Skip the rhetoric about "self-determination" and all the rest of it.

The incorporation of Sandy Springs, and the coming incorporation battles over a "City of DeKalb" and Dunwoody, as reported by Bloglanta, are about money.

Thanks to their incorporation the richest vein of corporate real estate in the region is now safe from taxation. They only have to pay for services required by a bunch of little old ladies to the west and north who are already millionaires because the own their own homes. No more supporting the poor.

Taxes in Sandy Springs are going down, and it has nothing to do with privatization. It has to do with tax base, the number of people covered by that tax base, and the amount of services (minimal) required by that tax base.

The same do-re-mi animates the move to re-create Milton County and to attach Dunwoody (which is in DeKalb) to it. If North Atlanta can break away, no more support for the poor in South Fulton or (god forbid) Atlanta. No more MARTA, no more Grady, and no more zoning of big apartment complexes poor Mexicans might settle in. All the money goes to the limited needs of the rich, and the poor can pound sand.

Of course, as Radical Georgia Moderate points out, through a link to TheStory, the same process animates Vernon Jones' DeKalb City proposal.  Jones has been subsidizing South DeKalb with tax money from North DeKalb. Incorporating the whole unincorporated area as a City of DeKalb means those two ends of the county remain united, and so does the money.

As Rusty points out, however, this process of isolating rich from poor to keep money (or the services money provides) away from poor folk is already going on. It's going on in Decatur, which has changed in the last decade from being a fairly liberal, and diverse city into an essentially upper-middle class white enclave whose mayor, Bill Floyd, sees nothing wrong with that.

The fact that there are more poor black folks than poor white folks is merely coincidental. Most Hispanics are, ethnically, Caucasian, or at worse a mixture of Caucasian and American-Indian. The walls going up around the city are meant to exclude them, as well.

So cut the rhetoric. It's all self-interest. Nothing more, nothing less.