Last Call For De-Unionized In Tennessee

The United Auto Workers have now officially abandoned any and all efforts to unionize the Volkswagen plant in Tennessee in what has to be a pretty brutal defeat for all working Americans.

The United Auto Workers, surprising even its supporters, on Monday abruptly withdrew its legal challenge to a union organizing vote that it lost at a Volkswagen AG plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee in February.

Just an hour before the start of a National Labor Relations Board hearing on the challenge, the union dropped its case, casting a cloud over its long and still unsuccessful push to organize foreign-owned auto plants in the U.S. South.

VW workers due to testify at the hearing were already at the courthouse in downtown Chattanooga when they heard the news, which left lawyers in the hearing room wondering how to proceed.

The union did not explain why it waited until the 11th hour to drop the case, but UAW official Gary Casteel said the decision not to go ahead was made last week.

That was when Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam, U.S. Senator Bob Corker from Tennessee, and Washington small government activist Grover Norquist said they would ignore subpoenas to attend the hearing, which was to have focused partly on their conduct in the days leading up to the plant workers vote.

"It became obvious to us that they were going to become objectionists and not allow the process to go forward in a transparent way. When that happens, these things can drag on for years," Casteel said in an interview.

And dragging on for years is something the UAW apparently doesn't have the stomach or money for.  So the GOP union busters win again in a victory for "right to work" because the real problem in America is that auto workers somehow make too much money.

UAW President Bob King, whose term expires in June, had vowed four years ago to successfully bring the union into a foreign-owned Southern plant. Three years ago, he said that if the union was unable to do so, its future was in jeopardy.

"The UAW is ready to put February's tainted election in the rearview mirror and instead focus on advocating for new jobs and economic investment in Chattanooga," King said in a statement on Monday.

Sure you will, Bob.  And no, the UAW officially no longer matters apparently, and collective bargaining and labor laws are simply more outdated anachronisms in a country where billions in wage theft is considered normal and acceptable.

Meet Greg Brannon!

If the Tea Party has their way in NC, Greg Brannon will replace Kay Hagan as Senator in November, so here are a few things that Brannon has said that BuzzFeed's Andrew Kaczynski put together, just so the folks back home know what they're getting into.

Greg Brannon is a doctor and former tea party activist running for Senate in North Carolina. Brannon, who is most likely headed for a Republican Senate primary run with North Carolina state House Speaker Thom Tillis, led incumbent Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan 42-40 in an April Public Policy Polling poll.

Brannon, who previously led an organization called Founder’s Truth, has a history of making controversial statements on the radio.

He previously called U.S. property taxes “American central planning” and cited the Holocaust and Soviet Union as other examples of central planning.

Brannon has said that the United Nations is a scam to control life and thinks that democratic debate over issues is a form of socialism.

Founder’s Truth’s now-shuttered website often posted conspiracy theories with blog posts that made claims like the Boston Marathon bombing was a false flag, the TSA might use electric shock bracelets, and that there is fluoridate in the water supply.

After BuzzFeed reported on Brannon’s website, it was removed from the Web Archive under mysterious conditions. The Web Archive would not comment if Brannon’s campaign asked for the site to be taken it down.

Reviewing hours of The Bill LuMaye Show, a radio program Brannon went on weekly as a guest since 2010, BuzzFeed has found other controversial audio statements from his tenure as a tea party activist.

Brannon would also get rid of public schools, believes President Obama is a dictator, thinks the Second Amendment gives ordinary citizens the right to own a nuclear weapon, thinks abortion is worse than slavery or the Holocaust, believes the Supreme Court has no power and no place in America, that property taxes are proof America is a socialist country, and that Upton Sinclair's "the Jungle" was government propaganda fiction.

And in a PPP poll earlier this year, Brannon was ahead of Kay Hagan 42-40.  The guy is bonkers, and yet it's entirely possible he'll be in the Senate in January.

But both parties are the same, right?  And Kay Hagan is a bad Democrat, so we should probably let Brannon win.

Right?

