http://billmoyers.com/2014/11/26/meet-fortune-500-companies-funding-political-resegregation-america/
Redistrict, Make people Poor, Stupid and Stop them from voting - Corporations and Billionaires are finding it very easy to steal their money if people are poor and uneducated.
Over the past four to five years, the United States has been resegregated —
politically. In states where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans
and presidential races can be nail-biters, skillful Republican
operatives have mounted racially-minded gerrymandering efforts — the
redrawing of congressional and state legislative districts — that have
led to congressional delegations stacked with GOP members and yielded
Republican majorities in the state legislatures.
In North
Carolina, Pennsylvania and Ohio, to name just three, GOPers have recast
state and congressional districts to consolidate black voters into what
the political pros call “majority-minority districts” to diminish the
influence of these voters. North Carolina is an especially glaring
example: GOP-redistricting after the 2010 elections led to half the state’s black population —
1.1 million people — being corralled into one-fifth of the state
legislative and congressional districts. “The districts here take us
back to a day of segregation that most of us thought we’d moved away
from,” State Sen. Dan Blue Jr., who was previously North Carolina’s
first black House speaker, told the Nation in 2012.
A major driving force behind this political resegregation is the Republican State Leadership Committee,
a deep-pocketed yet under-the-radar group that calls itself the “lead
Republican redistricting organization.” The RSLC is funded largely by
Fortune 500 corporations, including Reynolds American, Las Vegas Sands,Wal-Mart, Devon Energy, Citigroup, AT&T, Pfizer, Altria Group, Honeywell International, Hewlett-Packard.
Other heavyweight donors not on the Fortune 500 list include Koch
Industries, Blue Cross Blue Shield and the US Chamber of Commerce. At
the same time these big-name firms underwrite the RSLC’s efforts to
dilute the power of black voters, many of them preach the values of
diversity and inclusion on their websites and in corporate reports.
As
part of its Redistricting Majority Project — which, tellingly, is
nicknamed REDMAP — the RSLC, starting in 2010, poured tens of millions
of dollars into legislative races around the country to elect new GOP
majorities.
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