Comment on this story Wednesday, July 21 • The News Sentinel reports that a California man is offering a $5,000 reward for the safe return of his pet, an 8-year-old Senegal parrot apparently bird-napped from a local parking lot. A citywide search turns up a number of parrots in the vicinity, but all of them prove to be left over from the previous mayoral administration, and none of them are appraised at anywhere near five grand. Thursday, July 22 • TVA board director Bill Baxter orders his executives to stop expending company funds on expensive “business meetings” wherein VIP guests are lavished with lobster dinners, top-shelf liquor, and $45 cigars. Executives maintain that such affairs “foster good relations” with big customers. A former TVA insider concludes that a rub-and-tug at one of our fine local Asian massage parlors would foster plenty of good relations, at way less than half the cost. Friday, July 23 • News Flash: The Sentinel prints a feature story announcing that county residents can help prevent traffic hazards by strapping in unwieldy vehicular cargo so that it doesn’t spill out onto the road. We can’t imagine what kind of low-grade moron needs to be reminded of something as elementary as that. Saturday, July 24 • News Flash: The Sentinel reports that an Ohio man was responsible for a five-mile traffic jam on I-75 near Emory Road Friday when his unsecured sailboat fell off its trailer and into the road. Disregard previous item. Sunday, July 25 • Also in a Sentinel story, both candidates vying to fill the retiring Dr. Paul Kelley’s Knox County school board seat acknowledge that, try as they may, they will be unable to “fill Kelley’s shoes.” Some observers suggest that filling his socks and underwear might be more negotiable. The candidates politely decline. Monday, July 26 • The Associated Press tell us that a gubernatorial representative was recently presented with a jug of Campbell County creekwater filled with dirt and sediment, intended to demonstrate the runoff pollution that results from mountaintop mining. For reasons that should be readily deduced, the governor’s rep declined a like sample intended to demonstrate the overflow pollution resulting from recent KUB sewer woes. Tuesday, July 27 • University of Tennessee head football coach Phillip Fulmer says he refuses to attend SEC Media Days in Birmingham this week for fear that a group of attorneys involved in various NCAA-related lawsuits will turn the event into a “legal circus.” Another consideration: Whenever Fulmer leaves on a business trip, UT players have more difficulty posting bond. Knoxville Found What is this? Every week in “Knoxville Found,” we’ll print the photo of a local curiosity. If you’re the first person to correctly identify this oddity, you’ll win a special prize plucked from the desk of the editor (keep in mind that the editor hasn’t cleaned his desk in five years). E-mail your guesses, or send ’em to “Knoxville Found” c/o Metro Pulse, 505 Market St., Suite 300, Knoxville, TN 37902. Last Week’s Photo: According to David Collins, “This is the Signing of the Treaty of the Holston statue at Volunteer Landing. I had the opportunity to work with the artist, Ray Kaskey of Washington D.C., in the development of this project while I was the City Architect.” We send a sincere congratulations out to Mr. Collins for correctly identifying the marker and are pleased to reward him handsomely with a four-pack of Jones Soda. He can swing by the office betwixt 8:30 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. to collect the spoils. Meet Your City A calendar of upcoming public meetings you should attend CITY COUNCIL WORKSHOP Thursday, July 29 5 p.m. City County Building Main Assembly Room 400 Main St. Convention Center Hotel Analysis. KNOX COUNTY SCHOOL BOARD Monday, August 2 5 p.m. Andrew Johnson Building Boardroom 912 S. Gay St. Work session. CITY COUNCIL MEETING Tuesday, Aug. 3 7 p.m. City County Building Main Assembly Room 400 Main St. Regular meeting. KNOX COUNTY SCHOOL BOARD Wednesday, August 4 5 p.m. City County Building Main Assembly Room 400 Main St. Regular meeting.

Cooperative Changes
Knoxville’s food co-op looks to expand, but first it wants a change

The Knoxville Community Food Cooperative board of directors is asking its members to approve a restructuring of its membership system, with an eye to expanding the store and moving to a new location.

