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2S3 fire ad Street
Whatever Means Whatever: There was some
unfortunate news for Athens last week when
it was announced that Whatever It Takes
had not been one of five community-based
organizations to be awarded a share of $30
million in federal Promise Neighborhoods
grants. But WIT has already laid some seri
ous groundwork for its mission to ensure that
every child in Athens is on track to graduate
from a post-secondary education by 2020—in
part, through its use of the $500,000 Promise
Neighborhoods planning
grant it was awarded
last year—and that
work will continue,
even without more
federal money. This is
an absolutely crucial
initiative, and it needs
your support now more
than ever. Go to www.
witathens.org to find
out how you can donate
your time or other
resources to one of the
best efforts underway
to deal with poverty in
Athens in the long term.
They'll Mean It This
Time: The Athens-Clarke
and Oglethorpe county
governments are cur
rently engaged in nego
tiations with residents
near the coming landfill expansion to assess
and mitigate its impacts. Among the issues
being hashed out are the possibilities for
getting homes hooked up to city water amid
concerns about potential contamination of
wells, addressing damage to property values
and, finally, how to make any agreement that
may be reached legally binding, especially
considering that the expansion itself consti
tutes a breach of an earlier promise. The
next meeting of the joint
With no students clogging downtown’s streets,
they're just running the fiberoptic cables right
down the sidewalk. Happy holidays!
governmental committee with interested
citizens will be at 7 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 5 at
the ACC Solid Waste Dept, at 725 Hancock
Industrial Way.
Once More Under the Wire: We'll return to the
subject of the Selig/Walmart development for
just one more quick point before we vacate
the issue for the remainder of the year (which,
we hope, won't prove to be a disastrous der
eliction o' duty). Kevan Williams makes an
excellent point in this
issue's Athens Rising
column: that despite
the frequently repeated
refrain that the ACC
government is wait
ing for the results of
Selig's traffic study
before taking any fur
ther steps in the process
of vetting the project,
a developer with mil
lions of dollars at stake
really has no incentive
to release a study that
will dictate how it may
proceed until it is fully
prepared to respond to
the study's findings in
the most self-interested
way possible.
Might the Dope
suggest that ACC
commissioners—in
short order—pool their powers and instruct
planning staff to come up with some general
parameters for what kinds of traffic impacts
from the Selig project might be acceptable?
Then, we'll be a little better prepared to
respond to the developer's inevitable presen
tation of its air-tight conclusion that every
thing will be perfect exactly the way they've
got it figured out.
Dave Marr news@flagpole.com
Krazy Korner
,h Congressman Paul Broun, Jr. defends most corporate interests
with zeal, but he goes into berserker mode when it comes to oil.
Berserker Broun is willing to say pretty much anything. It’s a take-
no-prisoners, suicide-mission sort of thing when it comes to profits
for oil companies and others who depend on the unmitigated emis
sion of toxic exhaust. In his recent letter to the White House about
alleged Clean Air Act overreach by the EPA, Broun made the shocking
(and accurate) admission that “[pjeople who are unemployed or poor
tend to be in worse health and live shorter lives.” Broun was attempting to
argue that regulations on toxic emissions would cost corporations money, which would
translate to poorer Americans; tnus, the regulation of dangerous emissions is actually
unhealthy. It's a clear causal relationship: those who advocate for circumstances which
produce more poverty and unemployment, Berserker Broun implies, are killers.
So how, then, using Broun’s reasoning, do we evaluate his co-sponsorship of a
Michelle Bachmann bill that would return Wall Street's power to exactly what it was
on the eve of 2008’s financial collapse? Unlike Braun's shaky charge against the EPA,
the case against Wall Street is air-tight. Wall Street’s 2008 meltdown caused a sever
ity of unemployment unseen since the Great Depression. Thus, the banks, according
to Broun’s test, have brought an early death to many millions. How do we evaluate
Broun’s votes against the most basic provisions keeping American families from slip
ping into poverty? Or his support of policies that move jobs overseas? These are, by
Broun’s own standards, policies that kill Americans. In making a case against the com
parably negligible effects Of EPA regulations, Broun indicts his entire economic ideol
ogy, which creates, as if by design a widening peasant class whose very health and
lifespan are subservient to profit and the increased wealth of the “1 percent."
Broun’s “pro-life” stance is nothing but theocratic chauvinism. The remainder of his
platform can only be described, by his own logic, as “pro-death.” [Matthew Pulver]
4 FLAGPOLE.COM • DECEMBER 28, 2011 & JANUARY 4, 2012
