Kemper Coal: Plan to Add New Revenue

   Mississippi Power Company's "clean coal" Kemper County Energy Facility's cost overruns now have become a regular bad news story in local newspapers. Original project cost of $2 billion has ballooned to $6.4 billion and is still growing like kudzu. The Supreme Court forced the company to refund $350 million in refunds to its 186,000 customers, money that was part of an illegal rate increase.

   South Mississippi electric power co-ops have already bailed out of their planned 15 percent share of the Kemper coal plant and MS Power has agreed to refund their $275 million in deposits, plus interest. Top management is reportedly continuing to “explore future financing options.”  

   Their most promising "future financing option" is said to involve a quiet partnership between Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey and MS Power Company designed to produce "a projected long term revenue stream."
 
   The plan uses a clever PR approach which takes advantage of the well established public image of the Kemper project as a "white elephant" by actually exhibiting one of the rare white pachyderms on lease from Ringling Brothers.

   In the photo above, the white elephant, called Captain Kempie, seems to have a free run of the plant's white elephant area and a large circus tent has already been erected. Tickets reportedly go on sale "soon" statewide for a chance for the whole family to "see a white elephant up close," both under the big top . . . and all around it. Kids will each get a free red Mississippi Power Cost Cap!

Univ of Mississippi: What's in a Name?

"Ole Miss" giving a 'clear starching' to her slaves
This 1837 etching by August Hervieu depicts an irate plantation mistress
scolding two household servants. The slaves cower, carefully hiding
whatever anger or resentment they might feel behind a submissive pose.

Ever wonder where The University of Mississippi got its sweet Old South and seemingly innocuous  name, "Ole Miss?" I had no idea at all of its origins until I ran across an Associated Press article today about a  law suit underway by the Sons of Confederate Veterans against The University of Mississippi for daring to make name changes to 'Confederate Drive,' which enters Fraternity Row, being renamed ‘Chapel Lane.’ Seems the SCV way back when had a state law written that prohibits removal or alteration of war memorials on state property.

The short Associated Press article was used in a regional South Mississippi online daily news web site I check every morning. Having lived in Mississippi for almost 35 years I was dumbfounded to read that "Ole Miss" was originally what slaves used to refer to a plantation owner's wife. And that same 19th century slaves' reference continues to be used today with great fondness, innocently or otherwise, by students and proud alumni of "Ole Miss." Checking around I found more detail in the original story published September 24th, 2014 in the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal.

Serious progress has been made at the University of Mississippi by forceful movers for change like former Chancellor, Robert Khyat. His steady, patient leadership was effective in distancing the University's image from memories of the Ole Miss campus riots of 1962. This climb up out of a darker past has been recognized across the USA.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans are free to preserve civil war history and to take pride in being descendents of those who fought to continue their percieved right to own slaves and keep them in forced labor from dawn to dusk in the sprawling cotton fields of Mississippi. That pride, however, gives them no right to sue to keep what they deem to be offensive street names, monuments and other symbols from being updated or placed into a modern day context.

I think most of us can still see the black and white film of James Meredith being walked into the university doors of by Federal Agents through a gauntlet of shouting, taunting and threatening students as well as rabid local white segregationists, in the bad old days of Ole Miss. I thought this state had long gotten way past all of that, at least publicly.

But the Good Old Boys, parading under the flutter of a huge Confederate Flag are still living back in the Civil War Days and have a string of their law suits to prove that they and their ilk have not gotten past a damned thing, and don't want to.

Chancellor Khyat, a true Gandhi on the Delta, moved and operated carefully and thoughtfully as he guided the University of Mississippi from its immovable granite rock 19th century attitudes of class and race to an excellence-based school of true learning that hosted the first 2008 presidential debate.

And what about the little Confederate flags that used to fill the stands at Ole Miss football games? The mini Civil War battle flags painted the stadium with the symbolic color pallet of Ole Miss, and its colored past. Khyat removed them from the riotous and pride-filled stadiums not by flatly outlawing the flags. He simply outlawed sticks of any kind from entering the gates . . . even the short ones to which little flags can be stapled. This allowed everyone to look sideways at the dual meanings of the stars and bars ... innocent school spirit or racist banner. And they quickly disappeared from Ole Miss games and eventually from the Ole Miss campus, neither side really wishing to create another nasty uproar.

