similar pattern is emerging in the public schools with the current Director throwing down race cards as a response to a request by board members who are no longer smiling and signing off on one request after another.  Ask questions in Nashville you will hear lies behind smiles, ask too many questions rocks will get tossed in your direction.

What I do like to note in the article is the concept of “Carpetbagger” and that regardless of how long you live here, your ties to the community and service you are an outsider.  And yet almost all of the elected officials are from elsewhere, possess degrees from out of state Colleges and have personal wealth that they gleaned from the swamp they now want to drain.   Wealth matters here as the most critical element of determining worth here, that and being a good Christian.

Nashville city core was designed to be a chocolate city as the public housing rings the city like a bracelet and now this valuable real estate is the issue that divides it in ways that city planners could only wish.  Nashville is a perfect concentric zone and the core is undergoing some change, yes the first was the infamous Gulch.   What is not mentioned is that area is marked by a busy day business, overpriced apartments and restaurants that after six are dead zones.   There is another hotel in the works to build more traffic as the Thompson there with its $400 dollar rooms cannot sustain it alone.  And what was not mentioned was the bridge to nowhere that was proposed to further pedestrian traffic to the area and the bizarre tax cuts that were to aid residents in an area that needs little such. And all of it signed and sponsored by Black City Council members.

The hotels that are being build rival any in a major city with room rates that match.   But again are those the tourists that come to Nashville or are they working class people who cannot afford Vegas and this is the next best thing?  This is not a family friendly city in the least even for families who live here.

The schools here are garbage dumps and again by design historically and reinforced when the Chamber became involved to ensure that tax dollars by the varying standards set into place by first G.W. Bush and later Obama and that too widened the divide.  Again broken record here is that the book, Unmaking the Great Metropolis explains this in detail.  There was a book group formed to read and analyze this and like everything here it fell apart after one meeting.  They formed the day of the Nashville Marathon, another day of many that shuts the entire city down, to meet at the Downtown Public Library and of course once you have that hurdle here dealing with parking and traffic, it ended that right away.    I have never met people dumber and lazier than the people here.  Funny how the prosperity pulpit and the work hard one is preached as gospel its just happens to be written by the Apostle no one remembers.

Permits are approved here without sufficient inspectors available let alone qualified technicians in which to meet standards, so houses are built like shit and the failure to meet the infrastructure needs many neighborhoods flood when it rains.   This is city like a baby where you flash shiny keys and they look in that direction as across the city sits holes where developments were promised while the new “it” section of the city gets the attention for that hot minute until some new shiny object is flashed.  It is laughable and pathetic.

In turn it is why you see the outlying areas such as Bellevue, Donelson and even the home of the Beav as in Mae, approaching development as transit friendly, walkable and affordable. Gosh who would a thunk it!  I love Bellevue and Donelson and spend as much time as I can frequenting businesses to encourage growth.   There is little to no reason to do so in Nashville, despite the hysteria about the 5th and Broadway development and the Nashville Yards, these are on the scale that once again cannot support residents who live here due to the costs to construct these, the rents and businesses that will eventually come into them will have prices that again can only be supported by a transient tourist not a resident, which explains why many businesses, both long term and new have had problems succeeding despite the boon and are now closed.

And all of this fails to include the very residents who ring the city.  They are being passively aggressively pushed out in the very Nashville way by making it impossible for them to live and work in the community.  Wages are stagnant here, the Legislature that is the biggest industry in the town makes sure that minimum wages, rent control,  and infrastructure bills are unfunded.  Transit was and is a massive issue here and has been for decades, the lack of sidewalks, crosswalks to street lighting are all part of this.  Add to the fact that we don’t have enough Police and in turn they are busy making overtime to cover the varying events that happen on a daily basis takes them out of the issue of truly monitoring neighborhoods and without that overtime their wages are too low to actually live in the city where they work.  So again the areas outside the city that the Author mentions are doing a better job of enabling them to have a home and in turn lends to further traffic problems and issues.  It is a nasty circle of pain.

And that is why the crime is surreal here.  There is so much violence that one Council member called the City, Beruit.  This comment upset Beruit, Lebanon, not the city of Lebanon which is just up the road and is better than here.  Everywhere is better than here.  

I cannot point out enough that the crime is largely perpetrated by teenagers and they are almost always exclusively black. All of the crime is with guns and those are stolen out of vehicles as that is the number one complaint here about car theft, car jacking and break ins.  Almost all of them are cars left unlocked and with guns.  Again  the residents of Petticoat Junction has more smarts.

Nashville has no direction, no core, no true plan,  it is decisions pulled from a hat by a white man who tells whoever is holding the hat and the person pulling the ticket to do whatever he and his buds want.   The current Mayor was never a member of the boy’s club so he will be used to do the heavy lifting that no one does here unless you are an Immigrant who is disposable once used.  The reality is it is only about money and mo money.  There is little concern about long term needs of the citizens and of the the city itself.    The Author compares the ambitions of the city to be like Seattle.  Wrong again, there is nothing here that could be anything like Seattle.  That is insane and they need to be realistic and stop quoting that bullshit made up number of 100 people a day moving here.  The Author should have validated where that came from and what that actually means demographically.  But no just like all the facts in Nashville, they are just ones that are lathered, rinsed and repeated.  Validated and vetted? Nope.

The title says it all, I don’t think anyone knows here.  They just want to be rich.  That is what matters here.

 WHAT KIND OF PLACE DOES NASHVILLE WANT TO BE?
                             MUSING CITY

by John Buntin | July 2018 | Governing The States and Localities

Earlier this year, Nashville’s Frist Art Museum suffered an embarrassing episode. The museum had just opened a new exhibit on ancient Rome, showcasing art and artifacts from the British Museum in London. But just six weeks in, the British Museum notified the Frist that it was pulling the exhibit. Seismographs put in place to protect the art had detected excessive vibrations. Museum staff in London worried that the shaking could damage the artworks on display.

Curators at the Frist were stunned. Their museum is housed in an 84-year-old art deco building that formerly was the city’s main post office. It’s a substantial structure, all marble and granite, sitting on a foundation of solid limestone. But that wasn’t enough to shield Rome’s ancient artifacts from Nashville’s relentless growth. Across the street, developers had started work on a 4 million-square-foot, mixed-use development modeled on LA LIVE in downtown Los Angeles. The sensors had picked up vibrations from blasting for a new hotel at the site. So the antiquities went back to London, and the construction went on.   

Nashville is booming. Some 5,000 hotel rooms are currently under construction, with new high-rise hotels by Marriott and Westin soaring over the 2.1 million-square-foot, guitar-shaped Music City Convention Center downtown. Visitors to the city have swelled from 2 million a year in 1998 to more than 14 million today. On weekends, pedal taverns clog the streets of downtown while bachelorette parties crowd the honky-tonks of Lower Broadway, where free music plays 24/7. Not long ago, the city’s Department of Public Works commissioned a study to measure the foot traffic along Lower Broadway and on First Avenue on a typical Thursday and Saturday. Planners were shocked to discover that the number of pedestrians using those streets was comparable to foot traffic in Times Square.

People aren’t just visiting. Every day, roughly 100 people move to the region. Whole new neighborhoods have risen to accommodate the growth, most notably The Gulch, a lively high-rise district near downtown that, not too long ago, was nothing but an open rail yard. East Nashville has emerged as a kind of Brooklyn South, a mix of farm-to-table restaurants, backyard recording studios and historic bungalows. To the west of downtown, Germantown is growing into one of the city’s densest neighborhoods, with a mixture of restaurants, corner stores, restored brick Victorians and new low-rise apartment buildings. In the process, Nashville has become something it never was before — hip. Affluent Nashvillians once flew to New Orleans for fine food. Now Nashville chefs regularly appear as James Beard Award nominees, and trendy eateries in New York feature such Nashville specialties as “hot chicken.” On screen, the hillbillies of older shows such as “Hee Haw” have given way to the heartthrobs of “Nashville,” the musical network drama that premiered in 2012 and ran for six seasons. Nashville’s hockey team, the Predators, is an NHL powerhouse, with home games that effortlessly blend country music glamor with on-the-ice excitement.

Nashville’s recent rise is not accidental. It reflects a concerted quarter-century effort by mayors to encourage investment in the city center — and a half-century-old bet on what at the time was a unique, strong mayor form of government, one of the nation’s first consolidated city-county governments. “I’ve visited a lot of other cities,” says Criminal Court Clerk Howard Gentry, the city’s most prominent African-American politician. “Everybody envies the fact that we [as a typical county-level entity] can go sit down with the mayor and police or fire chief and the school superintendent; we can have a meeting and everyone is around the table so we make a decision for the city without having to deal with other jurisdictions.”

For decades, the system has worked well. “Nashville,” says Steve Cavendish, the former longtime editor of the local alt-weekly the Nashville Scene and an astute observer of local politics, “has kind of been blessed with good managers. Almost all of them have been these slightly progressive, good government sorts of leaders who have gotten business buy-in for what they wanted to do.” And what they wanted to do was create a vibrant, growing city that welcomed visitors and residents from around the country and the world — Nashville has the largest population of Kurds in the United States — while also avoiding the sprawl and traffic of Atlanta.

When Megan Barry was elected mayor in 2015, she seemed to be yet another leader in the familiar Nashville mold. Barry, a former corporate ethics officer and at-large city council member, was a proud progressive — more progressive than anyone who had come before her, perhaps—but she’d also worked hard to be business-friendly. Where her predecessor as mayor, Karl Dean, had been reserved and businesslike, Barry was expressive and charismatic. The Dean administration had frequently benchmarked Nashville against other “peer” cities such as Austin. Under Barry, some progressives began to imagine a new Nashville that resembled Minneapolis or Seattle. Those cities, says Jennifer Carlat, vice president of metropolitan policy at the Nashville Chamber of Commerce, “have understood what growth is coming and have tried to guide it to specific locations supported by infrastructure and transit.” By 2030, Nashville will have roughly the population Seattle does today. Why, then, shouldn’t it resemble Seattle in other ways?

Barry rallied the city council and Nashville’s business establishment around the idea of raising the already high sales tax to fund a $5 billion transit plan that would expand bus service and build light rail. With a 70 percent approval rating and a national reputation as an emerging Democratic star, Barry seemed well positioned to make the argument for transit.

Instead, earlier this year, it all fell apart. In January, reports appeared that Barry had been having an affair with the head of her security detail and improperly using city funds. In March, she resigned after negotiating a plea deal with the local district attorney. As Barry was stepping down, problems began to appear on Nashville’s balance sheet. Revenues fell short, and the city was increasingly unable to meet its needs. Two months later, voters roundly rejected the $5 billion transit plan.

Meanwhile, Nashville’s needs are becoming urgent. Violent crime rates remain stubbornly high. Housing affordability has become a major problem. Debt payments are consuming an ever larger part of the city’s budget, and transit is still an unmet challenge. Addressing these needs will require money. Yet despite a boom that is everywhere evident, Nashville’s government is facing a $34 million budget shortfall and dwindling reserves.

All of this raises some very big questions about where the city is and where it’s going. How, in the middle of unprecedented growth, did Nashville’s government run short of funds? If Nashville isn’t willing to raise taxes to build a transit system like Seattle, then how can it hope to harness growth in the way those cities have?

The challenge of answering these questions has fallen to the new mayor, David Briley, who took over the position when Barry stepped down. He is an accidental leader, but someone with deep roots in Nashville politics: His grandfather, Mayor Beverly Briley, presided over the merger of city and county governments in 1963 that laid the groundwork for strong regional leadership to emerge. Can Briley help Nashville figure out what kind of city it wants to be? Or will the problems he’s inherited derail Nashville’s unique mix of progressive growth?

“We’ve had mayors with bubbly personalities, and we’ve had mayors with hardly any personalities,” says Court Clerk Howard Gentry. “David [Briley] is just the steady hand.”