Another Supreme Misfire

Given the Supreme Court has gutted the Civil Rights Act, nobody should be surprised that yesterday they upheld Michigan's right to ban affirmative action in college admissions in a 6-2 decision (with Justice Kagan recusing herself.)  Justice Sotomayor's dissent was impressive, however.

In my colleagues' view, examining the racial impact of legislation only perpetuates racial discrimination. This refusal to accept the stark reality that race matters is regrettable. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race, and to apply the Constitution with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination. As members of the judiciary tasked with intervening to carry out the guarantee of equal protection, we ought not sit back and wish away, rather than confront, the racial inequality that exists in our society. It is this view that works harm, by perpetuating the facile notion that what makes race matter is acknowledging the simple truth that race does matter.

And that's the lynchpin of the argument: in 2014, race still matters.  Chief Justice Roberts has told us multiple times that it simply does not.

The dissent states that “[t]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race.” ... But it is not “out of touch with reality” to conclude that racial preferences may themselves have the debilitating effect of reinforcing precisely that doubt, and—if so—that the preferences do more harm than good. To disagree with the dissent’s views on the costs and benefits of racial preferences is not to “wish away, rather than confront” racial inequality. People can disagree in good faith on this issue, but it similarly does more harm than good to question the openness and candor of those on either side of the debate.

Unless the balance of the Supreme Court changes, we're only a couple of major cases away from a 5-4 decision ending affirmative action in this country.  Maybe after that point, Roberts will discover race still matters.

Because it'll sure matter to those of us who aren't white. The Boston Globe's Derrick Z. Martin:

The tyranny of the majority won. Access to college for African Americans and Latinos suffered another major defeat. Instead of surveying the destruction of opportunity that is occurring at this very hour, the Supreme Court cowered behind a purist reading of the Constitution and upheld the 2006 decision by Michigan voters to ban affirmative action in higher-education admissions.

The decision upheld the right of white voters to continue to roll back the clock.

The ballot initiative was sought by anti-affirmative action forces still smarting over the Supreme Court’s 2003 decision that upheld the use of race as one of many diversity factors at the University of Michigan law school. Michigan is 80 percent white, and ban supporters undoubtedly assumed they could tap into enough resentment over affirmative action to win.

They were correct. The initiative won with 58 percent of the vote. In a CNN exit poll, Proposal 2, as it was called, received 64 percent white support (including 70 percent among white men). It mattered not that African Americans voted against the proposal by nearly a 9 to 1 margin.

Unfollow me if you want to, but I am sick of anyone who is white telling anyone who isn't that racism is over and that we should just get over it already.

StupidiNews!

• The US Supreme Court has upheld Michigan's state constitution banning race as a factor in college admission.
• Federal investigators have determined that last April's fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas that killed 14 was an entirely preventable failure on the part of the West Fertilizer Co.
• President Obama has assured Japanese officials that disputed islands contested by China in the East China Sea are covered by bilateral military agreements.
• Ukraine may resume operations against Russian militants from eastern Ukraine cities as a weekend cease fire agreement has now completely collapsed.
• In oral arguments before the Supreme Court, several justices seemed skeptical of internet startup Aereo's arguments that it has the right to stream broadcast TV.

Last Call For Chris Versus The Stupid

On Monday, Chris Hayes defended his "interview" with Nevada State Assemblywoman Michele Fiore last week by saying that it's necessary to "talk to the other side" and that his show isn't an echo chamber.

"But you know what?  This is a big country with a lot of political conflict in it, in case you have not noticed, and politics is about having those arguments.  Not just talking to yourself, not just hearing what you want to hear, but actually learning by listening to what the other side is saying.  Not that they're necessarily right or instantly persuaded or allowed to go unchallenged, but it is important to understand how they are thinking on the issue, how they see the world."

"It is not a wrestling match or a high school debate you need to win in the moment.  And the point is not to bring someone on and thoroughly humiliate them on national television, no.  The point is this:  These folks, like Assemblywoman Fiore, are people we share this country with. I want to hear from them. And I think I have a better understanding of American politics because of it. So we're going to keep doing that. And you, please, keep sending us your feedback."