Robert Khyat was Chancellor from 1995 until his retirement in 2009. He led his University and a steadily growing contingent of forward thinking and fair minded leaders in Mississippi into a new era. He saw the the Confederate Battle Flag, Colonel Reb, the school's mascot, and the old Southern Anthem, "Dixie" all leave the University Campus. But when Khyat retired five years ago, the University was still called "Ole Miss," and it still is. Even Gandhi could effect just so much change.

Poking around a little, I found that this past August 1st, present Ole Miss Chancellor, Dan Jones, unveiled a six-point plan which would include adding a new Vice Chancellor For Diversity. Plaques are to be placed at "racially divisive sites to add modern context to their symbolism." The announcement said that Jones, "... also defined a shift in the common use of the term “Ole Miss” for close identification with athletics and school spirit." So school spirit and "athletics" still will have 19th century slave slang for a plantation owner's wife from which to draw their pride and inspiration. Jones clearly is no Gandhi but he knows a hot potato when he sees one. Too bad potatoes on his campus aren't on sticks.

Ole Miss is not the only Civil War reference alive and well in Mississippi. There are still countless sacred old Mississippi names with painful segregationist roots adorning places public and private across the state. A good example is the large Forrest General Hospital in Hattiesburg which serves a 17-county area. It is named for Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general well remembered for being accused of war crimes at the Battle of Fort Pillow for allowing troops under his command to massacre hundreds of black Union Army and white Southern Unionist prisoners. And, oh, he was also the very first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. But, otherwise it is a very good hospital.

Mississippi's state flag is the sole remaining U.S. state flag with the Confederate battle flag's crossed blue saltire. Even Georgia adopted a new flag in 2001. If there is no political will to do anything about the use of the old reference to a slave owner's wife as the popular sobriquet for The University of Mississippi, then maybe the ESPN and major Network sports announcers can effect some change.

Most all the major NFL announcers now refer to the NFL football team from the state of Washington only as "Washington" never saying "Washington Redskins" because that name has increasingly become offensive to a majority of their American viewers.

So, maybe if the big buck college football networks and their announcers became aware of where the Ole Miss Rebels got their name, even Mississippi's good old boy hands-off politicians and big business titans might finally be pulled into the 21st century by their purse strings. "The University of Mississippi Rebels" would work fine. There are all kinds of rebels, including civil rights workers.

*The 1837 etching above is from the University of Rochester Frederic Douglass Project

Hitting the Petro-Jackpot: Everyone loses

Winds, tides and ocean currents, changing like spinning wheels on a slot machine, have finally lined up to announce a Petro-Jackpot! Floating and submerged oily, syrupy petroleum filth is the unwelcome payoff as it finally glides into the Mississippi Sound.

BP's uncontrolled gusher of oil has assaulted our protective pristine offshore barrier islands and now is flowing into the shallow marine nursery grounds off the Mississippi coastal shoreline. The gulf is carpeted with long wide dark and slimy rainbow slivers and miles of weathered henna colored crude oil mousse that bob and drift toward the horizon. This menace is now within sight of our miles of white beachfront along coastal Highway 90.

The futility of pleading "Somebody do something!" becomes evident. Trying to skim and contain the millions of gallons of floating oil before it comes ashore is like trying to scoop up and dispose of billions of flu germs from ten thousand sneezes. Oil, assisted by a rolling sea, splashes over and eases under so-called oil containment booms. Also consider that we have had a daily heat index here averaging 100º to 108º for the past month. Suffocating heat adds to the futility of trying to sop up oil and tar before it arrives to coat the blazing beach sand.

All the political rhetoric, naive denial and assurances that "Our Beaches" are pristine and somehow exempt from the nautical nuance of Ma Nature, has stopped. The hastily produced TV commercials showing happy kids splashing along our water's edge, and couples strolling on the beach with a setting sun turning the water golden have been pulled off the air.