It’s important to put Nashville’s growth in perspective. First, it’s not just the city of Nashville, population 680,000, that’s growing. It’s the entire 14-county region, population 1.9 million. Those 100 people moving to Nashville every day? Only about 15 of them are going to the city proper. The rest are moving into surrounding jurisdictions, some of which have invested in excellent public schools and developed commercial hubs that rival downtown Nashville itself. The city currently has 1.5 million square feet of class A office space under construction. Next-door Williamson County, which is home to Nissan’s North American operations, has 7 million square feet planned or being built. In short, growth of the region remains primarily a story of suburban growth, a trend the regional Metropolitan Planning Organization expects to continue. Between 2015 and 2025, the organization predicts that Nashville will add 50,000 residents. During this same period, it estimates that Williamson County will add 80,000 people; and exurban Rutherford County, another 65,000 residents.

Nashville itself grew by harnessing the post-World War II surge in suburban growth. In 1963, it became one of the first cities in the United States to completely merge city and county governments, creating a new municipal government, known locally as Metro. Prior to consolidation, Nashville was a compact city with a significant minority population surrounded by fast-growing, predominantly white suburbs. Some observers believed the city would eventually become a majority black city, much as Atlanta, Birmingham, Ala., and Jackson, Miss., had. Consolidation ensured that white suburbs did not compete with a black central city. Former county chief executive Beverly Briley became Metro’s first mayor, a position he held for 12 years.

Briley looked to suburban parts of Metro for growth. The city’s downtown started emptying out in the 1960s; even the Grand Ole Opry radio variety show, which in the 1930s had become the nucleus of the country music industry, decamped from its longtime Ryman Auditorium location downtown to a more suburban part of the county. In the city center, poverty and crime rates remained high. Most of downtown was given over to adult bookstores and “massage parlors.” A few stalwart honky-tonks remained, like Tootsies Orchid Lounge, where singer Willie Nelson was discovered. But for the most part, says Butch Spyridon, the longtime head of the Convention and Visitors Corporation, downtown Nashville “was not for the faint of heart.”

Things generally continued that way for the next two decades, with the center city languishing while the suburbs kept growing. That all began to change in 1991, however, when the city elected the first in what would turn out to be a trio of transformational mayors.

Phil Bredesen was a Harvard-educated physics major who grew up outside of Rochester, N.Y. He’d moved to Nashville in the mid 1970s, after his wife, a nurse, got a job with the Hospital Corporation of America, which today is the world’s largest private hospital company. Bredesen himself soon made a fortune in health care, which he used to run for political office. His first campaign for mayor faltered after his rival accused him of being “a Yankee.” After the previous mayor’s tenure ended in controversy, voters took another look at Bredesen. In 1991, he handily won election.

Bredesen immediately focused on downtown. He leapt at an opportunity to bring the Houston Oilers to Nashville—and rename them the Tennessee Titans — and he oversaw the construction of a new football stadium just across the Cumberland River. He also focused on making downtown the cultural core of the region, championing an elegant new main public library in the heart of downtown, as well as the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Frist Art Museum. However, his most important initiative was the push to bring a sports and concert arena to lower Broadway. The arena opened in 1996 and soon attracted an NHL expansion hockey team, the Predators. A major test of this new strategy quickly followed. In 1997, Gaylord Entertainment abruptly announced that it was shutting down the main engine of Nashville’s tourist economy, the Opryland theme park. By default, downtown Nashville became the city’s new tourist attraction. It also became a challenge for Bredesen’s successor, former state Majority Leader Bill Purcell.

Bredesen had focused much of his energy on jump-starting development downtown. Purcell took office on the promise of focusing more on neighborhoods and on improving education, safety and quality-of-life issues. He saw downtown as a neighborhood. Purcell thought that the government had spent 40 years trying to address downtown’s problems by removing people from it. He wanted to do the opposite — shut down the massage parlors, improve public safety, create mixed-income housing in and near the core, and bring residents back. For help with this task, Purcell turned to the city’s law director, Karl Dean. Dean and his office cracked down on illicit businesses and activities in the area.

Purcell also wanted to rezone downtown for mixed-use developments. He recruited a planning director from Orlando, Rick Bernhardt, a New Urbanist who overhauled the zoning code for downtown and encouraged dense development in the city’s first new close-in neighborhoods, including The Gulch. Together with local preservationists, Bernhardt also put a break on plans, drawn up by the city’s department of public works and the state department of transportation prior to his arrival, that would have put a six-lane interstate connector through the heart of downtown. Bernhardt eventually whittled it down to a four-lane surface street that he insisted must have sidewalks, a decision that effectively extended the city’s grid to the east. Purcell also supported a private philanthropic effort, led by another local billionaire family, that of Martha Ingram, to build a $120 million symphony concert venue downtown, just a few blocks away from the honky-tonks that were starting to spring up on Lower Broadway.

When Dean succeeded Purcell as mayor in 2007, those sidewalks became useful. (Dean was a Massachusetts native, continuing Nashville’s tradition of turning to outsiders for leadership.) Dean greenlighted the most expensive project in the city’s history, a $600 million convention center. Building during the Great Recession kept the cost lower than it would have otherwise been and moderated the recession’s impact on Nashville. Dean also worked with local businesses to turn Lower Broadway into a full-fledged tourist destination. These efforts laid the foundation for the boom that followed. “That investment in a new convention center provided a level of confidence that caused developers to reconsider downtown Nashville as a priority,” says Tom Turner, who heads the Nashville Downtown Partnership. “That confidence led to a resurgence in downtown investment that continues to this day.”

As the national economy recovered from the recession, the city’s growth kicked into high gear. Nashville became cool. Tourists and new residents began pouring in. Bachelorette parties began showing up. (No one is quite sure how Nashville became one of America’s biggest destinations for bachelorette parties over the past decade. Spyridon, the convention corporation head, says bridal parties come “because we are authentically American and unique” — and nice. Austin, he quips, “can stay weird.”) At any rate, sustained investment in downtown over the tenure of three unusually effective mayors, plus a dose of zeitgeist luck, had turned downtown Nashville into a growth machine.

As in other urban areas, Nashville’s breakneck growth didn’t guarantee that everyone would share in the city’s economic boom. Sure, it currently has the lowest unemployment of any U.S. metro area with more than a million residents. And according to the Brookings Institution, between 2006 and 2016, Nashville ranked seventh nationwide in the number of overall jobs created. But on other, more nuanced measures, the picture isn’t as rosy. Take Brookings’ measure of prosperity, which divides gross municipal product by the total number of jobs, creating a crude measure of overall productivity. Nashville ranked near 16th in the nation through about 2016. Since then, its level of prosperity has fallen to 73rd place, as annual wage growth has stalled. Or take another measure: Stanford University economist Raj Chetty has proposed “intergenerational mobility” — namely, what percentage of kids born into the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution make it to the top 20 percent — as a potential indicator of success. Like all Southern cities, Nashville does a poor job promoting intergenerational mobility. Only 12 percent of counties in the U.S. see a lower percentage of poor children move up the income scale.

These and other cracks in the veneer of Nashville’s growth had started to become more and more visible by 2015, when Barry was sworn into office as Metro Nashville’s seventh mayor — and its first female leader — in September. Relatable and articulate, she seemed the perfect face for the new Nashville. However, she also inherited real problems. The city had a large and seemingly intractable homeless problem. Violent crime rates were rising, particularly among young people. Rents were rising at more than twice the rate of wage growth. Housing advocates estimated that the city needed to develop or preserve 30,000 affordable housing units over the next decade. Nashville’s public hospital was bleeding funds.

Solving these problems required money. But the city’s budget wasn’t growing fast enough to meet its needs. Part of the problem is a quirk of Tennessee state budget law: Legislation requires that the city’s property reassessments, which must occur at least every four years, must be revenue neutral. When assessments rise, property tax rates must fall accordingly. That means Nashville’s red-hot real estate market doesn’t translate into a huge boost in municipal revenues. Properties in Nashville were reassessed in 2017. Assessments shot up by a record median 37 percent, so, accordingly, the property tax rate fell to its lowest level in Metro history. The only way for a mayor to raise real new revenues was to pass a property tax increase, something Barry didn’t want to do.

Another quirk: Nashville property owners can appeal their property tax assessment. And following the record 2017 reappraisals, a huge number of them did — 55 percent — more than the number of appeals after the previous reassessments in 2013. The reductions blew a $25 million hole in the budget going into 2018.

The most talked-about problem in the city, though, was traffic. For most of the auto-era, Nashville was a city where you could drive everywhere in 15 minutes. As the region grew, that ceased to be the case. Commutes were getting longer. Yet the city’s bus system was anemic, and even walking places could be hard. Only a third of the city streets had sidewalks.

To address this, Barry unveiled a sweeping $5.4 billion transit plan in November 2017. Her “Let’s Move Nashville” proposal was monumentally ambitious, with 26 miles of light rail on four different lines, new bus rapid transit service, bike lanes, sidewalks and a massive transit center tunnel beneath downtown. To fund it, she proposed a sales tax hike and an increase in taxes on hotel stays, rental cars and businesses. The controversial plan was never going to be an easy sell to residents, who were set to vote on it in May. But Barry planned to stake her political capital on it. And with a 70 percent-plus approval rating, there was reason to think she could be successful.

But then her administration fell into chaos. In January, Barry admitted to the affair with her security officer. Questions soon emerged about whether taxpayers had been billed inappropriately or even illegally for travel and overtime expenses. In March, as part of an agreement with the district attorney, Barry agreed to resign and plead guilty to one count of felony theft; she reimbursed the city for $11,000 and agreed to three years of probation.

Barry’s resignation set the city reeling. After 25 years of scandal-free mayoral stewardship, her resignation left Nashville leaderless before the most important local referendum in more than a decade. In a city that depends on strong leadership, that was a problem.

“It took us 20 years to get to a vote on transit,” says Court Clerk Gentry, who endorsed Barry for mayor and supported the transit referendum. “Changing leadership in the midst of it affected us.” Barry was the face of the pro-transit campaign. Backers expected her to lead the effort in rallying support. Instead, says Gentry, the charges against Barry created “a question about public trust.” Subsequent events heightened public suspicions. Problems appeared in the city’s balance sheet as Barry was departing. In addition to the $25 million gap from the property assessment appeals, Metro had dipped into reserves to fund modest initiatives such as expanding sidewalk construction and putting $10 million into an affordable housing fund. It also fell to Briley, the new mayor, to sell the divisive transit vote less than two months after he took office. He tried gamely, but with yard signs across the city declaring “No Tax 4 Trax,” it was an uphill battle. Voters rejected the plan by a resounding 2-to-1 margin.

Briley’s tenure has gotten off to a tepid start. At his first State of the City address, the soft-spoken mayor began by quoting his grandfather Beverly Briley on the need to act today for the sake of tomorrow. He then proceeded to present an austerity budget. “The budget that I presented to the Metro council earlier this week was not the budget I would have presented to the city in an ideal world,” Briley declared. “But it’s my job, and it’s this government’s job, to manage the circumstances that we’ve been dealt.”

Nowhere was there any acknowledgement that the cuts were necessitated by Barry’s decision to forego raising property tax rates the previous year. Instead, Briley announced that he was rolling back cost-of-living pay increases for city employees that his predecessor had promised. He gave brief remarks about expanding pre-K programming. There was polite applause from the audience. After the speech, Director of Schools Shawn Joseph issued a statement that criticized Metro for cutting funding for education by $14 million. (The mayor’s office disputes that characterization.) It was, in short, a shaky showing.

Nashvillians don’t insist on charismatic mayors. “We’ve had mayors with bubbly personalities, and we’ve had mayors with hardly any personalities,” says Gentry. “David [Briley] is just the steady hand.” But to some close observers, he’s been a curiously passive figure. That’s been particularly true on the subject of his first budget. Budgets are the means by which Nashville mayors exercise authority. Yet Briley has treated his first budget as if it was something he was forced to agree to, not something that he shaped.

Briley himself insists that fiscal discipline is necessary but rejects the idea that Nashville faces a fiscal crisis. “It’s not a crisis by any means,” he says of the $34 million shortfall. “It’s not going to categorically change the way we provide services.” In a sense, that’s true. Nashville’s overall budget of $2.2 billion is significantly larger than the budget was just a few years ago. But it’s also the case that by not raising property tax rates, the city is limited in its ability to address important needs for tomorrow. Briley acknowledges that if the city had voted to keep the old property tax rate in place, “we would have somewhere close to half a billion dollars in new revenue this year.” A fiscally conservative mayor could have used those funds to replenish reserves and invest in water and sewer upgrades or jump-start transit improvements. A liberal mayor could have used those funds to spur the development of affordable housing.