It's a pretty noble argument.  But if Chris Hayes understood American politics better because of these steamrolling episodes, he'd understand that his nobility is being used against him in order to score political points, and that the people he brings on the show in this capacity are not interested in the goddamn least in sharing the country with the rest of us but "taking it back" by any means necessary.  His nobility, while admirable, is completely one-sided.

What Hayes has actually constructed here is really a "both sides do it" and "both sides have equally valid viewpoints worth listening to" argument.  There are cases where this is true, but Friday night wasn't one of them, not by a long shot.  This was a person who wanted to score cheap points at Chris Hayes's expense, and she did.  Hayes's idealism is great in an ideal world, but against Tea Party Republicans who practice dangerous eliminationist tactics, it's folly.

The Michele Fiore defense was bad enough, but then today Chris Hayes compounded his bad behavior with a piece in the Nation that compares the fight to abolish slavery to climate change.  Granted, he acknowledges that this is a bad idea about twelve paragraphs in:

It is almost always foolish to compare a modern political issue to slavery, because there’s nothing in American history that is slavery’s proper analogue. So before anyone misunderstands my point, let me be clear and state the obvious: there is absolutely no conceivable moral comparison between the enslavement of Africans and African-Americans and the burning of carbon to power our devices. Humans are humans; molecules are molecules. The comparison I’m making is a comparison between the political economy of slavery and the political economy of fossil fuel.

But then two paragraphs later goes right back to demonstrating exactly why this is a bad idea.

The connection between slavery and fossil fuels, however, is more than metaphorical. Before the widespread use of fossil fuels, slaves were one of the main sources of energy (if not the main source) for societies stretching back millennia. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, nearly all energy to power societies flowed from the natural ecological cascade of sun and food: the farmhands in the fields, the animals under saddle, the burning of wood or grinding of a mill. A life of ceaseless exertion.

What he says is true, but it becomes dry, bloodless statistics rather than the psychological, physical, social, and mental horror that was slavery.  Even this seemingly innocuous piece glosses over the fact that it's the descendent of those slaves who have the fewest resources to address climate change today.

Later on in the piece Hayes tries again to save himself:

Let me pause here once again to be clear about what the point of this extended historical comparison is and is not. Comparisons to slavery are generally considered rhetorically out of bounds, and for good reason. We are walking on treacherous terrain. The point here is not to associate modern fossil fuel companies with the moral bankruptcy of the slaveholders of yore, or the politicians who defended slavery with those who defend fossil fuels today.

In fact, the parallel I want to highlight is between the opponents of slavery and the opponents of fossil fuels. Because the abolitionists were ultimately successful, it’s all too easy to lose sight of just how radical their demand was at the time: that some of the wealthiest people in the country would have to give up their wealth. That liquidation of private wealth is the only precedent for what today’s climate justice movement is rightly demanding: that trillions of dollars of fossil fuel stay in the ground. It is an audacious demand, and those making it should be clear-eyed about just what they’re asking. They should also recognize that, like the abolitionists of yore, their task may be as much instigation and disruption as it is persuasion. There is no way around conflict with this much money on the line, no available solution that makes everyone happy. No use trying to persuade people otherwise.

The issue is not that Hayes is wrong, but that trying to separate out the economic ramifications of slavery from the moral ones is impossible.  Hayes tries to do it in order to avoid the treacherous ground he mentions, but instead ends up stomping all over it.

In both the Fiore defense and his economics of slavery piece, Hayes's well-meaning intentions end up blowing up in his face.  That seems to happen to him an awful, awful lot.  Maybe there's a reason for that?

In other words, when I make arguments about useful idiocy, Chris Hayes is Exhibit A.

America's Looking Pretty Banged Up

Ahh America, land of the free and home of the science illiterate. Hot on the heels of such smash hits as "Global warming is a giant hoax" and "Human beings sure as hell didn't come from chimpanzees" we now have a majority of Americans asking "What's all this Big Bang theory crap, anyway?"

In a new national poll on America's scientific acumen, more than half of respondents said they were "not too confident" or "not at all confident" that "the universe began 13.8 billion years ago with a big bang."

The poll was conducted by GfK Public Affairs & Corporate Communications.

Scientists were apparently dismayed by this news, which arrives only a few weeks after astrophysicists located the first hard evidence of cosmic inflation.