Now multi-faceted environmental damage begins right here on the beaches and in the seafood-rich waters fronting Gulfport and Biloxi. Recovering from this long term damage will not be like recovering from Hurricanes Camille and Katrina. The area around Valdez, Alaska has yet to truly recover from a much smaller amount of oil carelessly loosed on its shores 21 years ago when a fully loaded Exxon oil tanker ran aground splitting open its tanks releasing its load of crude.

Looking at today's NOAA oil trajectory map, above, one can visualize a double lobed, fat tube of 30-weight toothpaste being squeezed, with the cap having been unscrewed right at the flat line just off Gulfport. Governor Haley Barbour has urged churches to have special prayer services. I wonder if entreaties to a higher power to cause the deluge to somehow miss "our area" suggest that the glop would be prayed away to "some other area?" This has puzzled me since I was a little kid.

During an active hurricane season here a few years ago a large evangelical church's sign on a main Gulfport street proclaimed, "Glory . . . God turned the storm!"

A category three hurricane, indeed, veered away from our coast right into Florida causing several deaths and terrible destruction in the tens of millions of dollars.

How about we call off the location-specific prayer tug-of-war and instead all go take a nice walk down the beach in a couple of weeks?

There's lots of power in reality checks too.

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Mississippi Politics: Oily denial and delusion

Growing up in Texas I was sure politics couldn't get any stinkier, any dumber or any more corrupt than ours. Then later in life I moved to Mississippi and soon saw that Texas politics pales in all categories of underachievement and good-old-boy domination when compared to the Magnolia State.

But Mississippi politics is generally endured much like mosquitoes, stifling summer heat and down here on the gulf coast, hurricanes. Katrina wiped most of the edge of the state off the map in 2005. We had just gotten the place more or less back in shape and looking very good again, then April 20th, 2010, 25 days ago, a British Petroleum offshore oil well in 5,000 feet of water suffered a "worst case scenario." And by now it looks like it is even worse than that.

After a lethal fire, explosion and sinking of a leased drilling rig that killed 11 workers, oil began gushing into the Gulf of Mexico uncontrollably from a mile below. For almost a month now, millions of gallons of crude oil continue to escape, out of control. The entire world has been following news reports on British Petroleum's failed attempts to stop the flow and to deal with a catastrophe that worsens daily.

Winds and currents have kept the spill off Mississippi shores so far, but the petroleum odor from hundreds of square miles of floating oil some 40 miles offshore has been noticeable here in communities all along the coast.

About a week and a half ago the moment I stepped outside with the dogs to take a morning walk a heavy, oily, almost diesel-like smell filled the air. A steady south wind was blowing. As we got to the park, folks were stopping to ask one another if they "could smell that." We all could.

And the vagaries of wind and air currents has brought the petroleum smell back several more times. Folks have been calling city officials and health departments. There have been several mentions of the oily smell up and down the coast by local news media. Folks with severe asthma were told to check with the doctor if it really got bad. But it was not a really big deal.

Then day before yesterday one of our esteemed politicos, Lt. Governor Phil Bryant, had his photo on the front page of the morning paper with the headline, "Bryant Doesn't Smell The Oil." The Sun Herald's article reported that, "Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant’s response to people in South Mississippi who’ve said they can smell oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf is, 'No, you can’t.'

"Speaking at Wednesday’s Coastal Development Strategies Conference, Bryant said the smell may be coming from their lawn mowers. 'That is not gasoline coming out of the Gulf,' he said."

Bryant, who back slapped his way to hosting the National Association of Lieutenant Governors in July in Biloxi went on about the BP disaster noting it is "not the Exxon Valdez." Phil was as oily and about as crude as his odorless oil out there declaring there is nothing to worry about, "Y'all come on down here, you hear!"

Bryant's imperial pronouncement that no one was smelling anything except lawnmower fumes followed the blithe May 1 pronouncement from Mississippi U.S. Rep. Gene Taylor, after a quick fly-over of the gathering spill that, “It’s not as bad as I thought. “It’s breaking up naturally; that’s a good thing. The fact that it’s a long way from the Mississippi Gulf Coast, that’s a great thing, because it gives it time to break up naturally."

