You remember in high school history, when the teacher brought up the old, bad days of Jim Crow? With tales of poll taxes and literacy tests to ensure that access to the ballot remained exclusive to white people?

We like to think that those days are gone, that the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s remedied the worst abuses of systematic white racism. After all, the current occupant of the White House is a descendant of Kenyans. It has to be better.

Right?

Well, no.

Those days aren’t gone. They aren’t gone at all.

Most readers are aware that the Republican Party, given to using to a race-baiting rhetoric of resentment that alienates many of the demographic categories required to gain office in many jurisdictions, has adopted a bullshit agenda to fix the scarcely existent problem of “voter fraud” to justify restrictions on voting that—what do you know!—just happen to benefit an electorate that is whiter, older, more affluent, etc.—in other words, more Republican. 

Since Republicans are having trouble winning elections, they are trying to reduce the voting population to the citizens that vote Republican. Nice trick, eh?

Cut to yesterday, when the website for the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency announced that it would be closing 31 of its offices throughout the state, leaving 29 counties without a place where teenagers can take a driver’s test. (For convenience, I’ll using the term “DMV” to stand for such offices.)

As it happens, in 2011 the Alabama state legislature passed a voter ID law as described above, making it impossible to vote in Alabama without a government-issued photo ID. For most Americans, of course, the most common form of government ID—by far—is a driver’s license.

From here, Alabama journalist Kyle Whitmire picks up the thread:
 

Look at the list of counties now where you can’t get a driver’s license. There’s Choctaw, Sumter, Hale, Greene, Perry, Wilcox, Lowndes, Butler, Crenshaw, Macon, Bullock ...

If you had to memorize all the Alabama Counties in 9th grade, like I did—and even if you forgot most of them, like I have—you can probably guess where we’re going with this.

Depending on which counties you count as being in Alabama’s Black Belt, either twelve or fifteen Black Belt counties soon won’t have a place to get a driver’s license.

 
Now, I’m going to be honest with you. When I read Whitmire’s article yesterday, I instantly became skeptical. It did not look, to me, that the overlap between the Black Belt and the affected, soon-to-be-non-DMV counties was that strong. After all, if you eliminate services in 29 counties, some of the counties are going to be in the Black Belt, that’s only fair and not necessarily an indication of shenanigans. In fact, to my eye, the map of the affected counties looked like it might be a fair distribution in geographical terms to spread the inconvenience around the state equally.

But I may have underestimated how devious the planners were.
 

 
I decided to crunch the numbers, with the help of the 2010 census results for Alabama, which of course have demographic data on race associated with each county. You can find that data here. 

What I found was extremely concerning, if you are troubled by the rise of a new Jim Crow.

Alabama has 67 counties. Of that set, 29 of them are going to find themselves without DMV services, while 38 counties will continue to have DMV offices. If you take the 29 counties that will not have DMV services, the average percentage of black population is 35.2%. For the other 38 counties, the ones that will still have local access to a DMV office, the average black population is considerably lower, at 22.2%.

I’m going to repeat that:
 

29 counties without DMV: 35.2% black
38 counties with DMV: 22.2% black

 
It gets worse.

Of the top 10 “blackest” counties in Alabama (Bullock, Dallas, Greene, Hale, Lowndes, Macon, Montgomery, Perry, Sumter, Wilcox), fully 8 of them will no longer have a DMV. If you restrict the set to the 6 blackest counties (Bullock, Greene, Lowndes, Macon, Sumter, Wilcox), none of them—repeat, none of them—are going to have a DMV office.

Meanwhile, of the top 10 whitest counties in Alabama (Blount, Cherokee, Cleburne, Cullman, DeKalb, Franklin, Jackson, Marion, Marshall, Winston), only 4 will be deprived of a DMV office. For the more restricted set of the 5 whitest counties (Blount, Cullman, DeKalb, Marshall, Winston), only 1 will have its DMV office taken away.

As I indicated, I didn’t want to take some journalist’s word that there were electoral shenanigans going on (although in principle I was perfectly willing to believe that such things do happen, of course). But a quick look at the numbers does suggest that some nefarious things are going on with the closing of these drivers’ license agencies.

If you are the powerful interests in a state, and you cannot win elections legitimately, then you will find illegitimate ways to win elections. Such shenanigans are legion, and almost always concentrated among conservative interests. My favorite for sheer dickishness are the myriads of leaflets that get distributed in impoverished and minority-heavy locations that helpfully remind citizens “to vote this Wednesday!”—i.e. one day AFTER Election Day, or the ones in the same neighborhoods that imply that outstanding parking tickets may cause one to be ineligible to vote—which of course is nonsense.

