Category: Public Events

This category will encompass all posts for public events at Emory University or local Atlanta areas.

November 7 & 10: “NO to Erasure of Transgender People”, protest organized by RefuseFascism

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The text for this post has been quoted from Refuse Fascism’s social media circulations about the same events.

 

***2 SEPARATE EVENTS AND DATES 11/7 & 11/10 see info below***

Nov 7_No to erasure of transgender people_refusefascism event

November 7, 6:00 pm “No to erasure of transgender people”, protest event organized by Refuse Fascism, Atlanta chapter

Regardless of whether you voted…
No matter who wins
We Must Be In the Streets,
Beginning the Day After the Midterm Elections
TO DEMAND AND DEMONSTRATE OUR DETERMINATION THAT:
IN THE NAME OF HUMANITY,
THE TRUMP/PENCE REGIME MUST GO!

Protest Wednesday, November 7 – the day after the midterms and
Protest Saturday, November 10

-Nov. 7: Protest, 6pm, CNN Center (Marietta St. and Centennial Olympic Park Dr.)
-Nov. 10: Rally/Speakout – 1pm – MLK Jr. National Historical Park in Peace Plaza (Auburn Ave. & Jackson St.)

This is not a “normal” election season.
11 people murdered in a synagogue while they worshipped, allegedly by a man with a terrifying record of unbridled antisemitism.
15 pipe bombs sent to former presidents, high ranking officials, media institutions, and others who have been repeatedly targeted by Trump.

Two Black people murdered, allegedly by a man who spewed racist epithets and had just been denied entry to an African-American church.

Through it all, Trump never backed off his hate-filled, fascist rhetoric on the campaign trail. Rather, he ramped it up.

Trump’s “Make America Great Again” is a 21st century fascist program of Manifest Destiny – “America First” – wrapped in the flag and Mike Pence’s Bible taken literally, with a program of white supremacy, misogyny, and xenophobia.

Stopping this rapidly escalating fascism cannot be done through the normal process of elections!

Millions of us are shocked and horrified by what is happening, but that only matters if we dare to act in a way that can stop this nightmare. Ultimately, this means millions in the streets day after day, refusing to stop until the whole regime has been removed.
On November 7th and November 10th, join a different kind of protest movement, one that refuses to get swept up in another election cycle that buys our silence and capitulation to fascism, and instead demonstrates our singular demand and determination that:

This Nightmare Must End: The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go! In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America!

November 5, 12:00 pm, Redlight the Gulch Rally, with Brother Haroun, the Housing Justice League, and others

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Event: Nov 5, Monday, 12:00 pm, Redlight the Gulch

              Event: Nov 5, Monday, 12:00 pm, Redlight the Gulch

On Monday City Council will vote to approve or deny the Gulch development plan and we need to show up in force to demand that they VOTE NO! We are going to rally before the vote and pack the house to send the message that we will NOT stand for the Gulch plan to go through. 

#RedlightTheGulch rally will be at 12pm on Mitchell St. outside of City Hall. The City Council meeting will follow. WEAR RED!

Learn more about why this is a horrible deal for Atlanta here: redlightthegulch.com 

TOP 10 REASONS WHY THE GULCH PROJECT IS BAD FOR ATLANTA:
1. Public cost is 55 times the public benefit. This is a grossly disproportionate cost/benefit in CIM’s favor. Council has done well to hold it. This deal is so terrible that Council now needs to walk away from it. You don’t negotiate when the gap is so enormous between what the billionaires are demanding from the public and what their scheme is worth to the public

2. Public cost is about $2.5Bn at 2018 prices, of which $2Bn is property tax and $0.5bn in sales tax. In return, public benefits are only worth about $45mm. Details are broken out below. 

3. When the public is putting in as much as 50% of the cost to develop a private, commercial project, the public should own 40% of it. Instead, we will own nothing. The only explanation for this grotesque imbalance of advantage is CIM’s Abject Greed.

4. The numbers. Property tax on a $5bn project when it’s complete – in 2032, per developer’s schedule – would be $90mm / yr. APS (the schools) would be losing out on $45mm / yr and the city and county $22.5mm / yr each. 

5. Despite all the smoke from the project’s boosters, this lost property tax really IS a cost to the public. Because if offices, hotels etc. are NOT built in a tax-free Gulch, they will be built in taxable parts of town, such as Tech Square, Midtown, S Downtown, Atlantic Station, Buckhead and around the Beltline. If CIM does not get this deal, the demand for office space, etc. will be met by developers in places where new construction pays taxes. In other words, this Gulch scheme ‘cannibalizes’ a massive amount of commercial growth and deprives the city and schools of future revenues for 30 years.

6. The same is true of the sales tax. This scheme would short the city and the state of some $500mm at 2018 prices thru 2048. Retail sales demand is not going to be created by putting stores in the Gulch. Those sales are going to happen somewhere in town, and the only question is whether they pay tax to the state and the general fund or not. Again the Gulch scheme would ‘cannibalize’ or displace retail activity in town and rob the state and city of tax revenues needed to pay for public services. So the total revenue loss IS $2.5 Billion. That is over $5,000 per man, woman and child resident in the city. It is equivalent to a $20,000 donation or more from every family of four in Atlanta to the billionaire Ressler brothers. 

7. The public benefits that have been dribbled out amount to around $45mm. The different cash funds are easy to add up: $42mm (though with no guarantee they’ll be spent to create real community benefit). The 200 housing units affordable at 80% AMI are worth only about $3mm, because CIM can sell them off after 3 years as rentals. CIM could sell the 200 units at prices for which a buyer would need an income 20% higher than the area median. By definition, that’s not affordable. Forget the claim that there might be some extra units for low-income folks: that’s only if AHA pays for them, which means it costs CIM nothing. 