Of course, this isn't too much of a new thing.

But when compared to results from other science knowledge surveys, 51 percent isn't too shameful -- or surprising.

Other polls on America's scientific beliefs have arrived at similar findings. The "Science and Engineering Indicators" survey -- which the National Science Foundation has conducted every year since the early 1980s -- has consistently found only about a third of Americans believe that "the universe began with a huge explosion."

 And we're not alone.

Every year, new reports come out suggesting America's grasp on geography, math, history or science is waning. But a wider lens suggests the reality isn't always so bleak. The 2014 NSF poll proved American's scientific knowledge was on par with most of Europe.

But there's some good news at least:

And given the recent press on the resurgence of childhood diseases -- mostly blamed on public skepticism surrounding vaccines -- it is important to note that this latest poll suggests 83 percent are at least "somewhat confident" that childhood vaccines are safe.

So there's that, right?

More Fish With Martyr Sauce

Former CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson quit her job because CBS wasn't mean enough to President Obama, so she went on a wingnut world tour in order to sell her victimhood.  When that failed to get President Obama impeached for some inexplicable reason, she decided this week to aim her sights a little lower.  Josh Marshall:

Sharyl Attkisson is the former CBS News reporter who left the network over what she claimed was liberal bias. After her computer was allegedly hacked by someone in late 2012 (seemingly confirmed by a network investigation) she hinted that President Obama's surveillance operativesmight be behind it. Now she says Media Matters may have been paid to go after her because of her reporting on Benghazi and other rightwing bugaboos.

I'm sorry but Attkisson has some serious temperament issues.

She has an even larger evidence issue, which is awfully strange for an investigative reporter to have.  Her interview on Sunday on CNN's roundup of the news media industry, Reliable Sources, was nothing but hearsay and accusations of a massive conspiracy designed to crush any bad news for the Obama administration. 

"In general, there was a pattern of more - many more stories in recent years being embraced if they were seen as being positive to government, the administration and even certain corporations, that if they were stories that were pitched that could be perceived as negative to government, administration and certain corporations."

The conspiracy theory of our time, certainly.

As I keep saying, she just needs to get a job at Fox News so she can happily hate the President with the rest of them.  CBS was wise to let her go.  The woman's batshit crazy.

StupidiNews!

• Meb Keflezighi became the first American man to win the Boston Marathon since 1983 as Kenya's Rita Jeptoo claimed her second consecutive women's title.
• Streaming video service Netflix says it will have to raise monthly fees on new subscribers by as much as 25% in order to be able to purchase rights to new movies, TV shows, and servers.
• US military officials may cut American troop levels in Afghanistan to as little as 5,000 after the end of the year as Afghan forces are increasingly able to handle Taliban insurgents.
• This weekend's "Easter accords" in Ukraine already appear to be falling apart as Vice President Biden arrives in Kiev for ongoing talks.
• AT&T has announced several possible candidate cities for gigabit fiber service in order to compete with Google Fiber, but actual expansion could take years if at all.

Last Call For The Sun Kings

As Steve Benen notes, recent breakthroughs in solar panel technology, power storage, and compact design has now made solar power a threat to the energy giants and the big mega-corporations that thrive off of forcing Americans to buy coal, gas, and oil-fueled electricity.  The Koch Brothers have officially declared war on the sun, folks.

The Koch brothers, anti-tax activist Grover Norquist and some of the nation’s largest power companies have backed efforts in recent months to roll back state policies that favor green energy. The conservative luminaries have pushed campaigns in Kansas, North Carolina and Arizona, with the battle rapidly spreading to other states.

Alarmed environmentalists and their allies in the solar industry have fought back, battling the other side to a draw so far. Both sides say the fight is growing more intense as new states, including Ohio, South Carolina and Washington, enter the fray.

Solar power is becoming more and more viable, so that viability must be crushed.

At the nub of the dispute are two policies found in dozens of states. One requires utilities to get a certain share of power from renewable sources. The other, known as net metering, guarantees homeowners or businesses with solar panels on their roofs the right to sell any excess electricity back into the power grid at attractive rates.