Just two months after he took over as mayor, Briley faced the public in a special election called to fill the remainder of Barry’s first term. He entered the race with a huge leg up — a familiar name and a sizable financial advantage that came from the nearly unanimous support of downtown businesses interests. Yet as the election approached, local Democrats worried about an apparent surge from a controversial Republican, Carol Swain, a Vanderbilt University professor known for her appearances on Fox News and her criticisms of Islam. She knocked Briley as an ineffectual leader. As Swain signs sprouted around Nashville and Tea Party notables rallied to her side, Democratic politicians worried that Swain, an African-American woman, could win some Democrats to her side and force a run-off election. In the end, she didn’t. Briley won with a comfortable 55 percent of the vote. Swain came in second, with 23 percent.

All of this brings uncertainty to what the future holds for Music City. With a transit plan off the table for now, and with Briley’s scaled-back budget setting the tone, the city seems to be retreating, at least temporarily, from sweeping changes and large-scale projects. “Nashville,” says Spyridon, the convention corporation director, “has never been afraid to do big things.” But at this particular moment, for the first time in recent history, it is.

Rolling Down the River

My home on and off for 50 plus years finally failed me in ways that to this day is difficult to describe but it was a massive collision in every sense of the word that led me to finally make the call to leave.

Seattle on paper is a very wealthy city. The median wage is higher, the minimum wage is higher and the cost of living is higher.   Seattle is not New York and never will be and has no aspirations to, it was San Francisco that was always the desired outcome, they got their wish. Be careful what you wish for.

I grew up there and watched Seattle go from boon to bust to boon again and it like many other company towns that litter the American highways and byways, it is just fortunate that Seattle was home to many types of company’s versus just one.  And then there was one.

Watching the Amazon growth had to be akin to what it was like back in the day of the Gold Rush when prospectors, dreamers, deadbeats and denizen tried their hand to find that pot of gold at the end of the Rainbow and it rains a lot in Seattle.  Then a crash came in the form of a fire, then in turn a  war that brought planes, trains and ships that built a stable economy until the 70s.  Then like America we turned tech and a Gate opened and through  it all Seattle was a working class town with not so working class duds that were all brought along by a cup of Joe.  But the river that ran through it was less idyllic and more demanding than any that came before.  The Amazon has swallowed all that it aligns and it lines all the pockets and books in Seattle’s economy.

And for all that wealth the crisis in the streets has expanded a problem that grew with the plants that brought more green into the economy.  Then we have a massive education crisis with not enough schools and desks in which to seat the newest citizens and the University of Washington seems to find itself lauded for one half of its institutions but its Medical and Dental schools are under crisis and facing insolvency and closing doors to those that are in most need.  Funny how all that green seems to bring nothing but blues when it comes to finding a safety net for those who weathered all the storms that came before the arrival of the new Captain of this ship of industry. 

 

Is Bezos holding Seattle hostage? The cost of being Amazon’s home

Amazon is looking for a home for its second headquarters. But in its original home of Seattle, critics say rising house prices and growing inequality have damaged the city

by Chris McGreal in Seattle
Guardian UK

However they see Amazon, for good or ill, residents of the fastest-growing city in the US largely agree on the price Seattle has paid to be the home of the megacorporation: surging rents, homelessness, traffic-clogged streets, overburdened public transport, an influx of young men in polo shirts and a creeping uniformity rubbing against the city’s counterculture.

But the issue of Jeff Bezos’s balls is far from settled. “Have you seen the Bezos balls?” asked Dave Christie, a jewellery maker at a waterfront market who makes no secret of his personal dislike for the man who founded and still runs Amazon. “No one wanted them. They’ve disfigured downtown. Giant balls say everything about the man. Bezos is holding Seattle hostage.”

My rent’s gone from $500 to $1,000, but outside of that Amazon have been beneficial
                           –  Jen Reed

It’s not strictly true to say everyone is against the three huge plant-forested glass spheres at what Amazon calls its “campus” in the heart of the city. The Bezos balls, as the conservatories are popularly known, are modelled on the greenhouses at London’s Kew Gardens, feature walkways above fig trees, ferns and rhododendrons, and provide hot-desking for Amazon workers looking for a break from the neighbouring office tower.

“They are absolutely gorgeous. There was nothing in that area 10 years ago,” said Jen Reed, selling jerky from another market stall. “I don’t hate Amazon the way that a lot of people hate them. Seattle has changed a lot. My rent’s gone from $500 to $1,000, but outside of that Amazon have been beneficial. It’s give and take, and anyway we invited them here.”

“Giant balls say everything about the man” … Jeff Bezos is taken on a tour of the Bezos balls during their grand opening in January.

But even those sympathetic to the biggest retailer in the US are questioning whether there has been more take than give. Amazon has long been accused of stretching the city’s transit and education systems, and its highly paid workers have driven up prices of goods and housing.

The resentful murmur recently became a roar after Amazon reacted to the city’s latest tax proposal, which would have charged large businesses an annual $275 per employee, by resorting to what critics call blackmail. In mid-June, less than a month after unanimously passing the tax, Seattle’s council abandoned it in the face of threats from the corporation. The tension has sharpened the debate about whether the city can retain its identity as one of the most progressive in the country, or is destined to be just another tech hub.

Ironically, given Amazon’s much-publicised “city sweepstakes”, in which municipalities in North America are competing to land the company’s second headquarters, Seattle did not reach a Faustian pact with Amazon to lure it in the first place. The city gave no tax breaks and passed no anti-union laws, although the fact that Washington state law bars income tax was certainly appealing. The council did encourage the firm’s massive growth, however, with accommodations on building regulations that helped drive $4bn in construction.

Amazon has remade Seattle in many ways beyond new buildings. The city’s population has surged by about 40% since the company was founded, and nearly 20,000 people a year are moving there, often drawn by the company and its orbit. The tech industry has brought higher-paying jobs, with its average salary about $100,000. But that is twice as much as half the workers in the city earn, and the latter’s spending power is dropping sharply, creating a clear economic divide between some of the city’s population and the new arrivals.

The better-paid have driven up house prices by 70% in five years, and rents with them, as they suck up the limited housing stock. The lower-paid are being forced out of the city, into smaller accommodation or on to the streets. The Seattle area now has the highest homeless population in the country after New York and Los Angeles, with more than 11,000 people without a permanent home, many living in tent camps under bridges, in parks and in cemeteries.

“It’s incredibly difficult to find housing in Seattle now,” said Nicole Keenan-Lai, executive director of Puget Sound Sage, a Seattle thinktank focused on low-income and minority communities. “Two years ago a study came out that said 35% of Seattle’s homeless population has some college or a college degree.”

John Burbank of the Economic Opportunity Institute said there is a a direct link between the surge in highly paid jobs and the numbers of people forced on to the street.

“There’s an incredible correlation between the increase in homelessness and the increase in the number of people who have incomes in excess of $250,000,” he said. “That has grown by almost 50% between 2011 and 2017. The population of homeless kids in the Seattle public schools has grown from 1,300 kids to 4,200.”

Amazon has sought to improve its standing with financial support for organisations such as Mary’s Place to build a new shelter for 200 homeless women and families.

It is a similar story as schools and public transportation grapple to keep up with the rapidly rising population and the demographic shift it is causing.

While use of public transport is falling in many major cities in the US, down more than 7% in Los Angeles in 2016 and 10% in Washington DC, it was up by 4% in Seattle. The city has redesigned bus routes and upgraded the South Lake Union Trolley, known locally by the unfortunate acronym of the Slut, to the Amazon campus in the area, but the system is struggling. The company has contributed towards some of the cost of the upgrades, including buying an additional streetcar and giving $700,000 toward running the bus service this year.

But still the flow of cars to the Amazon campus has led to long traffic jams to the interstate. The bus route to the same area, the No 8, is notorious as one of the most overcrowded and delayed in the city, prompting a derisory Twitter account with the slogan “You can’t say late without 8!”.

In other cities, rising salaries would be a boon to public coffers, but Seattle is burdened with one of the most regressive tax systems in the country.

With no income tax, the financing of public works falls more heavily on the less well off through sales and property taxes. “We have a tax system in which if you’re making less than $25,000, you’re paying about 18% of your income in state and local taxes. If you’re above $250,000 you’re paying about 4% of your income in state and local taxes,” said Burbank.

“As a result we’re leaving millions of dollars on the table that should be going into public investments in our state and in our city. We’re increasing taxes on the people who can least afford to pay taxes and we’re letting the affluent off the hook.”

We have personal freedom and no taxation. Of course chickens are going to come home to roost
                                                   – John Burbank

This is not how large numbers of people in Seattle think things should work. They argue that Amazon should contribute to upgrading a transport system that’s struggling under the influx it created, and improving schools that provide the educated workforce the company benefits from.

“It is sort of a bipolar relationship because we do have a progressive city in some respects, we have a progressive city council in some respects, and then we have an environment that embraces individual wealth,” said Burbank.

“I think Amazon’s attitude has to do with the difference between social liberties and economic equality. Bezos was helpful in the campaign for same-sex marriage, but he also put $100,000 in opposition to the [initiative on introducing an] income tax that we ran in our state in 2010.

“So if it has to do with personal freedom, that’s OK. But if it has to do with actually trying to create a shared quality of life which entails taxation of the affluent or higher taxation, that’s not OK. And so this is a really good city for him because we have a lot of personal freedom and we have no taxation. Of course chickens are going to come home to roost at some point.”

Bezos’s company has arguably done much to erode the liberal and progressive culture of the city that first attracted him. Unlike other locally based giant corporations such as Microsoft, Starbucks and Boeing, Amazon planted itself in the heart of the city, and the influx of well-paid tech workers has changed the feel of Seattle. Keenan-Lai sees it in the erosion of the identity of her old neighbourhood on the city’s Capitol Hill and the disappearance of older, quirky restaurants, driven out by newer, more polished places.

“I can’t begrudge people moving to try to find opportunity,” she said. “But I do hear a lot of people say ‘I don’t want those programmers coming to Seattle’. It does create a lot of tension. Amazon represents both innovation and progress, and also dystopian fears for a lot of folks.”

Reed, at the market stall, added: “It’s definitely weird when you go into a dive bar that used to have bike gangs and now everyone’s in a polo shirt.”

The city council has struggled to find a path that remains true to Seattle’s progressive values while keeping the source of much of its recent prosperity happy. In 2015 it became the first major US city to increase its minimum wage to $15 an hour. Keenan-Lai said 100,000 people – then quarter of the working population of the city – benefited from the measure, but that its impact was swiftly eroded.

“The increase in the cost of housing has exceeded the increase in wages,” she said. “When we were advocating for $15 an hour the idea was that everyone who lived in Seattle could afford to live here. Our housing market just skyrocketed.”

Seattle, forced by the lack of an income tax to hunt for innovative means of raising revenue, has run into resistance from Amazon at every turn.

The friction peaked over the recent worker tax, which was expected to raise around $50m a year to help pay for affordable housing and services for people made homeless by escalating rents and property prices.

Amazon, however, in actions critics called blackmail, characterised it as a “jobs tax”, threatened to freeze construction in the city and backed a petition drive to put the issue to a popular vote in November.

The city’s chamber of commerce and other businesses threw their weight behind the ballot initiative. Popular support for the measure collapsed amid accusations that it would cost jobs and that the money would not be put to good use because the council lacks a coherent strategy to cope with the homeless crisis.

Under pressure from Amazon, the council broke, and only two of the city’s nine councillors voted to keep the tax. One of them, Kshama Sawant, a member of Socialist Alternative, accused the council of a “cowardly betrayal” and called Bezos “our enemy”.

Sawant, a driving force behind the $15 minimum wage, said it would be a mistake to expect Amazon to behave any differently. The company, she said, could easily afford the tax but opposed it for ideological reasons.

Jeff Bezos and the billionaire class have no incentive to do the right thing
                                    – Kshama Sawant

“It’s not a tax on jobs,” she said. “It is not a tax on employees. It’s a tax on big business. For the people who would actually be paying this, it is pocket change, and yet they are fighting fiercely against it. ‘Good corporate citizen’ is an oxymoron, because Jeff Bezos and the billionaire class have no incentive to do the right thing.”