8. The hard sell for this deal pretends that it brings 37,000 jobs to town. That is nonsense. Employers bring jobs to town – over 40,000 new jobs have moved here in the past 6 years – NCR, Worldpay, Honeywell, Anthem, Kaiser and so on. They locate here for our competitive talent, universities and airport. Office towers do not bring jobs here. (If they did, we’d have had no unemployment in the great recession, because we sure had masses of empty office towers, including the biggest – Bank of America Plaza.) So the scheme does not bring one single job here. CIM is betting that the city will continue to attract employers to fill the huge office towers that they are planning to construct. But this scheme does nothing to attract those company relocations. In fact, if Council allows this crazily one-sided deal, smart company executives will question the city’s financial responsibility. They’ll wonder if a city too busy to think can be trusted to provide good
schools and public services for their employees.

9. Similarly the CIM sales pitch takes credit for 1800 construction jobs. But office towers are going to be built in the city to meet employer demand. So the same construction jobs will be here, whether those offices are built in the Gulch or in S Downtown and elsewhere. Handing over a $2.5bn subsidy will not result in more offices being built than are needed – or more construction jobs.

10. The final arm-twist on Council has been a Norfolk Southern deal. NS wants us to give this enormous subsidy to CIM so that NS can sell Gulch land to CIM at a big profit. There’s nothing in that for the public. But NS might move 1,000 HQ people here in a consolidation. To justify a $2.5bn subsidy, we’d need not 1,000 jobs but about 700,000 jobs! That’s around three times the entire number of jobs in the city. It’s also 14 times the size of Amazon’s HQ2, for those who still imagine HQ2 will choose Atlanta.

October 29 event_HJL

Stop Using Eminent Domain to Displace Black Residents

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** the following details have been pulled from the social media post by the Housing Justice League **

October 29 event_HJL

October 29: Stop Using Eminent Domain to Displace Black Residents

Peoplestown Residents Return to Court To Prove City’s Fraudulent Use of Eminent Domain in Peoplestown

Date: Monday October 29, 2018

Time: 1:45 p.m.

Location: Fulton County Superior Court/ 185 Central Ave SW/ Atlanta, GA 30303

Peoplestown residents return to court after Judge Schwall directed the City to bring former city engineer working on the proposed park/pond project to testify as to whether the houses that have been taken by the City were necessary for the plan. Emails authored by this engineer noting “no technical data” supporting the City’s proposed project, motivated Judge Schwall at an August 5, 2018 hearing to schedule another hearing to further consider the City’s motives for taking property in Peoplestown.

Resident Tanya Washington, the subject of the hearing, and her neighbors on the block have been targeted by the City for the past 5 years to take their homes to build a park, pond, waterfall and large gazebo. The City has maintained that it needs every home on the block to address flooding in the neighborhood. However, at a previous hearing the City’s star witness, Department of Watershed engineer Todd Hill was presented with a 2013 email by an engineer from his office that communicated that the flooding could be addressed without the block. In response to a direct question from Judge Schwall about the veracity of the document, Todd Hill testified, “I don’t know.” The hearing on Oct. 29 will reveal once and for all that this property was not necessary for the proposed project. Unfortunately, the truth will be too late for the 22 homes that have been demolished and the families forced to move at the direction of the City of Atlanta.

The outcome in this case will create precedence that will either protect residents against these types of land grabs by the City using eminent domain or it will give the green light to city officials, authorizing them to steal peoples’ homes under fraudulent pretenses. Resident Washington said, “I do not intend for my name to be in the caption of a case that is used to displace people in Atlanta. Five and a half years of my life has been consumed by this fight with my neighbors to defend our property against unlawful taking by the City of Atlanta. We will fight this until the bitter end!” In light of the Atlanta’s reputation as the City with the most economic inequality between the haves and the have nots, the dearth of affordable housing in the City and the rapid gentrification of Atlanta neighborhoods, this case is particularly timely and important.

powerlines_documentary screening_October 25

Georgia’s Plant Vogtle nuclear expansion – Forage Films premiere, October 25th, 7:00 PM

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Emory University’s Center for Ethics will host the debut screening of Forage Films’ short documentary Power Lines, chronicling the addition of two new nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle, located in Waynesboro, Georgia. The screening will take place on October 25th at 7:00 PM.

The film follows the construction of these new units, which are already five years behind schedule and more than $13 billion over original cost estimates. These overages directly affect ratepayers across Georgia, who are financing the construction through a fee on their monthly power bills, a process fraught with mismanagement and lacking in transparency. These ratepayer payments significantly enrich Georgia

Power’s yearly profits, giving them little incentive to ensure the project’s timely completion.

Power Lines also sheds light on the even more dire significance Plant Vogtle holds for the surrounding communities in Waynesboro, Georgia. While residents recognize the potential economic opportunity the additional reactors offer (over 40% of the population lives below the poverty line), they also bring significant environmental and health hazards, not to mention grave concerns surrounding serious flaws in their design.

Power Lines educates Georgians about a widely unknown issue that not only impacts their total power bill every month, but dictates which lines of power they are up against for their day-to-day health and environmental safety concerns.
 
The public screenings will be followed by a panel discussion on Plant Vogtle, featuring experts and residents.
please click here to access a press release by Power Lines about this documentary film.