Net metering forms the linchpin of the solar-energy business model. Without it, firms say, solar power would be prohibitively expensive.

The power industry argues that net metering provides an unfair advantage to solar consumers, who don’t pay to maintain the power grid although they draw money from it and rely on it for backup on cloudy days. The more people produce their own electricity through solar, the fewer are left being billed for the transmission lines, substations and computer systems that make up the grid, industry officials say.

The result?  Red states are starting to pass laws that charge consumers increasingly higher fees if they use solar power, in order to price solar panels out of the market. Instead of being able to sell power back to the power company, solar panel owners would have to pay exorbinant fees instead to be off the grid, and that will destroy the industry.

The Kochs and their allies don't want us off oil and coal.  Ever.  And they will obliterate anyone who gets in their way.

The Odious Patrick McHenry And Obamacare

As I've said before, NC-10 where I grew up is one of the most miserable places in the country to live, and GOP Rep. Patrick McHenry is doing everything he can to keep it that way.  He has no problem taking Obamacare benefits away from some of the most needy people in the country and now he has to face those voters over the Easter recess.

The two-week recess is the first extended break from Washington for lawmakers since the 2014 open enrollment season ended and coverage for many Americans kicked in. Many people with new plans received subsidies to make their health insurance more affordable, or they became eligible for expanded Medicaid.

It’s not that red-state representatives and senators won’t come across negative stories about the Affordable Care Act from constituents who say the law caused their plans to be canceled, forced them to change doctors or raised costs for their businesses.

It’s that other group, comprising the people being helped, that potentially poses a challenge.

In North Carolina, enrollment was higher than the national average, and 91 percent of those signing up were eligible for subsidies as of March 1. California, Florida, Idaho, Maine and Michigan also had greater rates of enrollment and subsidized coverage than elsewhere in the country. (Final state numbers, which would include the late March surge, haven’t been released.)

But nobody actually signed up for Obamacare, remember?  The 8 million is a giant myth, a hoax, a scam!

“We’re talking about those outside of a narrow band of folks who have benefited from this law,” said Rep. Patrick McHenry of North Carolina. “We’re talking about the average American who’s been harmed by it, and those are the people that are speaking today.”

And of course since McHenry is a Republican, "narrow band" means those people.  But it's red state Republican voters who are starting to realize Obamacare has given them affordable health insurance for the first time in ages.

Yet the latest Gallup poll shows that the public’s attitude could be shifting, certainly far more than the lawmakers’ comments suggest. The change is particularly sharp among Republicans. In late February, 72 percent of Republicans surveyed said the law would make their own health care situation worse in the long run. By early April, that had dropped to 51 percent, and more than 4 in 10 Republicans said the law would have a negligible impact for them.

They're starting to come around.  And that means Republicans are starting to deal with some very hard questions about repeal and what that would really mean for millions of Republican voters.

Nino's Still Nuts

Say what you will about the Tea Party and austerity-pushing creeps like Paul Ryan or demagogues like Ted Cruz, the most dangerous guy in DC is Justice Antonin Scalia.

During a Tuesday speech at the University of Tennessee College of Law, Scalia said that the government has a right to impose the income tax, “but if it reaches a certain point, perhaps you should revolt.”

"You're entitled to criticize the government, and you can use words, you can use symbols, you can use telegraph, you can use Morse code, you can burn a flag," he told the students.

Despite Americans paying the lowest amount in taxes in decades.

Scalia also said that he and other justices do not let politics influence their decisions, and that he believes that the U.S. Constitution is a fixed law.

"The Constitution is not a living organism for Pete’s sake,” he said. "It's a law. It means what it meant when it was adopted."

When the Constitution was adopted, slavery was legal and women couldn't vote.  It took nearly a hundred years and a bloody civil war to change the first and 150 years and more blood to change the second, so see, change is bad!

And this man sits on the US Supreme Court.

And there are three, if not four other men like him.

StupidiNews!