Amazon has said that while it opposed the worker tax, it is “deeply committed to being part of the solution”, and points to its support of nonprofits in the city. The company declined to comment for this article.

Critics are not persuaded. Some see the company as attempting to shape a future in which Seattle’s residents are dependent on Amazon’s largesse through the funding of NGOs to deal with social issues, giving the company undue power at the expense of democratic institutions.

“Amazon is very much, ‘We want to save the world too, let’s do it together.’ And then as you get into the details, not so much,” said Keenan-Lai. “There is a lot of benefit we provide to Amazon but the city has had a really hard time extracting benefit from the company in return.”

Still, Keenan-Lai said the city’s history of progressive struggle is deep-rooted. “There’s been a long understanding that corporations can’t continue doing what they’re doing,” she said. “In Seattle, we’ve been fighting back for a long time.”

NashVegas

That is one of the many monikers that Nashville attaches to itself like a child looking for a nickname. Again, I have never experienced anything quite as sad.grim.pathetic. I say this as this is a city searching for purpose or reason of decades of being the second best, the neglected ugly sister where Memphis seemed to draw the attention and in turn the history and respect when it comes to booze and music.  Funny I always associate it with the murder of Martin Luther King so you see my priorities. I have yet to go to Memphis and now will due to the King memorial there and to see Graceland.  Balance people balance!

After the 2010 flood, the country was in dire recession and Nashville was trying to be a boon town and in turn the federal monies that came in during this time, along with the investors looking to hide/park/launder/exploit the Government money that the Obama administration made available to communities under water, in this case literally, that were the result of the 2008 recession.  That was which was lost in  Nashville was opportunity gained.   But the reality was for whom?  It appears that the rich got richer and the poor were still poor just employed.

The South has an almost reverence for poverty as that is what Jesus was.  Yes the mythical or real or whatever person who lived thousands of years ago (they did not have dinosaurs in the Middle East) was poor.  Sure but given adjustments with inflation he still would have been poor just not dirt poor. But poverty is seen as an aspirational tool in which to elevate oneself by the same mythical boot straps that don’t exist and are a part of another unicorn tale in American history.  That is what is the constant message from the pulpit to the podium as if you are poor you can rise above those circumstances and become wealthy and happy and President of the United States.  That latter one I assume will be removed from many individuals pep talks in the future. 

But poverty is also another tool in which to bury people.  The view of those poor is that they have failed intrinsically to rise above their status, their skin color, the endless laws, policies and regulations often put in place to ensure that climb on the ladder is akin to tackling climbing Mt. Everest.  From education to housing the lines are not ones drawn in the sand.  Add to that medical care,  public transportation, the notions of access versus availability becomes another rung in the infinity ladder.

Add the next factor to ensure that the myths continue to rise is the role of the Church to inflate, deflate and polemicize the failures of those who don’t believe hard enough.   Yes Dorthy just click those heels three times and you will be home.

This is the hypocrisy that dominates the air here, thick like the humidity and just as oppressive Religion is the curse and the blessing that runs redolent through the Bible belt and this belt is extra large with plenty of holes in which to choke you with.  Drugs rule here and they run from the illegal with regards to the Opioid crisis (but pot that is the gateway to hell and that highway is a one way ticket issued to largely people of color. Green means go, go directly to jail or a ticket with a fine that you can’t pay. Opioids are for white people and in turn that means rehab and self pity.  Got it? Good.
Then we have the legal and the whiskey trail runs long here next to that same belt in the same way the Bourbon and betting in Kentucky.  But horses like distilleries not dispensaries are run by those who have their own history and resources in which to fund the monuments that dot the streets of these confederacy’s.

It seems exhausting to keep track of the players in this game, no it is quite easy.  First follow the money, then follow the Bible, then follow the women and you will find the order of import in the land of Jesus.  Someone has to fill that plate when passed.

And the plate runneth over when it comes to booze.  The street of honky tonks that make millions in revenue for the city of Nashville cannot be denied.  The street is called Broadway and is no less theatrical just less glamorous than the one to the north.  Dorothy click those heels and take me there as I have been in many a seat in many a house there, here in the city I do live,  I have never set foot in any of them.

These business are now full on corporations down to branding akin to Trump with affiliations and associations with greater stars who no longer live here or do so only temporarily as no one with real money is here full time unless you have a business here, the largest employer is the Government followed by Vanderbilt and then Ryman entertainment.  Many of the bars, the stores and other entertainment venues (Opryland Resort for one) own and run these that bring the boys to the yard and that is why they are wetting themselves over the future Nashville Yards another copy of New York Hudson Yards only with less style and more cheap over chic.    I hope to be long gone when this bullshit is finally finished.  Vegas was built by the mob, Nashville was built by white trash. But with money.

Money here comes primarily from three factors, Ed and Med and Hospitality.  The latter is the one that employs the workforce that is supposedly 100 people a day who come here without the qualifications needed to work in the first two and they are the ones that pay the bare minimum The Musicians that have acclaimed their fame to those boozeria’s that align Broadway are paid by tips, so from your 3 dollar bill put that extra 2 that you get from the 5 you break, give one to the player and the other to the Bartender, they need it.  I could use a drink myself it is now hitting over 100 degrees here.

Lawyers Drugs and Money is what built NashVegas and they run this town to the ground.  There are few smart educated professionals that live here, no one in their right mind would unless they wanted to lose it.  Come here for the bullshit and stay for the prayers.  You will need them.

This is from the Washington Post regarding the truth behind the promise and the reality beyond the hypocrisy.  Drinks on me, well just as long as they $3 bucks!

Sobering truths
Inside country music’s complex — and increasingly lucrative — love affair with alcohol

By Emily Yahr  The Washington Post  June 28, 2018

ARLINGTON, Tex. – As the temperature inched toward 92 degrees in the parking lots outside Kenny Chesney’s concert in May, the beer cans were icy, the Jell-O shots were melting, and the T-shirts were direct: “Country Music and Beer, That’s Why I’m Here.” “Pour Me Something Tall and Strong.” “Make America Drunk Again.”

Brightly hued bottles of Blue Chair Bay Rum, the country superstar’s popular beverage brand, lined the tables at tailgates around AT&T Stadium, where fans gathered hours before the first opening act went on at 5 p.m. When the crowd of about 46,000 started streaming into the venue, some friendly patrons near an entrance offered a beer bong funnel to passersby, and cheers erupted whenever anyone took on the challenge.

“Tequila, baby!” one man yelled nearby. Across the street, participants in a mother-daughter tailgate ticked off why summer Chesney concerts are so appealing: “Beer, songs, sunshine.” That night, Chesney, who has found immense success in the past two decades selling the idea of island-style relaxation, would reference alcohol in 18 out of his 23 songs.

Although fans imbibe copiously at concerts of every genre, all of which boast songs about drinking, it’s possible that no slice of American life has embraced alcohol with the enthusiasm of country music. The two have gone hand-in-hand for decades, thanks in part to the so-called “tear in your beer” songs that helped make the format famous.
3:12
‘Tear in my beer’: How country artists use alcohol to sing about love

Country artists love singing about drinking. It’s an essential part of many classic country tunes, especially the ones about love. (Nicki DeMarco, Sarah Hashemi/The Washington Post)

But today, country music and alcohol are inextricably linked as never before. Not only has the genre become known (and sometimes mocked) for its sheer amount of drinking-themed songs, but an increasing number of country acts have created their own brands of booze, including Chesney’s rum, Blake Shelton’s Smithworks vodka, Miranda Lambert’s Red 55 wine and Toby Keith’s Wild Shot mezcal.

In June, Shelton and Jason Aldean opened bars in downtown Nashville. They join recent establishments from Florida Georgia Line, Alan Jackson and Dierks Bentley, each of whom has a musical catalogue that pairs naturally with a few drinks.

“I know what’s going on at my shows. People are coming out to blow off steam and have a great time,” said Bentley, whose current tour is sponsored by Twisted Tea. “I’m kind of like the lead bartender: Jumping up on the bar table, drinking shots with you and singing ballads with you like at an old Irish pub somewhere.”

Every artist — even those who don’t drink — knows the power of relating to audiences through drinking, even if it’s in appearance only. Brad Paisley closed his 2012 concert tour set list with one of his biggest hits, “Alcohol,” during which he would invite his opening acts back onstage. A makeshift bar was brought out, and drinks were poured — except, according to one opener’s band member, the liquid was actually lemonade Vitamin Water.

However, when hearing “country music” and “alcohol” together, some people are reflexively defensive. Traditionally, the conjured image is not flattering, from the early-1900s “drunk hillbilly” stereotype to summer 2014, when country concerts saw a spate of intoxication-related hospital trips and arrests, and one death.

But that connection is changing, as the genre is skewing younger and wealthier than ever. According to the Country Music Association, fans of country music ages 18 to 24 have increased by 54 percent over the past decade, and the format has grown in popularity on the coasts — not just middle America, as many assume. The CMA also reported country music consumers have an average annual household income of $82,000, above the national average, and that amount is climbing.

Decades ago, when the country format was scorned as niche music of the working class, the prominence of alcohol fed into the cliche of drowning your sorrows at a honky-tonk. Now, it’s the reverse. Modern country singers promote alcohol largely as an escape: partying with friends, having wild nights on the town or — for singers like Chesney who lean into the tropical, Jimmy Buffett vibe — sitting on the beach with a drink in hand.

“Alcohol no longer serves as a sign of the distance between country music listeners and the middle class culture,” country music historian Diane Pecknold said, “but as a sign of the similarity.”

~

The holy grail in country music can be summed up in one word: authenticity. And if there’s one star who sums up authentic country music, it’s Hank Williams, the legendary singer who inspired generations of artists by writing hits such as “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” “I Saw the Light” and the classic drinking song “There’s a Tear in My Beer.”

In 1953, Williams died of a heart attack at age 29 after years of alcohol and prescription drug abuse, and his influence lived on in more ways than just as an artist. Bobby Bare, who launched his country career in the 1960s with “Detroit City” and released a song this year called “I Drink,” about the effects of alcoholism, remembers that trying to trace Williams’s path was a popular tactic in Nashville.

“Everybody I know wanted to be like Hank Williams. And everyone I know bought into the drinking,” Bare said. “You figure if Hank did it, it must be okay.”

The late Waylon Jennings, who long struggled with drug addiction, called it the “Hank Williams syndrome.”

Country and western singer and guitarist Hank Williams. He died of a heart attack in1953 at age 29 after years of alcohol and prescription drug abuse. (Associated Press) Country music legend Waylon Jennings performing in Nashville in 1984. Jennings died in 2002, after a long battle with diabetes-related health problems. He was 64. (Mark Humphrey/Associated Press)

“I studied him. . . . He was out of control, and that was the part I picked up, the bad part,” Jennings told the Chicago Tribune in 1992. “I think a lot of people did that, because it looked really romantic to be crazy and wild and die young.”

This thinking led to tragedy, such as Nashville crooner Keith Whitley dying at age 33 of alcohol poisoning.

“I thought everybody had to drink to be in this business,” Whitley said in an interview not long before his death in 1989. “Lefty [Frizzell] drank, Hank drank, George Jones was still drinking, and I had to. That’s just the way it was. You couldn’t put that soul in your singing if you weren’t about three sheets in the wind.”

Before Williams’s time, country music had been associated with alcohol as far back as the early 1900s, when many acts hailed from Appalachia, known as moonshine territory. The connection grew and faded over the years, from the 1950s honky-tonk bar craze to the alcohol-heavy outlaw era, followed by the 1980s, when people became increasingly aware of the dangers of alcohol. Mothers Against Drunk Driving reportedly protested Gene Watson’s “Drinkin’ My Way Back Home” in 1983, and it stalled on the charts. Keith said his record label didn’t want to release “You Ain’t Much Fun” in 1995, about a guy who sobers up and suddenly can’t stand his wife.

Here is a sampling of more than 100 country songs released since 2010 that have alcohol-themed titles.