The board outlined the proposal at a meeting last week. The current membership structure is a drain on the store’s coffers and makes expanding its services difficult. Currently, members pay $25 a year in dues and receive a 5 percent discount on groceries. But most members end up saving far more than that each year. With about 1,000 members, the co-op takes in around $25,000 a year. However, it gives away about $50,000 a year in discounts to members. In effect, the store is rewarding members each year before it knows whether it will turn a profit.

The difference is made up by non-members who shop at the Broadway Avenue store. And there is little left over to invest back into the store or pay for additional services, board members say.

“I predict you won’t be able to survive in the long-term,” says Marilyn Scholl, a Vermont consultant who advises food cooperatives around the country. “The numbers don’t add up.”

The board is proposing that members buy shares in the store at $25 each and that the discounts be discontinued. Members would have to buy a new share every year to remain active. However, shareholders could sell their share back at any time. People who accumulate eight shares or more would become vested owners.

Money collected from the shares would be spent in one of three ways: invested back into the store; returned to vested members at the end of profitable years; or spent on community functions and charities.

A few current members at the meeting were upset that they might be losing their discounts. “You can give all the money to the co-op, trust them, and maybe they’ll blow it,” one man angrily told the crowd.

Scholl responded that the main reason to invest in the store is to ensure it’s survival. “The reason [people would] invest in it is because they want the store to exist,” she said. “The very existence of the store is your most important benefit.”

Overall, the proposal has so been well-received so far. Jacqueline Arthur, the store’s general manager, said as of last Friday the store had received pledges for almost $10,000 in shares. Members will vote on the proposal at the store’s annual meeting in November.

One of the biggest things the co-op board hopes to accomplish with the restructuring is to expand. The store long ago outgrew its current space, and the board is looking for a new location.

“We’re expanding and relocating, that’s for sure. The big issue is whether we’re moving downtown. We’re going to stay within a three-mile radius,” Arthur said. “If we have strong support we can shoot for the size of store the market study says we can have. Otherwise, we’d have to lower our standards.”

Shoppers have been wanting the store to add a café and deli, which would require an expansion. The current store has 2,100 square feet of retail space. The co-op board has set criteria for what it’s looking for, calling for 5,000-to-7,000 square feet of retail space.

Two other changes were announced at the meeting—the store will start carrying a full line of organically raised meat, fish and poultry in November, and it plans to change its name to Three Rivers Market, in part to let people know anyone can shop there, not just members. More information about the proposed changes is available at the Broadway store.

—Joe Tarr

Il TVA
A trip to Knoxville with a reporter for Il Manifesto

A few weeks ago, we mentioned in Ear to the Ground that a somewhat unusual visitor was browsing downtown—the library, TVA, the brewpub—with a notepad, talking to a variety of locals.

The amiable, stocky 60ish fellow wore a cloth cap and a congenial smile. His name was Marco d’Eramo, and he was here working for Il Manifesto, which he described as the last Communist daily in Europe. One of the sources he spoke with was this reporter.

D’Eramo’s two articles about Knoxville and TVA appeared in Il Manifesto shortly after his visit, in late April and early May. He sent us copies, as we’d requested; the only problem for us, of course, was that they were in Italian. A few readers volunteered to help us translate; the first was Beth Secrist, director of UT’s Language Resource Center, volunteered to translate, for which we’re grateful.

The local features were parts five and six of a series called “A Trip through the New South.” In Part 5, “The Valley of Tennessee,” he begins his discussion of the region, as many travel journalists have, by focusing on downtown Knoxville.

He opens it at a Tuesday-afternoon Hawaiian luau celebrating the opening of the wesTrent condominium development on Market Square, which he calls “the main and practically only square in this East Tennessee capital.” He opens with a conversation with the lovely Susie Dew, masseuse, sometime bellydancer, and aspiring Market Square entrepreneur, talking optimistically about downtown Knoxville as her daughter played outside on the square. He used the Italian word piazza in his article, and found it remarkable that Susie did, too.