• A "massive and unprecedented" series of drone strikes against Al Qaeda in Yemen over the last three days has culminated in a Monday assault that has killed at least 30 militants.
• A sixteen-year-old girl in Palmdale, California was killed sleeping in her bed over the weekend when a drunk driver crashed into her family's apartment.
• A gunfight in eastern Ukraine early Sunday is threatening to unravel the fragile cease fire brokered between Moscow and Kiev last week in Geneva.
• Calling for an investigation into last week's ferry accident that left more than 300 dead or missing, South Korean President Park Geun Hye compared the ferry crew's actions to "murder".
• NASA's Kepler mission to locate Earth-like exoplanets has found a rocky planet only 500 light years away that exists in a habitable distance from a star and may contain liquid water.

Last Call For Burying The Lede

The Associated Press story on Missouri Republicans' latest nullification nonsense gets buried to the point of the final paragraph.  It starts off well enough:

Missouri Republicans are considering a new approach to prevent federal agents from enforcing laws the state considers to be infringements on gun rights — barring them from future careers in state law enforcement agencies.

The change marks the most recent version of Missouri's attempt to nullify some federal gun control laws. It was endorsed by a state Senate committee this past week and is likely to reach the chamber floor.

Well sure, that's standard GOP idiocy that's patently unconstitutional.  The Supremacy Clause has been settled precedent for decades now:  states can't pass laws that specifically refuse to enforce federal ones.  The Missouri GOP wants to not only make enforcement of federal gun control laws a crime, they now want to end the law enforcement careers of those who enforce these federal laws, and they reserve the right to declare which laws are unconstitutional.

The only thing keeping these bills from becoming law is Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon.

If the Senate passes the new version, the House would also need to sign off before the bill could reach Gov. Jay Nixon's desk. The Democratic governor vetoed a similar bill last year and has expressed reservations about any legislation that seeks to nullify federal laws.

Although supporters consider the employment ban a more moderate position, the change is unlikely to sway the measure's opponents who argue the entire bill wouldn't survive a court challenge because states cannot nullify federal laws.

"I'm adamantly opposed to this buffoonery," said Sen. Jamilah Nasheed, D-St. Louis. "I just don't think that we should be wasting our time on legislation that we all know is unconstitutional."

Right, so all this makes sense.  Why then are Republicans wasting their time?  Literally we don't find out until the very last paragraph:

The bill would also lower the minimum age required to get a concealed weapons permit to 19 from 21 and allow those permit holders to carry a firearm openly, even in municipalities with ordinances prohibiting open carry.

So this isn't a nullification bill at all, it's an open carry bill.  But we apparently can't call it an open carry bill for some reason.

Funny how that works.

Another Milepost On The Road To Oblivion

CNN's Ashley Fantz asks:

Can the Klan rebrand?

Because as white supremacists like Frazier Glenn Miller are shooting people and shouting "Heil Hitler" the real problem in 2014 with the Aryan movement is lack of marketing.

From a sheer marketing perspective, the lack of central leadership poses more problems for the KKK if it's serious about revamping its image. Just look at the Catholic Church, Ries said.

"The KKK doesn't have a Pope. Look at what that guy has done. You have to have a leader like that to make people believe a change has happened," she said.

Without a clear leader, marketing experts said, crafting and conveying a spin-friendly message is impossible.

That was evident the minute members of the "new" Klan denounced the shootings. Soon after Ancona spoke to reporters, other self-described "real" Klansmen began attacking him online for not adhering to authentic Klan doctrine.

"This movement is a hodgepodge of little groups that, as often as they attack their enemies, attack one another," said Mark Potok, a spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups.

He estimates there are about 8,000 KKK members nationwide.

"To call these guys disorganized," he said, "doesn't quite do it."

There's no chance that the Klan could rebrand and these are all dangerous, hate-filled lunatics, but somebody felt the need to write 5,000 words to give us the "both sides" of this "argument" in 2014.  How nice.

Your Sunday Long Read

This depressing, saddening and altogether heartbreaking ProPublica article by Nikole Hannah-Jones on school re-segregation in America should definitely spur some action.  It's evidence that the Bush-era civil rights division of the Justice Department, which started releasing school districts from busing orders almost immediately and for 8 years, has done so much damage to the public education system in this country that as we approach the 60th anniversary of Brown v Board of Education, one has to wonder if the decision even matters anymore in places like Tuscaloosa.

