Balancing the Budget on the Backs of Alabama's Black Belt

Obama, Alabama officials pledge aid for white storm survivors, black storm storm survivors not so much.

If you look closely at the photograph attached to this diary of a VIP group walking with President Obama, I count nine individuals....Two in the front row, three in the middle row and four in the back, one of whom is barely visible as a pair of grey-trousered legs and the corner of a face. Two of them -- counting the President -- are non-white, one more may be.

The proportion of non-white persons in Alabama's population is about 29%, so 22%, or better 33%, persons of color (2 or 3 out of 9) would not be far out of line with the state population.

According to the same source, the proportion of persons in the population of Alabama who happen to be female is almost 52%. Female persons in the VIP group including President Obama: precisely zero.

Band Director Ryan Campbell watched his Sumter Central High School Tigers marching band strut last week on a field outside the gleaming new public high school in Sumter County.

"Where are the white kids?" a visitor asked.

"At the academy down the road," Campbell said, referring to private Sumter Academy.

And this is why Governor Bentley and the red, republican controlled state legislature robbed the public education budget to the tune of $80 million dollars.   This is why public schools (not to be confused with segregation academies) are failing, or should EYE say, being failed? 

If you're thinking of moving to Huntsville, or the State of Alabama I hope you don't have any k-12 school children. If you are not affluent enough to live in a neighborhood with the best public schools your tax dollars can buy, or afford to send your student to private schools, your children are tough out of luck, because of the sad, sorry state of separate and unequal education in Huntsville, and the state of Alabama. Over 50 years after Brown v. Board ordered schools to integrate Alabama is still the state of segregation today, segregation tomorrow, and it looks like segregation forever.

Officially, the news out of Alabama is this:

Alabama's Republican-controlled legislature and governor's office are committed to cutting the state's budget and the size of state government. That means the state will slice into the money available to a number of public agencies. And the Department of Public Safety, which includes the state's offices that issue driver's licenses, will simply have to take an $11 million hit. To make that math work, the agency will shutter driver's license offices in the state's most sparsely populated counties.

B-But it's not racial, it's just a coincidence the DMV offices slated for closing are in the Black Belt.  If it was really about saving money Governor Bentley would expand Medicaid.  But if he did that people who need access to health care the most might benefit.

Alabama’s Seventh Congressional District in the center of the state. It includes a region called the Black Belt, which has some of the poorest counties in the Southeast and the nation.

A recent national study on county-by-county health rankings published by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that several counties in Davis’ district had high poverty, inadequate access to primary care doctors and a large numbers of uninsured residents.

Sumter, Hale and Greene counties had less than half the number of doctors recommended for their size populations, and 13 percent to 16 percent of the residents were uninsured, the survey showed.

Saving money my Donkey.  If it were about saving money they wouldn't be appealing  the Victory Land verdict.  Heck, they wouldn't have closed Victory Land in the first place.

If the cries of Montgomery politicians under indictment don’t generate sympathy, certainly the lamentation of unemployed workers in the Black Belt does. One effect of the bribe-induced Riley-Canary war on bingo in Alabama is the closure of bingo operations in Greene, Macon and Houston Counties, that employed literally thousands of workers, and brought millions of dollars annually to local government treasuries. We all wish that overwhelmingly black Greene and Macon Counties had bulldozers clearing land for new automotive and electronics plants, or for high-powered biology labs or computer engineering firms, but that’s the progress of the next generation. Right now, those counties are absolutely dependent on the entertainment and gaming business for their economic survival, and Obama’s what-me-worry attitude about Canary has placed that survival in jeopardy. Even in the white-majority Wiregrass, it’s probably safe to assume that Country Crossing employed a fair number of African-Americans in its service sector jobs. Had Bob Riley needed to worry about a U.S. Attorney with integrity in Montgomery, he would likely not have earned his Mississippi Choctaw bribes by shutting down the bingo halls, and the Legislature would probably have put a bingo referendum on this November’s ballot.

This is why EYE weep for the residents of Alabama's Black Belt, our state, and our country.

You’re either going to treat us right, or we’re going to withdraw from you our economic support,We intend to boycott Christmas, but not Jesus,”said Farrakhan. “So on Black Friday, we won’t be there.”‪#‎JusticeOrElse‬ #NotOneDime