Beer
“Count the Beers,” Darius Rucker
“Beer Can,” Luke Combs
Whiskey
“Hemingway’s Whiskey,” Kenny Chesney
“Wine After Whiskey,” Carrie Underwood
Drunk
“Drunk On a Plane,” Dierks Bentley
“(This Ain’t No) Drunk Dial,” A Thousand Horses
Drinks
“Drink in My Hand” Eric Church
“Haven’t Had a Drink All Day” Toby Keith

As country went mainstream in the 1990s and 2000s, the topic became more popular, and varied: Although hits including Gretchen Wilson’s “All Jacked Up,” Tracy Byrd’s “Ten Rounds With Jose Cuervo” and Keith’s ubiquitous “Red Solo Cup” celebrated getting drunk, some warned about the downside, such as Billy Currington’s “Walk a Little Straighter” and Chesney’s hit “The Good Stuff.”

Then, the past six years or so brought the rise of “bro country,” and suddenly, it seemed every hit on the radio was a dude singing about drinking beer in his truck with a pretty girl by his side. From Luke Bryan’s “Drunk on You” and Aldean’s “My Kinda Party” to Cole Swindell’s “Chillin’ It” and Shelton’s “Boys Round Here,” the songs appealed to the new surge of younger listeners.

“I think that today, the consumer likes to be in the car, turn on the radio and hear something that’s upbeat that they can sing along with and feel good,” said Troy Tomlinson, president of Sony/ATV Music Publishing in Nashville. “That doesn’t mean there won’t be a serious ballad with pain. But for the younger country music consumer, alcohol in a celebratory manner is very relatable.”

No matter the decade, country singers search for that elusive “authenticity,” which experts say remains somewhat linked to Williams — and alcohol.

“Today, country singers will still throw out references to Hank,” said Travis Stimeling, an associate professor of musicology at West Virginia University. “If you want to establish you’re a real country musician . . . you go back to same imagery and same symbolism.”

‘Part of a family’
~

At Chesney’s Texas concert, Nichole Anderson of Arlington stood near a pickup truck, where a group of friends had beers in hand and explained why tailgating at a Chesney concert is almost as important as the show itself.

“He just makes you want to be part of a family, and this is what this family is,” Anderson said. “The parking lot pre-party, hanging out.”

The most boisterous tailgate was in Lot 12, and known as Lot 12 Nation; Chesney’s fandom is called No Shoes Nation, a play on one of his biggest hits, “No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems.” (“The sun and the sand, and a drink in my hand with no bottom / And no shoes, no shirt and no problems.”) Chesney songs and pop hits blasted on speakers as people played flip cup and cornhole, snacked on barbecue and kicked back in lawn chairs. A human-size flip-flop and an enormous inflatable bottle of Blue Chair Bay Rum were popular spots for selfies.

Natalie Bechard of Starkville, Miss., is a founder of Lot 12 Nation. About 2006, a small group met on a Chesney cruise to the Bahamas and decided to start tailgating together at his Dallas shows. Now, hundreds show up. At one point, the tailgate’s DJ announced that Bechard’s car got towed while she was helping set up — so he started a collection for her next to the funds they already raised for Chesney’s charity.

It was a far cry from what some might imagine happens at country tailgates; Chesney concerts have made headlines in other cities, such as Pittsburgh and Foxborough, Mass., for getting rowdy.

In Texas, though people had stories from previous years of some fans getting a bit out of control, the tailgating scene was fairly low key.

“You’re always going to have a few that stick out,” Bechard said. “But so far, everybody’s been really great. It’s just having fun, enjoying the great weather. We’ve become one big family celebrating Kenny and his music and the spirit of his music.”

‘Start our own brand’
~

No country star sells escapism quite like Chesney, who has two hit songs on country radio this summer: “Everything’s Gonna Be Alright,” a duet with David Lee Murphy that encourages people to stop stressing out, and “Get Along,” which encourages everyone in this crazy world to just, well, get along.

So it made sense when Chesney (who declined to comment for this article) decided to start selling rum, a drink that goes well with relaxation. The singer owns a home in St. John and told Forbes that he wanted his flavored versions “to try to capture my life in the islands.” Now, his rum company sponsors his concert tours.

In 2016, Forbes reported Chesney’s annual sales had almost tripled over three years, in a time when overall rum sales had dropped; according to Nielsen data, country fans outspend average music listeners by 12 percent when it comes to rum.

Someone at Chesney’s level can earn millions through alcohol brands and sponsorships, which is why other country stars have had the same idea. Lambert, Little Big Town, Sara Evans, Zac Brown Band and Craig Morgan all have sold wine; Kix Brooks of Brooks & Dunn has his own vineyard outside of Nashville. There’s also whiskey from Jake Owen and Darius Rucker, along with tequila from George Strait.

Florida Georgia Line, the duo of Brian Kelley and Tyler Hubbard, burst onto the scene in 2012 with their smash “Cruise” and proved to Nashville there was an appetite for party songs. They were vocal about their love for Fireball whiskey and even mentioned it in their hit “Round Here.”

“We reached out [to Fireball] and asked how it benefited them, and they said it was pretty drastic,” Hubbard said. “That made us feel good. But also, it made us think, why don’t we start our own brand?”

So they collaborated on Old Camp peach pecan whiskey, which combines the flavors of their home states mentioned in their band name. As the brand has taken off, they’ve named-dropped it in songs. In “Smooth,” they sing about “young love buzzing off an Old Camp bottle by the moon.” Morgan Wallen collaborated with the duo on “Up Down,” which has the line, “Somebody pass that fifth of Camp this way.”

Last year, they furthered their image as young guys who love to have a good time with the opening of FGL House in downtown Nashville, a restaurant and bar that has lines down the block on Saturday nights.

Taylor Dahlia, with January Noise, performing on the top floor of FGL House in downtown Nashville on June 16. FGL House was named after the country music duo Florida Georgia Line. (William DeShazer/For The Washington Post) Country music fans enjoy a warm summer evening on the rooftop of FGL House in downtown Nashville. (William DeShazer/For The Washington Post) A large mural covers the stairwell inside FGL House. (William DeShazer/For The Washington Post)

In Nashville, Budweiser has signs that say it’s “the official beer of beer drinking songs.” And while women have had difficulty getting alcohol sponsorships (“I love alcohol! You would think a beer company would sponsor me,” Lambert told W Magazine in 2012), Maren Morris recently partnered with Corona Light.

Companies will even endorse groups who sing tunes that aren’t so happy. Smithfield, the duo of Trey Smith and Jennifer Fiedler, broke out with the ballad “Hey Whiskey,” about a woman who dreads when her ex drinks, because then he calls her. The duo has an endorsement deal with Rebecca Creek Distillery.

“It’s kind of weird, because if you listen to the song, we always wonder, ‘Why do we have a whiskey endorsement?’ ” Fiedler joked. “Because it’s like, the whole song is about how whiskey ruins the girl’s relationship — but hey, we’re handing out whiskey.”

‘It’s a drinking environment’
~

Nashville, which some winkingly call “a drinking town with a music problem,” has a well-established culture of alcohol: Writers say that grabbing a few beers is common after — or during — a songwriting session. This can make it difficult for the people in the industry who don’t drink.

Some high-profile singer-songwriters are sober, though they don’t advertise it. Others, such as Tim McGraw and Keith Urban, have spoken out about not drinking. Brantley Gilbert, who went to rehab in 2011, said that he relied on the guidance of Urban, who had gone through rehab five years earlier.

“I told him, I don’t think I can do my job. I don’t know if I can ever play a song at my shows without being [messed] up,” Gilbert told the Tennessean last year. “Or writing, I was worried my songs wouldn’t be the same, that I wouldn’t be on everyone else’s level. It’s a drinking environment.”

Gilbert still knows the appeal of drinking songs and sings about partying on tracks such as “The Weekend” and “Bottoms Up.” He’s not the only one: Chris Janson, not a frequent drinker, had a big hit with “Fix a Drink” and released a single called “Power of Positive Drinkin’.” AJ McLean of the Backstreet Boys, who is sober, recently decided to embark on a country music career and assumed the best way in was a debut single called “Back Porch Bottle Service.”

Ray Scott, known for “Sometimes the Bottle Hits You Back” and “Drinkin’ Beer,” has been sober for more than a year. Initially, he was concerned fans would be disappointed to learn he didn’t drink.

“Some fans can kind of build you up to be this thing that they think you are, and a couple of these songs sort of painted a picture of who I was,” Scott said. “I’ve been pleased that people take it for what it is. It’s just fun music; I don’t have to live the part.”

Behind the scenes, despite the casual drinking, country music isn’t necessarily the crazy party some might think.

Jason Fitz, a former fiddle player for the Band Perry, is now an ESPN radio host. The Band Perry opened for Paisley on tour in 2012, which is how he came to know that the cups from the onstage bar actually contained Vitamin Water. (Although Paisley is also known for not drinking, his publicist said the onstage bar now serves beer and has in the past, yet added that it’s possible previous tours had water because he featured opening acts younger than 21.)

“I get asked so often, ‘Tell me your craziest backstage story!’ People think I’m joking when I say, ‘There really aren’t that many,’ ” Fitz said. “You get into the grind on the road — we were on the road for about 300 days. I don’t care who you are, you can’t party and survive that many days.”

Even artists with a party-heavy playlist echo this attitude. “We like to have a good time but maybe drink a little bit less than we used to,” said Hubbard of Florida Georgia Line. “As our manager says, if you’re gonna party like a man at night, you’ve gotta work like a man in the morning.”

Chesney is also a prime example. As his lyrics celebrate having a drink, from the “little umbrella-shaped margaritas” in “How Forever Feels” to a “cold drink chilling in my right hand” in “When the Sun Goes Down,” he’s also in killer shape. He didn’t lose a second of intense energy in his nearly two-hour set.

“I probably don’t drink as much as perceived. I’m too healthy,” Chesney told Parade magazine in 2010. “But a lot of my songs were written with the idea of having a good time.”

There’s no doubt the audience appreciates this. And as Nashville continues to see dollar signs (a CMA study this spring found “country music consumers are spending more on alcohol” these days), artists will keep singing about it.

The mutual benefit is a marked difference from decades ago, when there was a negative connotation of even listening to drinking songs in country bars. Now, those establishments embrace the image. And even a Sirius XM satellite radio station proudly plays “music of country-themed bars and honky-tonks across America.” It’s called Red, White & Booze.

Walk Bike Die

Last night I discovered the new plans (well the most recent as that changes like the wind) for the MLS Stadium down the road from my home.   They now want to add a hotel, an apartment unit and retail in addition to the stadium.   There are two major roads leading to said future stadium, now a dilapidated fairgrounds, and both are crossed by train tracks which are used and used often.  CSX owns the tracks and in turn block the intersections often for hours at a time, oddly most often during prime peak hours use in the a.m. and p.m.  There is one bus to service the area and the other bus that does go by is available week days only and only during certain times.  The area is largely residential and gentrifying and of course has no sidewalks nor crosswalks to enable pedestrian traffic that currently the two other stadiums in Nashville do at least have.

Right now the transit situation is in limbo. Irony that the transit bill failed and now the MTA has decided to go ahead to remodel the downtown singular transit station, replace buses and in turn alter lines and reduce service while the upgrades are taking place.  The times to do such is during 2-6 pm, prime commute time as most Government employees begin leaving work at 3:15 to 3:45 and the peak commute time starts at 4 pm.  Perfect time to reduce express bus services and options to travel in the city, make connections that are already challenging and all while having a massive heat outbreak with temps over 100 degrees during the same time frame.  Good planning! And it is why I rent cars with this as it is not safe to wait for buses let alone walk in this heat.  But I live close to the center of town which enables me to get to where I need to be fairly easily but that is not the case for most who work in the core of the city.   This is just one of many problems facing Nashville. 

Add to this the rising cost of housing that has not kept up with wages, but again the Chamber has said the low available jobs, the supposed 100 people a day moving here (a number pulled out of an ass) has enabled them to say wages can remain low as competition for said jobs are high. Add to this that the MEME’s (as I call Millennial morons) change jobs at an average of 24 months which high turnover enables employers to keep wages stagnant as they do not need to negotiate nor provide wage increases for performance over time.  They know it all the MEME’s!