Taylor, a supposed Democrat, whose voting record would make Senator Mitch McConnell proud, was already fast becoming very unpopular for his dullness and increasingly regular trips to the all you can eat lobbyist campaign contribution buffet. His remarks exhibiting no real concern for the potential offshore threat elicited an outraged reaction from folks up and down the coast. Taylor's political future seems to breaking up naturally as well.

It is completely understandable that area chambers of commerce, businesses and our tourism and seafood industries want to get out the word that our beaches are still clean, seafood is fresh, and that we are open for business. We might well dodge the worst of the damage along with Alabama and Florida. But selling that idea as the oil spill grows, heaves and moves at the whim of sea currents and surface winds is tough to pull off.

Having political buffoons telling the world that folks here aren't smelling anything but lawnmower fumes, and that the oil is "breaking up naturally" only serves to rob any planned promotional campaign of any credibility it may have.

And I haven't even mentioned our Governor, Haley Barbour, who made the national news recently after he declared, dew laps swinging, "When you're a fat redneck like me and got an accent like mine you can say, 'well they're gonna hold me to a higher standard.'"

Higher than what, Governor? The next high tide?

graphic by Larry Ray

Disasters Past and Present: Haiti's Horror Hits Home

Many of my fading memories of scenes of destruction, death and total loss have come back into sharp focus as I watch the constant news reports from Haiti. The video of dazed, thirsty, injured and frustrated disaster victims who have lost everything is still painfully familiar.

The photo above is not of the magnitude 7.3 earthquake damage in Haiti. It is a NOAA satellite photo of my hometown on the Mississippi gulf coast taken just after hurricane Katrina slammed ashore almost five years ago pushing a 30 foot storm surge from the Gulf of Mexico over our coastal communities. The tidal surge pushed back up into inland bays, rivers and bayous forcing water into houses up to their ceilings just a few blocks from my home. I was grateful to have only lost a side roof.

Along the beach front, homes and belongings, large buildings, automobiles and those souls unable to escape the wind and rising water were smashed together and broken apart in the powerful deep wind driven tidal swirl. The splintered debris washed inland or was sucked back out into the Mississippi Sound. Stark, bare foundations are all that remained of stately homes, churches and businesses for more than 50 miles along the coast. Only a few centuries-old Oak trees remained, still defiantly claiming their ground.

Haiti's earthquake took 300 years to slowly build up sufficient energy for the fault zone beneath the island to finally vault violently upward. Mighty seismic ripples heaved up and down, racing outward with energy said to equal to 35,000 atomic bombs. In a blink, structures in and around the capitol city of Port-au-Prince were leveled or perilously damaged.

Thousands died instantly, and untold thousands more were buried beneath impenetrable debris. As I write this it has been five days since the quake hit at about ten o'clock in the evening. The epicenter was beneath one of the island's most populated areas.

While Haiti's death and destruction happened in less than one minute, those of use who rode out Katrina in our homes were hammered for eleven hours with heavy rain and sustained winds reaching more than 140 miles an hour. Hurricane Katrina was the largest natural disaster in the history of the United States with damage estimates well in excess of $150 billion. At least 1,836 people lost their lives in the actual hurricane along the Mississippi gulf coast and in resulting floods in New Orleans from levee failures. Haiti's death toll has reached 50,000 as I publish this article and will possibly go into the hundreds of thousands.

While trying to compare the victims in Haiti with the American victims of Hurricane Katrina may seem a real stretch, there are, nonetheless, some valid commonalities. Regardless of skin color, rich or poor, educated or not, thirst is thirst and hunger is hunger. Broken bones and painful injuries feel the same in Haiti today as they felt here five years ago when roads were blocked and help had to be coordinated while we waited, doing the best we could do.

The desperation and suffering in New Orleans where effective rescue and help was very slow in coming was more like what we are seeing in Haiti today. Across New Orleans survivors sought shade and drinkable water in the sweltering August heat for days on end. Many large residential sections of the city were flooded beneath a dark putrid swill that reached the rooftops and remained there for days.