Remember, nowadays, whenever you hear of anyone complaining about voter fraud, they’re actually trying to deprive Democratic voters and minorities and lower-income people of their right to vote. And when you hear about the closing of driver’s license offices, it’s likely that there is some connection with VoterID laws that require a driver’s license to cast a ballot.

After the jump, helpful maps and demographic data so that you can crunch the same numbers yourself!

An ‘artist’s impression’ of a terror attack on London 2012, courtesy of the Daily Mail
 
Anti-terrorist fears surrounding the London 2012 Olympics are reaching fever pitch in the UK. The Ministry Of Defence is reportedly planning to install anti-aircraft missiles on the roof of a residential block of flats in London’s East end.

No, this isn’t a sketch by Chris Morris or a story from the Onion. It sounds crazy but this is real. From BBC news:

An east London estate, where 700 people live, has received leaflets saying a “Higher Velocity Missile system” could be placed on a water tower.

A spokesman said the MoD had not yet decided whether to deploy ground based air defence systems during the event.

But estate resident Brian Whelan said firing the missiles “would shower debris across the east end of London”.

The journalist said: “At first I thought it was a hoax. I can’t see what purpose high-velocity missiles could serve over a crowded area like Tower Hamlets.

“They say they’ll only use them as a last resort, but… you’d shower debris across the east end of London by firing these missiles.”

Mr Whelan, who claims to have seen soldiers carrying a crate into the building, said his property management company put up posters and gave out the leaflets on Saturday.

He continued: “They are going to have a test run next week, putting high velocity missiles on the roof just above our apartment and on the back of it they’re stationing police and military in the tower of the building for two months.

 
This begs the question: are the supposed benefits of hosting the Olympics in London worth the intrusion into people’s lives?
 

 
The News of the World/News International scandal (or Murdochgate as it has been dubbed by the UK media) continues to grow amid allegations that NI’s The Sun newspaper illegally obtained information on the former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s newborn child while he was still in office.

This broadens out the problems in three ways. Firstly, while the information on Brown’s child may not have been hacked necessarily (as is being reported) it was still possibly obtained illegally, through the process of blagging, or obtaining classified information under false pretences. Ironically Brown’s Labour government introduced heavier punishment for blagging while still in power. Secondly, it brings into doubt the old red-tops’ excuse that they only investigate or dig dirt on people who “deserve it” (the argument wheeled out by Paul McMullan on Newsnight last week). As Prime Minister, Brown did deserve to be investigated of possible wrong doing, but exposing private medical details about his new born child just seems like a nasty step too far with no real journalistic purpose other than to put the PM on a Murdoch-controlled leash. 

Thirdly it proves, as many people had previously speculated, that the rot within NI has spread much further than simply one or two rogue investigators or even one particular publication. It’s getting harder and harder for the Murdoch organisation to claim that these incidents are isolated, as opposed to part of a broader culture at NI. As more and more salacious details leak out and more journalists, politicians and police are implicated, Murdochgate is shaping up to be he biggest scandal in British public life since the Profumo affair. News Corporation lost $3.4 billion in market capitalization yesterday, and now even the American media is interested, which is really saying something.

So, are these crimes going to be the undoing of the oldstream, printed press? Perhaps, but not fully. Yes News International are up to their necks in a sea of shit, but what is really sounding the death knell for newspapers to my ears is the fact that this is a scandal that is breaking and being consumed on the internet. I can’t remember this being the case before, but the web seems to be the only place to keep track on the ever evolving story, as more and more facts and bizarre twists emerge that prove too much to be neatly encapsulated by traditional news narratives.

Television and newspaper reportage just doesn’t seem adequate in this particular case - it took three to four days of issues being covered by a select few sources before the mainstream media deemed them newsworthy, by which time the public was already well aware of what was going on. The delay in reportage was indeed a bit of a gaffe, but more seriously it also brings up the question of media trustworthiness. Why now trust what the media says when the media themselves are directly implicated in a scandal? Press impartiality is out the window, as evidenced by the lack of coverage of Murdochgate in Murdoch’s biggest UK title The Sun.

While it’s ironic that a newspaper broke this story of press misdoings, what’s more telling is the traffic being directed not to the printed Guardian newspaper itself, but to the paper’s website. This paper’s news blog and its live feed is the premier source for keeping up with the scandal as new elements emerge. It’s also highly ironic that the story that sees internet news coverage really come into its own is the story of the major failings of the mainstream media. The author Will Self, in a slightly verbose but incisive article for the Guardian, calls this a tectonic shift in the media. I think he’s right, and I don’t see how the oldstream press can recover from these multiple knocks in confidence and consumption.

Thanks to Richard Metzger for the financial information.