I must have had a puzzled look on my face because he asked if I knew why he wanted them. I didn’t. He explained that it was because criminals sometimes go dumpster diving for carbons to steal credit card numbers. Huh? It would never have occurred to me, I said. That’s because you don’t have a criminal mind, he replied. Maybe for the first time it dawned on me that it takes a certain bent of mind to turn one’s creativity to criminal mischief.

All that is preface to Ari Berman’s new Nation  essay, “How the GOP Is Resegregating the South.” In their vanity, some liberals like to think of themselves as more intelligent and creative than their conservative counterparts, but Berman shows just how creatively Republicans of a certain bent have twisted the Voting Rights Act to renovate their Southern Strategy and dilute minority influence — by packing as many minority voters into as few congressional districts as possible.

In virtually every state in the South, at the Congressional and state level, Republicans—to protect and expand their gains in 2010—have increased the number of minority voters in majority-minority districts represented overwhelmingly by black Democrats while diluting the minority vote in swing or crossover districts held by white Democrats.

[...]

According to data compiled by Bob Hall, executive director of Democracy North Carolina, precincts that are 90 percent white have a 3 percent chance of being split, and precincts that are 80 percent black have a 12 percent chance of being split, but precincts with a BVAP between 15 and 45 percent have a 40 percent chance of being split. Republicans “systematically moved [street] blocks in or out of their precincts on the basis of their race,” found Ted Arrington, a redistricting expert at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. “No other explanation is possible given the statistical data.” Such trends reflect not just a standard partisan gerrymander but an attack on the very idea of integration. In one example, Senate redistricting chair Bob Rucho admitted that Democratic State Senator Linda Garrou was drawn out of her plurality African-American district in Winston-Salem and into an overwhelmingly white Republican district simply because she is white. “The districts here take us back to a day of segregation that most of us thought we’d moved away from,” says State Senator Dan Blue Jr., who in the 1990s was the first African-American Speaker of the North Carolina House.

Then-Republican Party Chair Ken Mehlman apologized to the 2005 NAACP national convention for the thirty years of this Republican strategy. You see how much that was worth. Republican master strategist Lee Atwater repented of this kind of politics as he faced his death in 1991:

My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood. The ’80s were about acquiring — acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn’t I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn’t I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime. I don’t know who will lead us through the ’90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul.

Obviously, the Koch brothers, Art Pope and the GOP leadership in Raleigh and ALEC didn’t listen. Berman writes that the new Southern Strategy makes it “difficult for voting rights advocates to prove in federal court that packing minority voters into majority-minority districts diminishes their ability to elect candidates of choice.” Because allowing them representation is just the point. It just concentrates minorities into apartheid-like districts where their political influence can be minimized and controlled. This new-and-improved Southern Strategy assumes “that black people can only represent black people and white people can only represent white people,” according to North Carolina State Senator Eric Mansfield.

“What’s uniform across the South is that Republicans are using race as a central basis in drawing districts for partisan advantage,” says Anita Earls, a prominent civil rights lawyer and executive director of the Durham-based Southern Coalition for Social Justice. “The bigger picture is to ultimately make the Democratic Party in the South be represented only by people of color.” The GOP’s long-term goal is to enshrine a system of racially polarized voting that will make it harder for Democrats to win races on local, state, federal and presidential levels. Four years after the election of Barack Obama, which offered the promise of a new day of postracial politics in states like North Carolina, Republicans are once again employing a Southern Strategy that would make Richard Nixon and Lee Atwater proud.

(Cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans.)

An ambulance standing by eventually took her to town in time to have her child in a hospital instead of an animal stall. The child might have been the first ever born at a RAM free clinic. But not without a number, joked one of RAM’s 1,700 volunteers.

Far from Washington’s “debt crisis” abstractions is another crisis, an American reality one cannot describe in words nor experience secondhand.