National news coverage quickly shifted from the much more extensive hurricane damage along the entire Mississippi Coastline to the crisis in New Orleans. Flooding in large areas of the bowl shaped city, below sea level, did not result directly from the hurricane, but from inadequate protective levees too long ignored by our Federal Corps of Engineers, and the politicians who approve and fund their projects. But the media suffered little deprivation. The undamaged French Quarter and Bourbon Street was open in a matter of days. There was no flooding or serious damage in the metro center of the city.

But after the dead are buried, debris is removed, and urgent aid is finally provided, there is a huge difference in long term recovery between Haiti and America.

A majority of Haitian citizens live on one dollar a day and governmental control was only recently becoming effective after decades of dictatorial rule and unchecked violence. There is no concept of FEMA in Haiti. Violence and sporadic looting has reportedly broken out in parts of Port-au-Prince. People have not had food or water for almost five days. The dead are putrefying in the streets. Tons of food, water and medical aid from the USA and around the world are piling up at the only airport waiting for Haitian bureacrats, the UN, and many other countries to agree on an aid distribution plan. Desperation is spreading in the streets of Port-au-Prince.

We must remember that violence also broke out in New Orleans after several days when it was clear that no immediate help was coming. Lawlessness, frustration, hunger and opportunistic looting broke out. Shameful racial barriers went up with blacks seeking safety, food and water being turned back by white sheriff's officers on the bridges crossing the Mississippi river over to the basically undamaged West Bank.

It was not a pretty picture. One Parish President near New Orleans was screaming and weeping on national TV because of the seeming total lack of coordinated Federal assistance. Some New Orleans police officers helped themselves to several Cadillacs from a local dealership and did not return them for weeks till the cars were finally located and the cops identified. Haitian looting will not be surprising.

Then there are the political promises too often quickly forgotten after the debris is cleared away and the news media have left in their TV trucks. I can still see Jackson Square in the partially darkened New Orleans French Quarter all professionally illuminated under careful White House direction so George W. Bush could go on national television to make promises. He promised that government would "do whatever it takes" to help those in the Katrina disaster area completely recover assuring us he "would not forget you."

Mr. Cheney walked the streets of Gulfport with local officials nodding and promising. Ultimately, government FEMA money did help many individuals here. But the inflexible, poorly managed bureaucracy allowed wide scale fraud to flourish while red tape prevented many from getting needed help. Basically, strong local leadership has led us to a notable recovery in our major coastal cities. Mr. Bush's well staged promises have had little to do with our hard earned recovery so far. The $11.3 trillion national debt he left us only makes things more difficult for everyone.

Truth is that many smaller towns up the coast west of here are still begging for a grocery store. Whole sewer and water systems are being rebuilt, keeping streets torn up. Detours are legion. Doctors and many other professionals who left have not returned. But a new kind of life goes on.

New Orleans, however, still has huge problems with entire sections of the city nothing but block after block of sagging, mildew and varmint infested homes surrounded by overgrown weeds. The leadership vacuum there is palpable. What happened to millions of recovery dollars for Louisiana and particularly New Orleans remains a mystery.

So now try to imagine the total rebuilding that Haiti faces. The horrible irony is that Haiti was finally enjoying an end to violence through effective police protection and people were united for the first time in recent memory. Schools had opened, street markets were busy, and long-shuttered clothing manufacturing factories had just opened again. Name brand companies from around the globe were visiting almost daily to take advantage of Haiti's well trained sewing and fabric cutting work force. Then in an instant it was all gone.

The world is being extremely generous with millions of dollars pouring in daily to help Haiti. Promises to rebuild the country are coming from many nations. Can the downtrodden Haitians, raised in a failed state, surrounded for decades with the cruel realities of oppression and poverty believe these promises? It is difficult for the very poor to do. But this could be the rebirth of a vital Haiti if strong leadership and close supervision insure all the promises are kept.

A future article will visit what has happened to the promises and money designated for the poor here in Mississippi after Katrina. It is not a nice story.