Ascend (of Asheville)

I have to wonder about the pressures that Esther Manheimer must be under.

She was in many ways the lead person for the city during the negotiation, defense and early tactical decisions of the city in the still unsettled water dispute with the state. She also serves on the board of the MSD, which is the intended recipient of the water system. That would seem to be a conflict on its face, and I wonder if being an intimate member of two parties who are now suing each other will put her in a semi-permanent state of recusal.

I understand the purpose of having representation from the different stake holders on the MSD board, and Asheville having eyes and ears in the process on that end is a good thing. But the pressure must be intense. If this thing goes to a trial (if trials are even what happens here I’m not sure) it will no doubt look a lot like an Esther Manheimer music video shoot.

I just hope that when she sings, she is singing for us, you know what I mean?

Add to that a run for Mayor of our little town. Add to that a position in the largest most lucrative, most impressively connected law firm in the area and you get a real picture of both power and responsibility. She is quickly becoming the axis around which the city of Asheville drum circles. We’re talking awesome cosmic power.

I interviewed Ms. Manheimer once, and she was a very good guest. Smart, funny, real, generous in both time and conversation, all the things you want in a political figure. If she turns out to be an evil genius, we are all in trouble. Republicans locally are so caught up in their ongoing war against Gordon Smith and Cecil Bothwell that Manheimer barely gets noticed. She could be Asheville’s super hero because the Republican-led opposition can’t see through her mild-mannered disguise.

If it’s really a disguise. I’d better stop there. I just had a bad thought. The Republicans don’t pick on Manheimer. They don’t pick on Davis because he plays their game. They didn’t pick on Russell because he was one of them, at least a charter member anyway. Other than that, why? Oh my God! She is an evil genius! Do you know what this means?

Esther Manheimer is not a left winger! We’re fucked!

The internets are a-buzz today with the news that Elizabeth Warren introduced a bill to make the federal government loan money to students at the same rate they give the big banks.

That is all well and good. I hope to see her elected President one day. But it should not be lost that the rate the students pay does not matter if the program is not big enough.

For many years the number of loans given out, and the amount of those loans has been shrinking steadily. It has become impossible to borrow enough money from the government programs to offset any substantial part of a student’s debt load. As it stands now the federal education program only adds up to 217 billion dollars total. Of that, only about 28% is actually loaned out. You can hardly buy a good fighter jet for that kind of money.

Not only that, but the barriers to qualification on the basis of need has been getting closer and closer to the poverty line over the same time period, making the theory and the reality of the federal student loan program almost laughably distant from one another.

So, it’s fine for Ms. Warren to make the point that banks are too special by comparison to the students who represent our real future. But if the bill doesn’t have the whole picture in mind, and components that will improve the overall picture, it’s just a grandstanding political stunt or a shallowly conceived effort. Either way, I would expect better.

So, the Constitution says people can gather with their like kind or something. Freedom of association. And, like it or not the Constitution also says that the rights of the well-armed militias to have guns shall not be infringed. Put that together with the part about speech and redress of imaginary grievances, and you got yourself one Hell of a party.

Or, in this case an attempt by Big Gun, the overlords who profit from and manufacture the gun culture in this country, and keep the faithful on high alert with a constant media campaign of scary stories, to get about ten thousand or so of the truest of the true to march on Washington DC July Fourth with their weapons at the ready. Loaded, that is. Openly brandished. With a guaranteed high ratio of shirts and signs that say things like, “Come and take it.”

A Salon story has the intended figure at One thousand. But it also quotes the Facebook page as saying “This is a non-violent event, unless the government chooses to make it violent.” Confrontational much? They also say this will not be a permitted event.

Now, I’m assuming these people are going to be prevented from marching without a permit, armed to the teeth or not.

If they are allowed to assemble, they will of course be given an “approved” route they can take, and a vast police escort, who will issue instructions on when to cross the road, when to stay on the sidewalk, when and where to stop and stuff like that.

I also can pretty much guarantee they will be immediately arrested, their personal belongings (including weapons) confiscated and/or destroyed; threatened with extended jail time, lied to, subjected to brutal physical attacks, teargas and intimidation tactics by the police if they so much as breathe wrong.

I’m playing devil’s advocate here, but I will be watching. Because it hasn’t been very long since much, much larger peaceful demonstrations across this entire country met with exactly that kind of reception when they tried to walk, sit, protest, gather and speak with their physical presence in places like New York, Oakland, Atlanta, Boston, and right here in Asheville, North Carolina.

I’m waiting to see that marching in support of a corporate agenda gets treated equally to marching in opposition to one.

Oh, you know, I love Asheville. Here’s a sampling of what’s happening.

The infamous water bill has made its leisurely way through the NCGA. Nobody expects any miracles on that one, so we can all look forward to the day the MSD takes over, Henderson county gets a big share of our resources, and the privatization theory espoused by many gets its test for real.

Oh, and lest we forget the preview we got of that happy future this week, please keep this picture by the inimitable Bill Rhodes close to your heart. Six million gallons of poop gushing out into the Stench Broad, or rather the French Broad river.

Don’t worry though. There’s yet another festival heading our way. Or two, or three.

This week in beer tourism: Rocket girl gets named as “best lawnmower beer” by some outfit out west. Nicely done.

Speaking of tourism, there will be another new hotel coming up. The Three Brothers property got sold, and it looks like the ‘mission alley Hilton’ will be breaking ground very soon. I’d give it another two years at best before the missions and everything else in the triangle of Haywood Street, Patton and North French Broad is in a major transition towards the Disneyland master plan for Asheville. Not necessarily a bad thing, but I’m just saying. If it looks like a fake town and smells like a fake town the “keep Asheville weird” contingent will have lost that battle.

