Project for a New American Century co-founder to speak at JHU/Southern Oligarchy and the Labor Unions

Foreign Policy Expert [sic] Robert Kagan Comes to Johns Hopkins.  The Foreign Affairs Sympoisum presents author and exoert on US national security Robert Kagan as part of FAS’s Spring Symposium “Global Leadership for the 21st Century.” The event is set for 8 p.m. on Wednesday, March 11 in the Glass Pavilion. It's free and refreshments will be served.  See http://www.jhu.edu/fas/index.html.

 

Kagan is a leading expert in his field. He has worked as speechwriter for Sec. of State George Schultz, and currently works as a columnist for the Washington Post and as a contributing editor to the Weekly Standard and the New Republic. He is co-founder of the nonprofit Project for a New American Century.

 

Southern Oligarchy and the Labor Unions

 

By Joseph B. Atkins

 

Oxford, Miss.

 

http://www.populist.com/09.02.atkins.html

 

Cheap labor. Even more than race, it's the thread that

connects all of Southern history--from the ante-bellum

South of John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis to

Tennessee's Bob Corker, Alabama's Richard Shelby and

the other anti-union Southerners in today's U.S. Senate.

 

It's at the epicenter of a sad class divide between a

desperate, poorly educated workforce and a demagogic

oligarchy, and it has been a demarcation line stronger

than the Mason-Dixon in separating the region from the rest of the nation.

 

The recent spectacle of Corker, Shelby and Mitch

McConnell of Kentucky leading the GOP attack on the

proposed $14 billion loan to the domestic auto

industry--with 11 other Southern senators marching

dutifully behind--made it crystal clear. The heart of

Southern conservatism is the preservation of a status

quo that serves elite interests.

 

Expect these same senators and their colleagues in the

US House to wage a similar war in the coming months

against the proposed Employee Free Choice Act

authorizing so-called "card check" union elections nationwide.

 

"Dinosaurs," Shelby of Alabama called General Motors,

Ford, and Chrysler as he maneuvered to bolster the

nonunion Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai and other foreign-owned

plants in his home state by sabotaging as many as three

million jobs nationwide.

 

Corker, a multi-millionaire who won his seat in a

mud-slinging, race-tinged election in 2006, was fairly

transparent in his goal to expunge what he considers

the real evil in the Big Three and US industry in

general: unions. When the concession-weary United Auto

Workers balked at GOP demands for a near-immediate

reduction in worker wages and benefits, Corker urged

President Bush to force-feed wage cuts to UAW workers

in any White House-sponsored bailout.

 

If Shelby, Corker, and McConnell figured they were

helping the Japanese, German and Korean-owned plants in

their home states, they were seriously misguided. The

failure of the domestic auto industry would inflict a

deep wound on the same supplier-dealer network that the

foreign plants use. The already existing woes of the

foreign-owned industry were clearly demonstrated in

December when Toyota announced its decision to put on

indefinite hold the opening of its $1.3 billion plant

near Blue Springs in northeast Mississippi.

 

The Southern Republicans are full of contradictions.

Downright hypocrisy might be a better description.

Shelby staunchly opposes universal health care--a major

factor in the Big Three's financial troubles since they

operate company plans--yet the foreign automakers he

defends benefit greatly from the government-run health

care programs in their countries.

 

These same senators gave their blessing to hundreds of

millions of dollars in subsidies to the foreign

automakers to open plants in their states, yet they

were willing to let the US auto industry fall into bankruptcy.

 

In their zeal to destroy unions and their hard-fought

wage-and-benefits packages, the Southern senators could

not care less that workers in their home states are

among the lowest paid in the nation. Ever wonder why

the South remains the nation's poorest region despite

generations of seniority-laden senators and

representatives in Congress?

 

Why weren't these same senators protesting the high

salaries in the financial sector when the Congress

approved the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street? Why

pick on blue-collar workers at the Big Three who last

year agreed to huge concessions expected to save the

companies an estimated $4 billion a year by 2010? These

concessions have already helped lower union wages to

non-union levels at some auto plants.

 

The idea of working people joining together to have a

united voice across the table from management scares

most Southern politicians to death. After all, they go

to the same country clubs as management. When

Mississippi Republican Roger Wicker warned of

Democratic opponent Ronnie Musgrove's ties to the "Big

Labor Bosses" in this year's US Senate race, he was

protecting the "Big Corporate Bosses" who are his benefactors.

 

The South today may be more racially enlightened than

ever in its history. However, it is still a society in

which the ruling class--the chambers of commerce that

have taken over from yesterday's plantation owners and

textile barons--uses politics to maintain control over a

vast, jobs-hungry workforce. After the oligarchy lost

its war for slavery--the cheapest labor of all--it

secured the next best thing in Jim Crow and the

indentured servitude known as sharecropping and tenant

farming. It still sees cheap, pliable, docile labor as

the linchpin of the Southern economy.

 

In 1948, when the so-called "Dixiecrats" rebelled

against the national Democratic Party, Strom Thurmond

of South Carolina declared war on "the radicals,

subversives, and the Reds" who want to upset the

Southern way of life.

 

Seven years later, Mississippi's political godfather,

the late US Sen. James O. Eastland, told other

prominent Southern pols during a meeting at the Peabody

Hotel in Memphis that the South will "fight the CIO"

(Congress of Industrial Organizations) and unionism

with just as much vehemence and determination as it

fights racial integration.

 

Eastland, Thurmond and their friends lost the

integration battle. Their successors are still fighting

the other enemy.

 

Joseph B. Atkins is a veteran journalist, professor of

journalism at the University of Mississippi and author

of Covering for the Bosses: Labor and the Southern

Press (University Press of Mississippi, 2008), a book

that details the Southern labor movement and its

treatment in the press. A version of this column

appeared in the Hattiesburg (Miss.) American and the

Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger.

 

From The Progressive Populist, Feb. 1, 2009