Atlanta a Bastion of Super Wealthy Wants a Super Cop Training Center
‘Progressive’ Cities Losing Black Population, Become Boring, and Cruel
Atlanta according to neoliberal pundits and Democratic National Committee is a liberal city — a bastion of enlightenment in an otherwise rabid right-wing state in the south.
The truth, however, is that Atlanta like New York City and San Francisco are playgrounds for the super wealthy and their cop-friends. The Democratic Party may believe that those three cities are progressive bastions, providing great homes to its base of minority voters, such as Black people, but they would be wrong.
“Progressive” cities have been losing Black people to southern states because their so-called progressive values are nothing more than window-dressing, and the rent is too damn high.
As new research from Brookings reveals Black people, and many other people for that matter, cannot afford to live in the large “progressive cities.”
The Root puts it this way:
While Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, and Florida have gained 1.3 million Black residents since 1995, according to Brookings, New York, Illinois, California, and New Jersey are the top four states for losing Black people, to the tune of at least 1.5 million Black people. Recent stories in the New York Times and Washington Post, feature the massive declines in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
In those cities, the cost of living on top of the grinding structural racism in housing, schools, jobs and entrepreneurship, chews at Black people more than red meat Southern politics. The Democrats can talk all the Black Lives Matter they want, but the nitty gritty of a roof over the head and bread on the table is more important than a ranting Ron DeSantis in Florida, a curmudgeonly Greg Abbott in Texas, or a combative Brian Kemp in Georgia.
The north, as Brookings research notes, has been losing Black people for decades now.
As Brookings puts it:
The reversal of the Great Migration began as a trickle in the 1970s, increased in the 1990s, and turned into a virtual evacuation from many northern areas in subsequent decades. The movement is largely driven by younger, college-educated Black Americans, from both northern and western places of origin. They have contributed to the growth of the “New South,” especially in Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina.
The big “progressive” cities are becoming havens for super wealthy white people protected by large, well-funded, police departments. Look at New York City, where Eric Adams, a former NYPD spokesman, is bringing back heavy-handed policing, including stop-and-frisk, and razing homeless encampments to create more space for bath houses and an expansion of Frank Ocean’s exclusive boutique shop, Homer.
In San Francisco, Silicon Valley sludge creeps over homeless people on their way to the opera.
And then in Atlanta, the New York City of the South, city lawmakers are spending $90 million to build an outlandishly large cop-training center. This humongous training center is going to destroy at least 85 acres of land in Dekalb County.
But protestors, a young and diverse group against the project for environmental and policing reasons, are camping out on the proposed cop city land, scuttling the city’s efforts to build the heinous thing.
Atlanta’s super wealthy demand safe and clean shopping spots and they are funneling boatloads of cash into defeating the protestors and supporting Atlanta cops.
The giant-ass cop-training enter is the idea of the cop-boosting foundation, the Atlanta Police Foundation, which hopes the center would be a model for other cop-loving cities to emulate.
Atlanta police and prosecutors are also supporting the training center in the most rabid and ugly ways possible.
The Atlanta cops have killed one protestor already, and are working this week to jail, maim, and kill more in a brutal “crackdown” of the protests.
The Guardian reports:
After several hours of chaos on Sunday night, 23 people — including a legal observer with the National Lawyers Guild — had been arrested and charged with “domestic terrorism” under state law, adding to the 18 defendants facing the same unprecedented charges who have been arrested in recent months.
One or two “progressive” pundits hopes that a new Black migration to the South will halt or blunt right-wing cruelty. Maybe a well-heeled pundit is right, but now protestors in Atlanta need urgent help and support against a powerful, law-and-order setup.
See Stop Cop City for information to help the protestors today.
