Sunday, September 4, 2022

Report from Mississippi: Nor Any Drop to Drink

Dispatches from the Old Confederacy

By Phil Ochs
Mississippi Correspondent

It's been almost ten years since our old buddy John “the Bongmaster” Roberts '76 told us that state discrimination against Black people was no longer a problem in America.

Gov. Tate “What Me Worry?” Reeves

So on this last long weekend of summer, let's raise a glass to toast the brilliant insights of the Sage of Leverett House.  If you're in Jackson, Mississippi, though, don't put water in the glass, because the stuff that comes out of the tap is unfit for human consumption:

The entire city of more than 150,000 was without safe drinking water, with no end in sight. Many residents here say they adapted long ago to catastrophic government failure.

“Jackson’s water’s been messed up; I don’t even feel like they should be issuing people bills,” said Roshonda Snell, 32, who works at a local hotel. “It’s infected, and you can’t even do nothing with it.”

Lack of safe running water is something more commonly thought of as a problem in poor and developing countries without the financial resources or will to install and maintain a water system. But in the richest country in the world, how could this happen?

As usual, there's one white answer.

The estimate to repair the system comes to $2 billion, a sum far beyond the capacity of the city to bear.  Of course, the State will not allow its capital and largest city to suffer and languish, right?  The state's potato-faced Republican Governor, Tate Reeves, has responded.  Last week, he told the residents of Jackson not to drink the water.  Then he told them they could be thirsty for an indeterminate amount of time.

This is not the first time that the white supremacist tuber in a J.C. Penney suit ignored the plight of the residents of his capital city:

Gov. Tate Reeves (R) declared Jackson’s ongoing water crisis an “immediate health threat.” Experts say this crisis was years in the making, a result of inadequate funding for essential infrastructure upgrades. For the past year, leaders of this majority-Black, Democrat-led city have pushed for additional funding from the White Republicans who run the state. Little has come of those appeals....

Jackson might be the seat of power for the state government, yet many in the city contend that the water system is a glaring example of how the community has been starved of investment and attention. For decades, the city’s population has been shrinking, an exodus propelled in large part by the flight of white residents — along with their tax dollars — to surrounding affluent suburbs where, by and large, the water on Tuesday was flowing just fine.

Who saw that coming?  Not John Roberts!

Gov. Spud Reeves has also been sitting on over $400 million in federal water infrastructure funding, thanks to Joe Biden and the Democrats, or more than enough to slake the thirst of the residents of Jackson.  Last year the white Republicans who run the state also authorized the expenditure of a different $450 million of Federal money for infrastructure, as long as the community requesting the aid matched it dollar-for-dollar.  So if your community or county is rich and white, you cam get state aid.  If your city is poor and Black, you get to drink from puddles.   Nothing fishy going on here, of course.

The defenders of the white plutocracy that run the state may complain that you can't make out a claim of systemic racism based on this one data point.  OK, let's scout around and see if we can find anything else that would raise a bark from Bilbo, the ol' racism hound.

Say hello to washed-up football player and Mary's ex-boyfriend, Brett Favre.  What does he have to do with anything?  According to NBC News, in an impressive act of journalism:


Mississippi took federal money intended to ease the plight of poor people, some of them Black, and used it to enrich already rich white men.  It paid over a million dollars to Favre to make supposedly motivational speeches which he never made.  Don't worry; there's more:

The speeches aren’t the only welfare grants tied to Favre. Text messages obtained by Mississippi Today and authenticated by Pigott show that Favre sought a $3.2 million grant for a drug company in which he was a shareholder and a $5 million award that built a volleyball arena at the University of Southern Mississippi, where his daughter played the sport and where he played football. Favre’s lawyer declined to comment.

Let's hear it for volleyball!

So while poor Black families in Jackson are forced to shell out $300 a month to avoid dying of thirst or dysentery, Brett's daughter gets to play volleyball in a gleaming new facility. If that seems fair and reasonable to you, then you must be be a white Republican. Like John Roberts.

In addition to stiffing thirsty Jacksonians and shoveling money at rich celebrities, what else is Mississippi's predatory white plutocracy doing to make the poorest and more wretched state in the nation better?

As previously recounted in the Spy, they have terminated rental and unemployment assistance to the state's poor and unemployed, even though all the dough came from the federal government.

And just this year, after the reality of the collapse of Jackson's water system was evident to even the meanest intelligence (such as a Mississippi white Republican legislator), the ruling plutocracy handed out tax cuts to the rich and screwed the public school students of the state to pay for it:

The Mississippi Legislature may end the 2022 session taking credit for a historic tax cut while leaving local officials on the hook to either raise property taxes on their constituents or decide where to make cuts to their school districts. As gasoline prices rise and overall inflation rates increase, the Legislature is preparing to underfund the program that provides for the basics of operating local school districts by what may be a record amount. The only options for local school districts to deal with the state funding shortfall could be to make cuts or raise local property taxes.

Keep in mind that the white elite sends its mouth-breathing children to private segregation academies, so its appetite for providing a decent public education to majority-Black schools is shall we say limited?

They also cut the income tax by $500 million, benefiting higher income Republicans, while maintaining the nation's highest 7% sales tax on food.  Food.  Chew on that.  Just don't wash it down with tap water.

But don't think that the predatory white Republicans in the state are against people paying income taxes.

Mississippi is one of only five states that will levy taxes on the amount of forgiven student loans (up to $1000 in taxes for Pell Grant recipients who are by law poorer), disproportionately affecting Black residents, who rely on such loans in lieu of merit scholarships from their daddies.

But don't worry – the white Republican Governor and Legislatures have already agreed not to tax forgiven PPP loans, the kind that goes to white businessmen like Florida Republican Congressman and car dealer Vern Buchanan, who trousered $2,300,000 for his heroic effort to sell cars during the COVID pandemic:

Let's just keep in mind that these state-level shenanigans were made possible by a 50-year Republican policy of letting white Republican states get away with murder to pander to their racist voters, whose power has been enshrined by a bent Republican Supreme Court.  And all, repeat all, of the current crop of Never-FLG pundits and gasbags now heard to bemoan what happened to their beloved Party of Lincoln were in on the scam.

The results: across great swaths of this country, and notably in white supremacist plutocracies like Mississippi, racism, like water, is everywhere.  And like the water that oozes out of the tap in Jackson, it's toxic and disgusting.  And it comes to you thanks to the Republican Party.

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