The reason for the decline of Central’s homecoming parade is no secret. In 2000, another federal judge released Tuscaloosa City Schools from the court-ordered desegregation mandate that had governed it for a single generation. Central had successfully achieved integration, the district had argued—it could be trusted to manage that success going forward.

Freed from court oversight, Tuscaloosa’s schools have seemed to move backwards in time. The citywide integrated high school is gone, replaced by three smaller schools. Central retains the name of the old powerhouse, but nothing more. A struggling school serving the city’s poorest part of town, it is 99 percent black. D’Leisha, an honors student since middle school, has only marginal college prospects. Predominantly white neighborhoods adjacent to Central have been gerrymandered into the attendance zones of other, whiter schools.

Tuscaloosa’s schools today are not as starkly segregated as they were in 1954, the year the Supreme Court declared an end to separate and unequal education in America. No all-white schools exist anymore—the city’s white students generally attend schools with significant numbers of black students. But while segregation as it is practiced today may be different than it was 60 years ago, it is no less pernicious: in Tuscaloosa and elsewhere, it involves the removal and isolation of poor black and Latino students, in particular, from everyone else. In Tuscaloosa today, nearly one in three black students attends a school that looks as if Brown v. Board of Education never happened.

Tuscaloosa’s school resegregation—among the most extensive in the country—is a story of city financial interests, secret meetings, and angry public votes. It is a story shaped by racial politics and a consuming fear of white flight. It was facilitated, to some extent, by the city’s black elites. And it was blessed by a U.S. Department of Justice no longer committed to fighting for the civil-rights aims it had once championed.

We now live in the era of "apartheid schools" where less than 1% of the student body is white, students are well below the national average in poverty.  White flight combined with the elimination of busing enforcement to create entire neighborhoods left behind: crushingly poor, gerrymandered to a person, and nearly all black.  They were designed that way to save the white kids who still had a chance.

Tuscaloosa’s residential population stagnated during the ’90s, and the school situation took on special urgency in 1993: Tuscaloosa was vying for the Mercedes-Benz plant where Melissa Dent now works, which officials hoped would draw people to the city. Just a few years earlier, Tuscaloosa had lost out on a bid for a Saturn plant. In an interview early this year, Johnnie Aycock, who at the time headed the Chamber of Commerce of West Alabama, suggested the schools had scared Saturn away. “We learned that lesson. We learned that lesson completely.”

Publicly, the city’s movers and shakers said the lack of neighborhood schools made the district unattractive and that schools languished in disrepair because the district had to await court approval for every little decision. Behind closed doors, they argued that if they did not create some schools where white students made up the majority—or near it—they’d lose the white parents still remaining.

Districts under desegregation orders aren’t supposed to take actions that increase racial separation. And so the city’s leadership decided the desegregation order needed to go, and they believed the time was ripe for a court to agree.

The rest of course is history.

In 1993, Tuscaloosa’s school board fired a test shot. It filed papers in federal court seeking to build a new elementary school called Rock Quarry, deep in a nearly all-white part of town separated from the rest of the city by the Black Warrior River. If a judge accepted the school, that might signal a willingness to end the order altogether.

“You could see what the city and the school district were doing. They were going to have a racially and economically segregated school system,” said Janell Byrd, one of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund attorneys who represented the plaintiffs at the time.

The case landed in the courtroom of Judge Sharon Blackburn, a recent George H. W. Bush appointee who had gone to college in Tuscaloosa. In 1995, Blackburn held a five-day hearing to decide the question of Rock Quarry. School officials promised that the new school’s student body, though whiter than the district’s overall school population, would be half black.

Today that number is 9% black in Rock Quarry.  As with many larger cities in America, white parents have pulled their kids out to suburban county districts or private schools and designed the districts along racial lines.  In order to get the car plant, the black kids in Tuscaloosa had to be put out of sight and out of mind.  It worked too well.  And now what little hope and resources left for schools are being finished off by conservatives who argue that trying to educate these kids is a waste of taxpayer money. 

We've written off the education of black Millennials, and it's only going to get worse.