Yesterday I went into another new hotel to go to the Stumptown coffee place they have inside.  A nice 20 y/o girl has moved here from Chicago and picked the most remote area serviced by transit, Hermitage, in where to live.  She has no car and in turn is used to the robust L that services the city and of course the walkablity that enables those to access buses and other means of transit.  Given the refurbishment of the transit station (clerks are in a refurbished container, I kid not) it has made it impossible for her to figure out her transit options.  She was at work, a man with a baby who was screaming was inside and I suspect remaining to listen to the conversation, made it difficult for me to explain that yes she has a train option that does again only run during the week during limited hours and in turn takes no time and is literally just at Riverfront Station a matter of a 5 minute walk from where we were.  She had no idea about this service or her options as well transit is a hot mess here but if you are willing to sit down and figure out options it is possible.  It is why I am particular about where I work and in turn getting there in the morning may be a combo Bus and Uber but walking, varying bus routes are truly what I am looking for as I don’t have the haste that needs a singular route. 

I have written about the failure by Nashville to have genuine urban planning and once again the City t hired someone who has been here for two years and yet this is a gig that has been on the carousel from hell, three planners in three years.   Again that is a statement that there is a problem here.  Who does this woman report to? And again what is her role?  Hell if I know even the Council wondered about this.  Well get in line.  A city well running into the red, the public schools awaiting an audit with contracts in question and signed without board approval. Nothing new as the City Hospital is facing scandal after scandals for the same.  So the Mayor too is cleaning house and yesterday the  City financial officer who saw both the boon and the bust has “elected” to leave his vaunted place in the Mayoral office after a decade of serving his master-s.  The Mayor is only one of the many players on this board game.  Nashville Scene noted that this man who is not elected wields immense power and in turn offers little to no transparency when it comes to decision making.  That is the private sector in public office, note the current office holder and his ranting, raving and rambling.  Hard to go from  a closed door where the crazy is behind it versus stepping out in front of it into the light.   Heard of McKinsey?  Well that is another like Goldman Sachs that revolves through said doors in Governments across the globe.  Beware of Consultants as they are like Attorney’s as it is about billable hours not about solutions and resolutions to a problem.   Our School district is awash with them and that may explain the budget shortfall. 

The reality is that while Nashville brags and postures itself in some delusional grandeur of a city of import the City is a walking dump.  And you cannot walk here it is not safe.  The drivers go like bats out of hell and the reality is that they are simply unaccustomed to pedestrians and cyclists.  The man who hit a cyclist on a rural road (all caught on camera) is back in the news for being a drunk  and he is not alone in the endless stories about similar accidents.  

This is another list that the area made along with 35th best place to race a child.  Wow we were that high up the list?  Clearly that is wrong.  The reality is Nashville is a 20th Century city being shoved into the 21st Century with no one knowing what the fuck they are doing.  It shows. 

Pedestrian fatalities up in Tennessee’s largest cities
Mike Reicher, Nashville Tennessean June 28, 2018

More people have been killed walking the streets of Tennessee’s largest cities in recent years, reflecting the national uptick in pedestrian fatalities.

Memphis, which nearly doubled its number of deaths over six years, ranks among the top 25 large cities for its fatality rate from 2012 to 2016, according to a USA TODAY Network analysis of federal safety data. Nashville, number 70 on the list (out of 173 cities with populations greater than 100,000), saw a dramatic spike last year, but 2018 is looking better. Knoxville ranked 47th.
An elderly female pedestrian was hit by a teenager driving an SUV who was attempting to turn left at a green light at Abbott Martin Road at Cross Creek Road in 2011.Buy Photo

“We just do not have a pedestrian culture here,” said Stacy Dorris, a physician and pedestrian safety activist in Nashville. “It was not designed very well as a walking community.”

Death on foot: Distracted driving, cell phones seen as factors

Studies in Nashville and Memphis have pointed to problems such as crumbling concrete, missing sidewalks and long blocks without crosswalks.

About 80 percent of Nashville’s pedestrian deaths in recent years happened along state roadways, including the city’s major pikes, said Nora Kern, the executive director of the nonprofit group Walk Bike Nashville. Old Hickory Boulevard is another hot spot, she said. The deadliest stretches are typically wide thoroughfares with multiple lanes in each direction, and long blocks.

In 2017, for instance, three people died on Old Hickory Boulevard, during a particularly bad year in Nashville.

The city saw 23 pedestrian fatalities last year, according to Metro Nashville Police Department statistics. The previous seven years saw an average of either 13 or 16 deaths per year, depending which statistics you examine — local police or National Highway Traffic Safety Administration figures. Federal data excludes crashes on private property and it includes a more narrow definition of a pedestrian.

Advocates and government agencies, both at the state and local levels, are leading construction projects aimed at improving safety. In Nashville, the city allocated $30 million for sidewalks in each of the last two fiscal years, but progress has lagged as the city spent more time planning than building. The pikes are especially problematic, Kern said, because of their width and lack of walking infrastructure.

“To go back to add sidewalks is going to be very expensive,” she said.

Her group championed a relatively affordable project at Nolensville Pike and Welshwood Drive. For $50,000, Kern said, the Tennessee Department of Transportation installed a “pop-up crosswalk” with warning lights and signage. The state has identified other dangerous areas and will be using federal funds to work through the list of projects.  **BTW I know this and there are still major problems as it is across from Walmart and the bus transit stop.  It is at least better than nothing.

Memphis pedestrian fatalities

2010: 10

2011: 17

2012: 11

2013: 25

2014: 20

2015: 28

2016: 28

Nashville pedestrian fatalities

2010: 12

2011: 11

2012: 14

2013: 11

2014: 11

2015: 14

2016: 16

Knoxville pedestrian fatalities

2010: 10

2011: 17

2012: 11

2013: 25

2014: 20

2015: 28

2016: 28

Source: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration

Care for a Koch

The recent announcement of David Koch’s withdrawing from public life due to health reasons gave me a reason to cheer that even as rich as they are they are not immune from life depleting illnesses that eventually lead to death.  Frankly with the Koch Brothers that cannot come soon enough although there are many in the wings awaiting their turn at the throne of destroying democracy.

Nashville is a shithole.  I cannot stress that enough. Today they announced that right now like dueling pianos the council is presenting dueling budgets to somehow accommodate the budget shortfall affecting most importantly funding public schools and in turn providing desperate cost of living wage increases for municipal employees (which includes Teachers).  The constant refrain of this being a “it” city is wearing out “its” welcome as that declaration is now five years old and we are no longer the adorable toddler demanding attention.  I am so tired of hearing that phrase I want to smack someone who repeats it without citing the source of course which I know – fake media, circa The New York Times, 2013.

The city lacks infrastructure.  Let’s start with sidewalks. Long a problem and possibly why there is a never ending stream of pedestrian deaths, the lack of those and bike lanes are truly signficant. Add to them crosswalks, proper street lighting and other means that would enable people to use cars less and walk more would be great.  But this is 1950 and we need to not be it much longer clearly.  Here we are with what our current council tried with the sidewalk rule. 

It’s been nearly a year since a rule encouraging developers to build sidewalks went into effect in Nashville.
The ordinance, sponsored by Councilwoman Angie Henderson, was approved last April and took effect last July.
The measure forces builders of new homes in certain areas to either build sidewalks out front or pay a fee in lieu of the sidewalk construction.
“So if you have an immediate abutting sidewalk right next to you, we encourage you to build,” said Henderson. “But if you do not, and it would be a disconnected segment, you can choose to pay the fee in lieu of construction. It’s the builder’s choice.”
It was an effort to improve walkability in Nashville, which lacks sidewalks along roughly half of the city’s roads.
Some builders choose to pay the fee, while others build so-called “sidewalks to nowhere,” which end at the property line and do not connect to other walkways.

The current need for sidewalks amounts to approximately 2000 miles in order to meet demand and make Nashville walkable.  Add to this crosswalks, better timed lights and other ways to reduce pedestrian and traffic mess.  Well not happening and with the failure of the transit bill it would have enabled some of these issues to be addressed.

So why did it fail?  Well I knew immediately when I saw the plan it was out of scope and scale with regards to the city and the needs of those who use transit.   I went to many of the public hearings and meetings. The one in the Downtown Library was the most packed and that was in the early days, the subsequent meetings in smaller neighborhoods were not as packed but as the time drew closer the ones in the wealthier areas (Green Hills which ironically needs the most help and was largely neglected in the plan) were more packed.  It was then I knew for certain this game was up. The plan did suck for several reasons and it failed for them.   The first would have been address the airport issue and that could have been light rail. The next was outlying areas that have the largest traffic congestion coming into Nashville and the other cross town transfer and increasing that service.  But no, Nashville as they do plan last talk big first and they oddly presented Seattle’s transit plan as their own.  This was mistake number one, the rest came when the Slattern got busted and to this day I am amazed at the stupidity of that woman.  The marketing plan, the special election ruse and the issues about the new Mayor, the Budget and the rest of the bullshit in Nashville that dominates the news – crime – contributes much to the reasoning behind why people fear public transit.  Yes racism and  more importantly,  classicism,  also lent to its failure  But the biggest reason was the outside influence of the  Koch’s. They managed to defeat the prior Mayor Dean’s attempts at an express bus through the West End two years ago so  if anyone thought these two were done with the rubes here, think again.

The lack of education, wage stagnation, the ongoing push to suburbs and the lack of affordable housing dominate the dialog here and in turn also explain why we have such bullshit for infrastructure. Cannot pay for what you have no money for.   Taxes are slight here and much of the funding is via smoke, mirrors and sales taxes.  That is largely Seattle’s method of funding and in turn levy’s to allocate funds via property taxes to pay for schools and larger projects.  Even Seattle is going no mas regarding the head tax on the big business in Seattle (aka Amazon) lasted a month before it was promptly repealed by the same council that voted for it in the first place.  Fear of loss of jobs and in turn wages declining (if anyone thinks salaries remain in tact when a company moves or relocates their business to low tax right to work states needs to ask those who did and surprise, no) pushed for that act to be withdrawn.  So passive and aggressive is still Seattle’s trump card, just not in Donald’s hand.  Nashville has much to learn on that front, they just give and give it away.

Whoops! Care for a Coke anyone? Its refreshing right after getting screwed as in over.

How the Koch Brothers Are Killing Public Transit Projects Around the Country

By Hiroko Tabuchi    The New York Times   June 19, 2018

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — A team of political activists huddled at a Hardee’s one rainy Saturday, wolfing down a breakfast of biscuits and gravy. Then they descended on Antioch, a quiet Nashville suburb, armed with iPads full of voter data and a fiery script.

The group, the local chapter for Americans for Prosperity, which is financed by the oil billionaires Charles G. and David H. Koch to advance conservative causes, fanned out and began strategically knocking on doors. Their targets: voters most likely to oppose a local plan to build light-rail trains, a traffic-easing tunnel and new bus routes.

“Do you agree that raising the sales tax to the highest rate in the nation must be stopped?” Samuel Nienow, one of the organizers, asked a startled man who answered the door at his ranch-style home in March. “Can we count on you to vote ‘no’ on the transit plan?”

In cities and counties across the country — including Little Rock, Ark.; Phoenix, Ariz.; southeast Michigan; central Utah; and here in Tennessee — the Koch brothers are fueling a fight against public transit, an offshoot of their longstanding national crusade for lower taxes and smaller government.

At the heart of their effort is a network of activists who use a sophisticated data service built by the Kochs, called i360, that helps them identify and rally voters who are inclined to their worldview. It is a particularly powerful version of the technologies used by major political parties.

In places like Nashville, Koch-financed activists are finding tremendous success.

Early polling here had suggested that the $5.4 billion transit plan would easily pass. It was backed by the city’s popular mayor and a coalition of businesses. Its supporters had outspent the opposition, and Nashville was choking on cars.

But the outcome of the May 1 ballot stunned the city: a landslide victory for the anti-transit camp, which attacked the plan as a colossal waste of taxpayers’ money.

“This is why grass roots works,” said Tori Venable, Tennessee state director for Americans for Prosperity, which made almost 42,000 phone calls and knocked on more than 6,000 doors.