Of the luau, forced inside due to the uncertain weather, d’Eramo wrote, “Like all American parties, it begins around 6 and ends around 8:30. As you enter, a plastic lei is placed around your neck.”

That 2,000 people lived downtown, still seems like a lot to modern Knoxvillians—but d’Eramo found it shockingly slight. “The ratio 2,000/800,000 says it all about American suburban society (only one in 400 lives in the city)” he writes, “and perhaps explains why Knoxville is one of the most polluted areas in the U.S.

“And yet, Susie is right to rejoice over the flourishing city center.... But in spite of the enthusiasm of Susie and her friends, there is really little to see and do in downtown Knoxville.”

To be fair, d’Eramo visited on a couple of clammy, gray days early in the week when no one was sitting at the cafe tables, with no big concerts or street festivals to be seen. “One could then ask why so many famous foreigners from Jean-Paul Sartre to [David] Ben Gurion and Jawaharlal Nehru would bother to come here,” he continues. “The reason lies in the twin towers that close in the north side of Market Square, out of proportion to the adjacent low-lying buildings that surround the square.”

He’s talking, of course, about TVA. He outlines the agency’s history, albeit from a leftist point of view. “What distinguishes it from the Leninist slogan (‘Soviet Plus Electrification’) is tourism,” d’Eramo writes, outlining TVA lakes’ recreational charms.

He uses TVA’s involvement in World War II as a segue into a discussion of Oak Ridge; its Museum of Science and Energy “offers a playful and smiling image of atomic energy.”

That article ends on an unexpected bitter note. “Sixty percent of the phosphorous used in incendiary bombs during World War II was produced by TVA. After a bombing on February 27, 1945, a wall fell on my mother, Luce d’Eramo, while she was providing rescue assistance in Magonza. I wonder now if the phosphorous bomb that left her paralyzed for the rest of her life had been produced by the good TVA.”

The second installment goes on to describe how TVA is now less than one-fourth the size it was in 1980: “The decline of this New Deal monument is obvious in the two big buildings that tower over Market Square and serve as TVA’s headquarters. Its corridors are almost deserted.”

He describes involuntarily retired TVA librarian Ed Best (“white haired, with a kind smile”) and TVA spokesman Gil Francis, (“serious, bespectacled representative of the black ‘new’ middle class”). “Gil thinks differently from all the whites I speak with in Knoxville who are steeped in doubt as to whether or not Knoxville is in the South.... Gil has no doubts: it’s definitely the South.”

D’Eramo continues: “In the eyes of its users TVA has changed over the decades from great coal polluter to untiring supporter of nuclear power into a giant environmental Leviathan (Leviatano ambiantale), provoking fierce opposition from environmentalists.... This was an adversary quite different from those to which TVA was accustomed: capitalists and conservatives that TVA resisted but endured. From the beginning TVA had appeared to be a monster to the laissez-faire economists....” D’Eramo was apparently misinformed about one item; he had the impression that the environmentalists succeeded in stopping the Tellico Dam project.

By the 1980s, d’Eramo says, “TVA had a complete identity crisis. It no longer created jobs, but fired workers. No longer loved for the wealth it brought, but opposed for the pollution. No longer a mixed enterprise with social goals, but a capitalist company. The history of TVA describes in a paradigmatic way how the relation between capitalism and nation-state evolved in the course of the 20th century.... It’s a miracle, then, that after three years in Bush Jr.’s presidency, TVA is still in public hands.”

Then, in his final paragraph, he jumps to provocative, if tenuous, conclusions: TVA “owes its salvation to the bankruptcy of energy in California where the middlemen companies organized an artificial energy shortage in order to raise prices. Given such evil deeds, the move to privatize public-service companies... has weakened. But there’s no doubt it will begin again. It’s doubtful that TVA will be able to survive in the long run. In the meantime it will have to reduce costs to the bone and fire as many employees as possible....”

—Jack Neely

July 29, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 31 © 2004 Metro Pulse