(To the right, my front porch. It's dark in Mississippi.)
This column, which
appeared recently in the Jackson Free Press, in Jackson, Miss., is a follow-up to an earlier Labor South posting
in which I republished the original 2011 column cited below. Here I take a
look at Mississippi and my native North Carolina, both the heart of darkness in
their politics these days.
OXFORD, Miss. – I told you so.
Yes, I did. It was way back in November 2011 when the
Republicans took over the Mississippi Legislature as well as the state’s Governor’s
Mansion.
At the time, I was telling you about relatives coming to
visit me and one of them remarking how “it sure is dark in Mississippi.” She
was referring to the long, unlit roads and highways they traveled during the
night to get here. “It’s about to get a lot darker,” I told her.
And then I told you, my column readers, this:
“Better roads and highways? Not on this watch. Better public
transportation? Education? Health care? Mental health services? Social
services? Are you kidding? It’s going to be Tea Party heaven down here. People
finally get to see what it will be like in a Tea Party world.”
Thank you, Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant, Lt. Gov. Tate
Reeves and state House Speaker Philip Gunn for proving what a prophet Joe
Atkins is. I always knew it. Now the world does!
In the poorest, most woe-begotten state in the United
States, the Mississippi Troika and their loyal minions have managed to cut even
deeper into woefully underfunded state education, health care, mental health
care, roads and highways maintenance. As they slashed away at agency budgets
like machete-wielding tribesmen clear-cutting a scraggly forest to make way for
more desert, they even found they had overestimated revenue projections by $56.8
million!
And this is the state government that wants to take over the
Jackson, Miss., airport. One of the minions at the state Capitol has even
proposed that the state take over all of Jackson, that black-run state capital
that’s wont to challenge the Tea Party revolution from time to time. State Rep.
Mark Baker, a Republican from Brandon, came up with that brilliance. Should we
call it “Revenge of the Suburbanites”?
As they slashed budgets and services, however, the Troika
and its minions did manage to find the wherewithal to give $274 million plus
lots of juicy tax breaks to Continental Tire the Americas and Edison Chouest of
Louisiana, two more companies promising jobs and Nirvana in exchange for big
taxpayer-funded handouts. They both saw the $363 million handout poor ol’
Mississippi gave Nissan back in 2000 and the $356 million it gave Toyota a few
years later, and they wanted their share.
At the time of the Toyota deal, the state wouldn’t even fund
a burn center and had to send burn victims to Memphis.
The state’s pols also managed to kill efforts to limit
themselves in how they spend their campaign money, making them the envy of
politicians across the country who face jail terms for doing what Mississippi
politicians can do with impunity.
Something else they did during the past legislative session,
of course, was make discrimination legal and call it the “Protecting Freedom of
Conscience from Government Discrimination Act”.
When I first arrived in Mississippi back in the early 1980s,
many folks told me how much they admired my home state of North Carolina. They
talked about the beautiful mountains and beaches. Many talked with a degree of
envy about North Carolina’s longheld commitment to public education and wished
Mississippi were more so inclined.
Well, here we are more than three decades later, and we find
Mississippi politicians actually are looking at North Carolina as a model.
Trouble is, North Carolina today is a Jesse Helms dream come true—and that’s
not a good thing.
The Tarheel state’s so-called HB2 legislation, known as the
“bathroom bill”, preceded Mississippi’s HB 1523 (now the Protecting Freedom of
Conscience from Government Discrimination Act) in putting state authorities on
bathroom detail. North Carolina leaders took it a step further, however, by
also making it illegal for troublesome cities such as Charlotte (where the
whole bathroom controversy began) to adopt regulations contrary to what state
rulers prefer. This includes raising the minimum wage, an issue far removed
from gender identity.
So both North Carolina and Mississippi share something
besides a strong connection to Joe Atkins. Their leaders are the kind of hypocrites
my Pentecostal Holiness preaching Uncle Eb would’ve raked over the coals in his
Sunday sermons. They talk of the sanctity of local government when it comes to
defying federal mandates, but they’re quick to impose state rule over
municipalities, whether it’s a minimum wage hike in Charlotte or airport
control in Jackson.
Don’t let anyone pull the wool over your eyes. It’s already
dark enough in Mississippi.
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