And, as is happening more and more lately, because Asheville has become something of a test case for right wing legislative overreach, you should be familiar with this piece in Business Week. It is becoming the cool thing in town to be able to quote the national press stories about ourselves.

One final note: Tim Moffitt, Thom Tillis and some other high-profile defilers of North Carolina are off in Oklahoma this weekend, at an ALEC conference. No doubt they will return with some new and even more heinous legislative favors for the corporate overlords whose favor they garner at these posh events. Moffitt will have to run again next year, and I hope that when he does, his association with ALEC is a major issue.

North Carolina House Bill 705 was introduced in April of 2011. One of its primary sponsors was Tim Moffitt. Its aim was to lighten the burden of private well owners by getting the Environmental Management Commission and the Commission for Public Health off the backs of the citizens. This bill was to do away with local health department testing and inspection of almost all private wells. To quote Mr. Moffitt:

North Carolina’s citizens ought not be unjustly burdened in this way. And Representative Moffitt does not feel it is fair for working people to be forced to pay thousands of dollars in fines and emergency “repairs” so they can drink their own water.

Without the participation of local health departments, the quality of that water would presumably have fallen wholly to the DENR, the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources, and would have taken place strictly at the state level. No special accommodations were being planned at that time to enable the DENR to actually do anything with respect to the drinking water in the state. No increase in budget, no special mandate, no new rules, no guidance from the NCGA.

At the time it looked like an effort to do away with the possibility of discovering environmental damage in the face of an accelerated time-table for the implementation of Fracking in North Carolina. No testing equals no bad news. No bad news means all is well. The DENR was clearly not going to be able to enforce water standards on a local level with any diligence. It appeared that putting the people at risk to pursue private corporate profits was the order of the day.

Interestingly, a year later it emerged that the DENR had failed to engage on the issue of poisons in the drinking water on a large scale in Wake Forrest. It was eventually acknowledged that the DENR had known about the contamination, but had not raised an alarm. This precipitated a necessary change in the politics.

So this year we get a new song from the Republican legislature, and its seeming barometer of style, Tim Moffitt. His latest web entry highlights HB396, which directs the same Commission for Public Health that was an onerous burden on the backs of the common citizen in 2011, to implement a plan through local health departments to educate the well owners across the state on the availability of an necessity of well testing, inform the public of the results of the testing and make sure that everyone knows that the testing is available.

It does not take much of a leap to realize that this is at least a little bit hypocritical, and that the current law is not so much a product of Republican values as Republican CYA.

The reality is that Moffitt, like most of his Republican colleagues, is weak on the environment, being more concerned with getting rid of state bureaucracies and all the registrations, obligations and regulations and their presumed impositions on the citizens than with the actual public good that those things might bring. It also does not help that he has bought in to the apparent Republican theory that all power and control should be concentrated in Raleigh, whether it makes sense to do so or not.

But being one of those coldly calculating politicians who never lets his past or his preferences dictate his present, Moffitt is now making the appropriate noises on his website, and getting behind the new paradigm on water safety.

Don’t fall for it. There will be other attacks on the integrity of our water. It seems to be a fetish with this guy. The dollar signs he sees on the horizon will overcome any convenient temporary concern.

If I’ve got this straight a few years from now here’s what could be happening:

The cities are emptying out at an alarming rate thanks to the policies put in place by the North Carolina Republican government of 2013. State control of infrastructure assets sapped money from cities across the state and forced them to raise taxes substantially. Limits on zoning, annexation and an active revenue redistribution effort took money out of the cities and put it into the rural and suburban areas, which quite naturally grew rapidly.

The decay in the cities further eroded the tax base so that the rapidly growing areas that used to exist in sync with their nearby urban hubs had to raise their taxes too, pushing the development farther and farther out into what once would have been considered “the country” leaving an empty inner circle of crime-ridden poverty in the wake.

Agriculture, forests, and the state’s ecological balance are all toast because of the conflict from the badly mismanaged growth, ignorance about the changing climate, and the recent statewide development of a thriving fracking industry.

The tourism that once kept North Carolina afloat financially has dried up. The oil rigs along the shoreline, with their occasional accidents, the pollution from fracking, the new Nuclear plants, and the general degradation of the environment in the higher elevations of the western part of the state did away with all of that.

Meanwhile, charter schools with little oversight, no enforceable standards for teachers, and no means of public scrutiny are not producing educated children and in fact several scandals have erupted. But the police state that modern schools have turned into thanks to the arming of the untrained, unguided and unaccountable teachers have the behavior problem pretty much in control.

However, the prison system is groaning from the weight of all the extra inmates culled from the schools. Children that used to be behavior problems, weird or freaky are now criminalized at an early age and once indoctrinated into the criminal justice system, never make it out.

College enrollment dropped off significantly after a series of laws to restrict the voting rights of students, and efforts to financially punish the parents of those students led to a drastic cycle of tuition hikes, reduced funding, and a general degradation of North Carolina’s once stellar reputation for education.

The adopted state Church of the Free Market Magic Jesus has become another line in the state budget, and the legislature is busy fighting a protracted court case stemming from it’s efforts to make attendance mandatory for all citizens. The constitutionality of a new law criminalizing any sexual orientation, attraction or behavior considered unorthodox has also been in contention, although the federal administration of President Cruz has been very supportive of the state’s policy, and similar laws are on the books or being crafted in twenty one other states, mostly traditional Republican strongholds. Once the sovereignty of states challenge brought to national attention by the North Carolina government was upheld by the right wing Supreme Court, pretty much all bets were off as far as personal freedoms.

And in Raleigh, Governor Moffitt, in his third term oversees the continuing struggle to see free market capitalism finally succeed and bring forth the utopian vision of economic and social perfection. Reports are that he still has occasional trouble keeping his twitter account from being “hacked” by his own staff.