Stan Brock founded Knoxville-based RAM in 1985 to parachute mobile medical teams into remote areas of third-world countries. Now over 60 percent the patients RAM serves are in rural areas of the United States. Brock himself lives where he stores his supplies, in an old schoolhouse RAM rents from the city of Knoxville for $1 a year. Brock himself is reportedly penniless.

Patient-hopefuls started lining up at the fairgrounds on Wednesday for the Friday-through-Sunday event in this coal country town where per capita income is $14,000 per year. Outside the MASH-style field hospital, the patient parking contains rows of cars with Virginia tags. But many are from Tennessee and Kentucky, others from as far away as Alabama, Texas and Michigan. Patients camp out in their cars and vans, or set up tents. Cross from the volunteer to the patient parking lot and the vehicles are noticeably older.

Numbers seemed “a little off” on Saturday. The long lines I saw two years ago are gone. Standing among rows of patients and snaking air and vacuum hoses, one doctor credited better planning for the lack of lines. Patients were being staged in the covered arena seating. Wearing his signature khakis, RAM founder Brock said they’d given out 1,500 tickets on Friday, but a series of afternoon thunderstorms convinced some patients to leave. About 200 returned for treatment on Saturday, Brock explained, and he issued another came 700 tickets. “So 900 is not a bad number,” for Saturday, he said.

But Regina, a volunteer who had driven from Connecticut with friends, remembers Wise being slammed in 2009 and 2010, the height of the Great Recession. She speculated that the economy might be preventing people from coming for even free treatment. To drive round-trip from a couple of hours away might cost $40-50 dollars in gasoline. That could be the difference between feeding the family for the month and not. Two men directing traffic out in the parking lot also noticed that traffic seems down this year. Looking out at the less than full patient parking lot, they did not believe improved organization alone accounted for the lack of lines. They blamed the oil companies.

Wise is both inspiring and deeply disturbing. The dental schools from the University of Virginia and Virginia Commonwealth come en masse to Wise each year. Passing volunteers – many from church groups – hand out water, Gatorade and lunches as dentists and student assistants stand for hours filling and extracting teeth and fabricating dentures. Dental work is the biggest need, followed by eye exams and glasses, treatments least often covered by insurance plans. Few who arrive here for treatment have those.

Kenneth Bernstein serves in dental triage. An additional X-ray truck from North Carolina may have made the demand seem lighter than in previous years, he said, but without numbers he couldn’t say for sure. This is his third year at Wise. He recalls one patient in particular:

“I remember one still somewhat young lady who broke down when she was told her teeth could not be saved. She was comforted by many, both before they were pulled and afterward. But it was still hearbreaking. What if she had had access to diagnosis and treatment and training in proper dental hygiene earlier, could not her teeth and her self respect have avoided the harm she experienced today?”

 In Appalachia, those services are often unavailable and unaffordable. For many, these annual free clinics are their only lifeline. Jean Jolly recounted how one man last weekend had hitched a ride as far as he could, then walked the last twenty miles to the fairgrounds for free care. But this year, while the need – and the recession – persists, for whatever reason fewer patients seemed able to make that trip.

Doing a bit of math with the table that accompanies this chart in the report, we find that sales and excise taxes account for 7.8% out of the total 11.7% that the lowest-income 20% of Georgians pay in state and local taxes, meaning that sales taxes make up 67% (or 2/3rds) of all taxes that they pay. This compares to 0.9% out of the total 6.9% that the richest 1% of Georgians pay in taxes, meaning sales taxes make up just 13% of all taxes that they pay. So sales taxes are 5.1 times as big a portion of the taxes paid by those on the bottom, compared to those on the top.

Now, it’s not actually THAT bad, since the sales and excise tax total includes general sales, others sales & excise taxes and sales & excise taxes on businesses. The general sales tax portion is “only” 4.4% on the bottom 20%, and 0.6% on the top 1%, which is 38% and 9% respectively of their tax totals. Still, general sales taxes are 4.3 times as big a portion of the taxes paid by those on the bottom, compared to those on the top. So raising those taxes will fall that much harder on the poor compared to the rich.