Supporters of transit investments point to research that shows that they reduce traffic, spur economic development and fight global warming by reducing emissions. Americans for Prosperity counters that public transit plans waste taxpayer money on unpopular, outdated technology like trains and buses just as the world is moving toward cleaner, driverless vehicles.

Most American cities do not have the population density to support mass transit, the group says. It also asserts that transit brings unwanted gentrification to some areas, while failing to reach others altogether.

Public transit, Americans for Prosperity says, goes against the liberties that Americans hold dear. “If someone has the freedom to go where they want, do what they want,” Ms. Venable said, “they’re not going to choose public transit.”

The Kochs’ opposition to transit spending stems from their longstanding free-market, libertarian philosophy. It also dovetails with their financial interests, which benefit from automobiles and highways.

One of the mainstay companies of Koch Industries, the Kochs’ conglomerate, is a major producer of gasoline and asphalt, and also makes seatbelts, tires and other automotive parts. Even as Americans for Prosperity opposes public investment in transit, it supports spending tax money on highways and roads.

“Stopping higher taxes is their rallying cry,” said Ashley Robbins, a researcher at Virginia Tech who follows transportation funding. “But at the end of the day, fuel consumption helps them.”

David Dziok, a Koch Industries spokesman, said the company did not control the activities of Americans for Prosperity in specific states and denied that the group’s anti-transit effort was linked to the company’s interests. That notion “runs counter to everything we stand for as a company,” he said.

“Our decisions are based on what is most likely to help people improve their lives, regardless of the policy and its effect on our bottom line,” he said. Koch Industries has opposed steel tariffs, for example, even though the company owns a steel mill in Arkansas, he said.

The group’s Nashville victory followed a roller-coaster political campaign, including a sex-and-spending scandal that led to the mayor’s resignation.

But the results also demonstrate that the Kochs’ political influence has quietly made deep inroads at the local level even as the brothers have had a lower profile in Washington. (This month, Koch Industries said David Koch would step away from his political and business roles because of declining health.)

“These are outside groups,” said Nashville’s new mayor, David Briley, in an interview. “They don’t represent Nashville’s interests or values.”
A Nationwide Effort

The Nashville strategy was part of a nationwide campaign. Since 2015, Americans for Prosperity has coordinated door-to-door anti-transit canvassing campaigns for at least seven local or state-level ballots, according to a review by The New York Times. In the majority, the Kochs were on the winning side.

Americans for Prosperity and other Koch-backed groups have also opposed more than two dozen other transit-related measures — including many states’ bids to raise gas taxes to fund transit or transportation infrastructure — by organizing phone banks, running advertising campaigns, staging public forums, issuing reports and writing opinion pieces in local publications.

In Little Rock, Americans for Prosperity made more than 39,000 calls and knocked on nearly 5,000 doors to fight a proposed sales-tax increase worth $18 million to fund a bus and trolley network. In Utah, it handed out $50 gift cards at a grocery store, an amount it said represented what a proposed sales tax increase to fund transit would cost county residents per year

“There’s nothing more effective than actually having a human conversation with someone on events that affect them on a day-to-day basis,” Akash Chougule, policy director at Americans for Prosperity, said in an interview. “It’s a great opportunity for us to activate people in their own backyards, and we’re among the first to do it in a sustained, permanent way.”

The paucity of federal funding for transit projects means that local ballots are critical in shaping how Americans travel, with decades-long repercussions for the economy and the environment. Highway funding has historically been built into state and federal budgets, but transit funding usually requires a vote to raise taxes, creating what experts call a systemic bias toward cars over trains and buses. The United States transportation sector emits more earth-warming carbon dioxide than any other part of the nation’s economy.

The Trump administration had initially raised hopes of more funding for transit by advocating a trillion-dollar infrastructure push. However, when that proposed plan was made public it reduced funding for transit-related grants.

Nashville’s idea to invest in transit got off to a strong start. Introduced in October by Megan Barry, who was mayor at the time, it called for 26 miles of light rail, a bus network, and a 1.8-mile tunnel for buses and trains that would bypass the city center’s narrow streets.

The $5.4 billion proposal, the costliest transit project in Nashville’s history, was to be funded by raising the sales tax city residents pay by one percentage point, to 10.25 percent, and raising other business taxes. A coalition of Nashville businesses urged voters to endorse the spending as vital to a region projected to grow to almost 3 million people by 2040, an increase of 1 million.

“It will be far-reaching, it will serve every part of our city — north, south, east, and west — and it will help to shape our future growth and development,” said Ms. Barry, who enjoyed approval ratings near 70 percent. A poll by her team found that close to two-thirds of voters would support raising taxes to pay for transit.

The vote was set for May 1.

But then in late January Ms. Barry, who is married, acknowledged a nearly two-year affair with the former head of her security detail after a series of exposés, including reports of steamy texts, overseas trips and inappropriate spending. In March she resigned, and later pleaded guilty to theft. Ms. Barry did not respond to requests for comment.

Americans for Prosperity kicked its campaign into high gear.
Secret Weapons

The team that gathered at Hardee’s in March, two weeks after Ms. Barry’s resignation, was led by Ms. Venable and Mr. Nienow of Americans for Prosperity. Other canvassers that morning included a local Tea Party leader and a lawyer-turned-fantasy-novelist who writes about a young witch who pushes back against an authoritarian government.

Central to the work of Americans for Prosperity is i360, the Kochs’ data operation, which profiles Americans based on their voter registration information, consumer data and social media activities. The canvassers divided the neighborhoods into “walkbooks,” or clusters of several dozen homes, and broke into teams of two.

There are rules: No more than two people at a door (to avoid appearing threatening). No stepping on lawns (homeowners don’t like it). And focus strictly on the registered voter. If anyone else answers, say a polite “thanks” and move on.

“It’s the concept of opportunity cost,” said Mr. Nienow. Their data zeroed in on people thought to be anti-tax or anti-transit and likely to vote.

On a laptop in her S.U.V., Ms. Venable tracked, in real time, the progress of the four pairs working that day. By 4:30 p.m. they had knocked on 230 doors and connected with 66 people, a success rate of 29 percent. “Excellent,” she said

“Everything we do is very scientific, very data-based, very numbers-based,” said Mr. Chougule, the Americans for Prosperity policy director. “We are able to see who are the people that are most likely to engage on this issue, who are the people most aligned with us that we need to get out, and who are the people whose minds we can change.”

Another weapon in the Koch arsenal is Randal O’Toole, a transit expert at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington that Charles Koch helped found in the 1970s. Declaring transit “dead” and streetcars “a scam,” he has become a go-to expert for anti-transit groups. Crisscrossing the country, he speaks at local events and writes opinion pieces.

At a forum in Nashville in January hosted by a conservative radio host, Mr. O’Toole gave an impassioned speech. “I think of light rail as the diamond-encrusted Rolex watch of transit. It’s something that doesn’t do as much as a real watch can do. It costs a lot more. And it serves solely to serve the ego of the people who are buying it,” he said, meaning city officials.

Public transit critics have long raised fears that rail projects are a conduit for crime, and Mr. O’Toole himself has made that argument: “Teenagers swarm onto San Francisco BART trains to rob passengers,” he warned in a blog post last year. But in Nashville, Mr. O’Toole made a different argument, namely that transit is for hipster millennials and would be a conduit for gentrification, forcing people to move further away to find affordable housing.

In another line of attack, he also argues that ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft are the future of transportation, not buses and trains. “Why would anybody ride transit when they can get a ride at their door within a minute that will drop them off at the door where they want to go?” he said in an interview.

Asked whether low-income people could afford to use Uber instead of a bus, he said that subsidizing their rides would still be more cost-effective.

Raj Rajkumar, director of Carnegie Mellon University’s Mobility21 research center, which focuses on transportation issues, said studies have shown that mass transit reduces congestion and pollution. But he also said there is some truth in concerns that transit could bring gentrification. To offset that, he said, transit plans should be paired with measures to increase affordable housing.

Still, in most places and over the long run, buses and trains are the most effective and cleanest way of moving large numbers of people large distances, he said. Ride-sharing can help people on shorter trips, Mr. Rajkumar said, or getting to and from a train station. “But if you’re going 30 miles, Uber is less suitable. I don’t think Uber and Lyft can really replace public transit,” he said.

The scale of the Kochs’ anti-transit spending is difficult to gauge at the local level, because campaign finance disclosure standards vary among municipalities. But at the state and national level, the picture gets clearer.

Last year Americans for Prosperity spent $711,000 on lobbying for various issues, a near 1,000-fold increase since 2011, when it spent $856. Overall, the group has spent almost $4 million on state-level lobbying the past seven years, according to disclosures compiled by the National Institute on Money in State Politics, a nonpartisan nonprofit that tracks political spending.

Broadly speaking, Americans for Prosperity campaigns against big government, but many of its initiatives target public transit. In Indiana, it marshaled opposition to a 2017 Republican gas-tax plan meant to raise roughly a billion dollars to invest in local buses and other projects. In New Jersey, the group ran an ad against a proposed gas-tax increase in 2016 that showed a father giving away his baby’s milk bottle, and also Sparky the family dog, to pay for transit improvements among other things. “Save Sparky,” the ad implores.

In Nashville, Americans for Prosperity played a major role: organizing door-to-door canvassing teams using iPads running the i360 software. Those in-kind contributions can be difficult to measure. According to A.F.P.’s campaign finance disclosure, the group made only one contribution, of $4,744, to the campaign for “canvassing expenses.”

Instead, a local group, NoTax4Tracks, led the Nashville fund-raising. Nearly three-quarters of the $1.1 million it raised came from a single nonprofit, Nashville Smart Inc., which is not required to disclose donors. The rest of the contributions to NoTax4Tracks came from wealthy local donors, including a local auto dealer.

After Ms. Barry’s resignation, Nashville’s pro-transit movement struggled. Its messaging became muddled, strategists said, with supporters claiming that the plan would do everything: create jobs, benefit the environment and even boost the health and wellness of residents.

Ultimately, the pro-transit camp failed to fend off criticism that the plan benefited a gentrifying downtown at the expense of more distant lower-income and minority areas

“If everyone’s going to pay for it, everyone needs to benefit,” said Rev. Jeff Obafemi Carr, who threw his support behind the opposition campaign and mobilized African-American voters.

After the vote, the Americans for Prosperity crew celebrated its victory at the Nashville Palace, a country music venue. “I knew we were going to win,” Ms. Venable said. “But I wasn’t taking my foot off the gas for a second.”

Lux et veritas

It is the Yale motto meaning Light and Truth.  Funny when I think of the Ivy League those are two words that don’t come to mind in the least.

Yale is the Alma Mater of the Bush Dynasty and the Romney Clan. The Clinton’s met there and even Jodie Foster has a degree from said institution.  She took a long break from being a child actor and has a fairly well established pedigree.  There were many actors who have benefited from Yale’s acclaimed theatre and arts program and with that I give them a pass but as for any other white bread that found themselves in the acclaimed hall I will pass.    I have not met one single individual that had one ounce of dignity and perspective that possesses degrees from said institutions like Yale.

The “writer” J.D. Vance of Hillbilly Elegy went to Yale and is as a big a right wing douche as any of the others with less colorful backgrounds which may include Dr. Ben Carson who is also a Yale Graduate.  He seems to be on the drugs he administered to patients given his bizarre demeanor and arrogance.   Intelligent? I would not have him remove a fatty tumor from my body but I am sure in his heyday he was a good surgeon. Whatever that means.  I bet that he and John Bolton really yuck it up in Trump Cabinet meetings. Shame Clarence Thomas can’t join them.

I could go on with the famous grads of Yale and again realize they have an acclaimed theater college so don’t count any of them… HEEYYY Fonzie!   But the bulk of the minds are largely conservative and even those liberal are not very left of the right as there in the esteemed halls one learns early the art of self preservation.

I read this in the UK Guardian and it outs the writer as an Addict and in turn Graduate of Yale who brilliantly reminds the readers that much of the wealth and history of the esteemed school are vested heavily in hypocrisy.  Shocking, I know! Not really.  There is your truth and light.

