Editor’s Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a Facebook posting by Justin J. Pearson, currently a Tennessee State Representative, running for U.S. Congress in Tennessee District 9, located in Memphis. You can hear Justin speak about this by clicking here or on the photo below.
“We deserve real economic development. We deserve real investments in our communities, not someone exploiting our community for their own benefit and their own profit.”
Right here down the street from our house in Whitehaven, Tennessee is where Elon Musk has bought about 1/3 of the parking lot at Southland Mall.
I’ve never seen anything like this. There are hundreds of cars here, but they’re from Texas. They’re from Florida, even someone from Indiana. But I have yet to see a car from Tennessee who’s supposedly working on building out Elon Musk projects here in Memphis and in North Mississippi.
This is what people are trying to convince us is good for the economy, it’s economic development for our community, but if that was the case, these jobs would be helping people who actually live here. It would be improving the economy of our community and it wouldn’t be being received or needed for people who live as far away as Indiana.
Again, this is the problem when people in our government are trying to convince us that billionaires somehow care about us. They don’t. Elon Musk and the billionaires who are building data centers do not care about our communities, which is why we need a moratorium and it is why I’m advocating for a moratorium all across our country.
We deserve real economic development. We deserve real investments in our communities, not someone exploiting our community for their own benefit and their own profit.