As an Oxycontin ‘junkie’ at Yale, I saw how my addiction helped fund the university

Through attending an Ivy League university as an addict, I learned that while I might be considered ‘deplorable’, elites are not much better

Mon 28 May 2018
Matthew Jeffrey Abrams
Guardian UK

I’m a junkie – recovered now for 14 years, but a junkie just the same. A high-school dropout and chronic runaway, I spent my later teenage years shooting black tar heroin and smuggling drugs across the Mexican border – mostly ketamine and OxyContin, the latter of which I also shot. Back then I was a loser, a washout, a petty narcotrafficker, a statistical blip in the opioid epidemic.

But today I’m also a doctor (of the illegitimate variety, mind you). Clean at 19, I spent my later twenties at Yale University earning a PhD, which I completed last spring. There I was a scholar, a student, a teacher,a valued member of an exclusive intellectual community.

Being a junkie in the Ivy League doesn’t guarantee success, but it does guarantee perspective. I learned a lot about America’s upper crust, and I saw much that my colleagues never could. But only last week, during a visit to my alma mater, did I begin to understand the role that Yale played in my own addiction.

Believe me when I tell you that you are not deplorables, that you are assets to this country.

Spring having arrived, I visited Yale, which wears the season well. I wandered the campus before entering Dwight Chapel, which stands in the heart of Old Campus and hosts a small morning AA meeting. I used to attend that meeting quite regularly, although I remember our fellowship being mostly indigents from the nearby New Haven Green and kids from local rehabs. I remember two things: we were opioid addicts, and we were invisible to the Yale community – ignored, really, like unwelcome pests.

And it was then, sitting alone in that musty chapel, when it hit me: to my left stood the Skull and Bones crypt , the secret windowless clubhouse for the country’s most exclusive private society, whose founder’s extended family had become the largest American merchants in the Indo-Chinese opium trade. And beyond the crypt stood Yale’s medical campus, which has received major gifts from the Sackler family, whose wealth comes largely from owning Purdue Pharma, the maker of Oxycontin. Purdue Pharma criminally misbranded that drug to make it appear harmless. The company pleaded guilty in 2007 and agreed to pay around $600m in fines.

But behind me, I also realized, beyond the Old Campus quad filled with elite Yale undergrads (one of whom, I’ll never forget, once wore a $70,000 Patek Phillippe wristwatch to my class), stood the New Haven Green. Many times while crossing the Green I was offered heroin and OxyContin, and more than once I saw EMTs attempting to revive an addict with naloxone. What’s more, across the street stands New Haven City Hall, where last October the city formally sued Purdue Pharma for their brazen behavior and illegal practices.

The irony would be comical if it were not so lethal: I once violated federal laws to smuggle a drug across an international border that was manufactured by a company whose malfeasance simultaneously exacerbated my own addiction and, through the personal donations by the owners of Purdue, enriched a university that would later grant me a PhD.

While Oxycontin had almost killed me, it had also helped build Yale’s vaunted Raymond and Beverly Sackler Institute for Biological, Physical and Engineering Sciences. So had every opioid addict in my little chapel meeting – so had every dope fiend in America.

I’ve learned much about this country’s powerful and elite, but I have no interest in scolding them. People and places like Yale will never change. I’d rather address my junkie brothers and sisters, and everyone else that this epidemic has touched:

Listen, friends, I have a dual identity, and I have for most of my life. I’m an addict kid and a suburban child, an Ivy-League insider and a dope–shooting outsider, a deplorable and a doctor. I’ve learned first–hand how little regard the wealthy, corporate and institutional worlds have for us, even supposed liberal bastions like Yale. I’ve learned that while we have the privilege of perspective, they have the perspective of privilege. And I’ve learned something else: they are wrong about us. We are not worthless, or weak.

Dear brothers and sisters, believe me when I tell you that you are no less special or brilliant or talented or ambitious than the Yale students I once knew and taught.

Believe me when I tell you that you are not deplorables, that you are assets to this country, that your will and resolve to hustle and survive make you uniquely equipped for the contemporary world. Believe me when I tell you that you are wanted, and useful, and important and deserve to thrive. Believe me when I tell you that I love you, and so do so many others, and that you should never, ever give up.

DINO or RINO

Here in Tennessee we have one of many major off year elections.  Today, May Day, more of an alert versus a spring fling, we vote here in Nashville on the Transit Referendum.  It has been as divisive and argumentative as busing was in the 1970s. And by busing I mean integration of schools.  This is one hell of a city that fears change more than black people.

Our next election begins Friday for the Mayor of Nashville to complete the term after the Slattern left in March.  The current Vice Mayor (never heard of this until I moved here) David Briley is serving in the position and I of the adage “Don’t change horses in the middle of the stream” person is voting for him.  He did one thing right immediately upon taking office and that was declare Ft. Negley a public park and will have the aging dump of Greer Stadium torn down and green space installed in what was the last civil war outpost built by slaves to remain preserved and more importantly maintained.  As for what happens after that I am going with a spinning wheel as I better be out of here by then.  My time clock is 18 months and that is ticking away like a biological clock only without hormones.

This is then followed by the November elections for our  Senator and Governor of the State replacing the Truck stop Governor and bizarre waffle house employee, Bob Corker.   This is one man I will not miss seeing or hearing on my news as he cannot commit to a decision or have an opinion let alone what syrup he wants on his waffle.

And when I open my beloved New York Times to see the State in the opinion page regarding the upcoming election I either think hell hath frozen over or that this State matters.  I am leaning to the former given global warming y’all!   Oh wait no one here believes in it.  Welcome to Tennessee where logic and education are for those who enter the local colleges and promptly leave the region once diploma is handed over if you are smart.  I have met some of them and it explains a lot.  Again only 33% of the population is educated over grade 12.

Nashville is not liberal. Davidson County is not liberal.  Only 30% of the population votes as Tennessee has the lowest civic turnout in the country.  And the irony is that one believes that education equates civic responsibility and in turn are more liberal in politics.  Wrong again. Nothing you think or believe is true until you move South and it is turned upside down when it comes to SOP.

The editorial below discusses our current options in the upcoming election but he fails to note the voting thing that is coupled with our gerrymandering and our surreal voting laws that also act as a preventative to generating larger turnout.  Irony was that the transit bill has found a much larger turnout in early voting that anticipated which has shocked the true powers and players in Nashville – the Chamber of Commerce.  They run the town and are pro transit and not for the real reasons but for the money bomb it will bring with regards to the construction of said plan.  Everything here is always beneath the surface when it comes to swimming in the deep red sea. The water looks inviting and you dip your foot in and it feels warm and then you dive in and then you find out the predators that swim below. Why do you think the Hockey team is called that?

Marsha Blackburn is already moving towards Plan B, not the birth control as that would be against her fake principles but to become Education Commissioner.  She is perfect for the job as the State in week two of the insane obsessive need to test anyone and everyone has continued to blow up requiring the Legislature to involve themselves and pass bills before retiring for the season.   She could set fire to the tests and thrown them in the ash heap.

Once again Nashville may be the city of the capital but they can’t run themselves into anything but the ground and it is apparent in this new Reconstruction sans Civil War.  They have civility wars here and its the women like Marsha Blackburn and her battleax cohort, Diane Black, who is running for Governor that is literally running this State into the ground. And they are one of many who are standouts in this state who you have to hear to believe with regards to the idiocy level. They make Trump seem intellectual.

The South is complicated and over 200 comments regarding the article address much of the issues and train of thought that envelopes the region.  I was impressed with the quality of comments and relieved that intelligent articulate individuals live here – all 216666** of them. Love the triple 6s, that too is irony in this city weighted with them

*The number was calculated on the 2016 estimate of Nashville population of 650K

 

Can a Tennessee Democrat Pull a Doug Jones?

By Steve Cavendish
Op-Ed Contributor
Mr. Cavendish is the former editor of The Nashville Scene.
April 29, 2018

To understand how Phil Bredesen, a former Democratic governor of Tennessee, has a chance of winning this year’s race to replace Bob Corker as the junior senator from this deep-red state, it helps to know a story making the rounds in Nashville about his likely Republican opponent, Representative Marsha Blackburn.

After returning from a 1995 trip to Los Angeles to drum up support for the Tennessee film industry, Ms. Blackburn, the executive director of the state’s Film, Entertainment and Music Commission, submitted her expense receipts to the office of the Republican governor, Don Sundquist.

The office sent them back, saying that a limousine was inappropriate for a state official. Ms. Blackburn said she didn’t hire a limo, but paid the charges; she then set the receipts on fire and sent the ashes to her superiors with a note: “Copy of L.A. expense report as requested!”

The story would remain a fun bit of political lore, save for one detail: Today those ashes are in the care of a Bredesen staffer. Someone in Mr. Sundquist’s circle saved them, waiting for a chance to pass them along to the right person with a pointed message: There are a lot of Republicans waiting to see Marsha Blackburn fall.

Ms. Blackburn is a Tea Party and Trump stalwart, as are many Tennessee voters. She also represents a type of conservatism that may be peaking in some parts of the South: combative, inflexible and more interested in picking fights than actually governing. An aggregate of recent polls has Mr. Bredesen leading her by 5 percentage points.

Mr. Bredesen spent two terms as governor, from 2003 to 2011, with a pro-business reputation. But since he last ran for office, in 2006, when he won all 95 counties, his party has suffered a string of defeats: only in Nashville and Memphis do Democrats hold congressional seats; at the state level, Democrats have been reduced to superminority status in both houses, meaning they are not even needed for the Legislature to hold session.

Why then did Mr. Bredesen, at 74, dive back into the political fray? Associates say that he never would have challenged Mr. Corker, a friend and, like him, a former mayor and businessman, but the thought of losing a nominal check on Mr. Trump bothered him. And even last fall, before the Democrat Doug Jones beat Roy Moore for a Senate seat in Alabama, internal Democratic polls put him slightly ahead of Ms. Blackburn in a state that Donald Trump carried by 26 percentage points.

Ms. Blackburn, on the other hand, was ready made for the Trump era. As a state senator she hounded Mr. Sundquist on taxes; after jumping to Congress, she became an at-the-ready Obama critic who spent the last decade as a fixture on cable news outlets. She’s one of the president’s strongest defenders in Congress, voting with him 91 percent of the time.

But a statewide campaign in Tennessee is not like running in a safe House district or doing another segment on Fox News. And not all Republicans are alike.

Take East Tennessee, which has produced many of the statewide Republicans in recent years, including Mr. Corker, Lamar Alexander, Howard Baker and the current governor, Bill Haslam. Mountain Republicans have 150 years of political tradition and, while conservative, have often displayed a pragmatic streak.

But in Middle Tennessee, the conservatism is newer, and more cultural. The state’s biggest wingnuts, like the senator whose anti-L.G.B.T. student bill was referred to as “Don’t say gay,” primarily hail from here. Ms. Blackburn’s 7th District, running from Kentucky to Alabama, draws heavily from this area and her stance on many issues has played well with that crowd.

But even in Middle Tennessee there are some ominous signs for Republicans. In a special election for a State Senate seat in December, a Democrat lost by just 307 votes, in a district Mr. Trump carried by more than 50 percentage points.

While Mr. Trump’s rhetoric may play well nationally, it may be a tougher sell at the state level, where personalities, local politics and the driving need to get something done dominate. Ms. Blackburn is a barnburner; it’s not clear that she can be a barn-builder. On the stump, she’s more comfortable talking up illegal immigration and, at an event in Murfreesboro, calling for the support of a candidate who believes in creationism. In contrast, Mr. Bredesen’s latest spot emphasizes that as senator he would support a good idea, even if it comes from Mr. Trump.

His get-it-done message resonates with state Republican leaders, including Mr. Corker, who couldn’t even say Ms. Blackburn’s name in a recent appearance on CNN. “I’ve said I’m gonna plan to vote for this person,” Corker told an incredulous Dana Bash, before adding that Mr. Bredesen “is my friend,” adding, “I’m not gonna campaign against him.”

In a race that could determine control of the Senate, Tennessee Republicans may hold their nose and vote for Ms. Blackburn. Then again, one of the wealthiest of them, Colleen Conway-Welch, held a fund-raiser for Mr. Bredesen, which raised $350,000. Ms. Conway-Welch and her husband, Ted Welch, have supported Republicans for decades. But Ms. Blackburn appears to be a bridge too far.

If this keeps up, the Sundquist staffer who held onto those ashes for years may finally get revenge.