A Christmas Carol revisited, and an immigrant family's search for refuge

 

(Charles Dickens)

Christmas is just around the corner, and I've pulled out my "Ultimate Collector's Edition" DVD of A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens' wonderful story of the Cratchit family and mean old Ebeneezer Scrooge, whose greedy, miserly descendants are many today with few of them likely to experience a ghost-and-spirit-induced conversion! 

Of course, the DVD version I have is the best in my opinion, Alastair Sim's masterful portrayal of Scrooge in the 1951 version of the film.

Ah, Scrooge, the moneylender who, as Dickens expert Norrie Epstein has written, "controls others by keeping them in his debt." Sound familiar? Today, it's entire nations in bottomless debt, and their Scrooge is the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, European Union, and hedge fund operators on Wall Street.

Then there's Scrooge, the "squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner" who begrudges his poor clerk Bob Cratchit ever hour away from the chains of his desk. Pick a modern-day corporation--Nissan or Walmart's a good place to begin--and there you have an example of the descendants of Scrooge.

"I have endeavored in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an idea," Dickens once wrote. "May it haunt (readers') houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it by."

I'm sorry to say the folks who most need to read Dickens probably don't and never will.

Below is another familiar tale, my version of which I first presented back in 2010. I've re-published it several times in this space, and I offer it again this year for pondering as, I sincerely hope, all of you have a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Here it is:

(The Holy Family's flight to Egypt, as depicted by Giotto)

They were descendants of immigrants who themselves became immigrants.

Soon after the baby arrived, a dream came to the father that the little family would have to leave their homeland if they were to survive. Even the life of an innocent child was in danger in their homeland.

So the three of them—father, mother and child—left their tiny village and embarked on a treacherous journey through the desert wilderness. They were very poor and had little more than the clothes on their backs.

They traveled by day and by night, ever fearful they might be captured or attacked, until they finally crossed the border. They brought no documentation with them, only their humility and the father’s willingness to work hard to support his family.

He was a trained craftsman, good with his hands, and his work was valued even if he was paid so little he could never hope to rise out of his poverty. With his teenage wife tending to their baby, he went out among the people to earn bread and shelter for them.

He heard the whisperings among those in this new land. They called him and his family foreigners, outsiders, and even illegal aliens, as if they had come from the moon and their very existence was something less than human, a violation of not only the law of the land but also God’s law.

“They’re just here to take our jobs, to feed, house, and clothe themselves at our expense,” he heard one of them say.

“They don’t even take the time to learn our language,” said another.

“Why are they even here? Is their own country not good enough for them? Perhaps they’re spies,” said yet another.

“The way people like these spawn they’ll soon be everywhere, expecting their new offspring to be treated equally just because they were born here, like so many little anchors for their illegal parents. Anchor babies, that’s what they’ll be.”

Some of these whisperings came from the very people who benefited from his labors. They would say these things as soon as they walked away from the worksite and rejoined their neighbors and friends. Local leaders heard the comments, too, and saw an advantage in such fears, prejudice, and suspicions. So they began to talk among the crowds and, being leaders, talked loudest of all, loud enough for everyone to hear.

Even some of the priests joined the chorus, invoking God’s judgment from their pulpits, condemning the strangers for breaking the law and taking advantage of people’s hospitality.

The father and mother, already homesick, longed for their faraway families and friends. They knew many did not welcome them in this strange land, but they also feared for their child’s life if they returned home. Did their little child have any idea of all the troubles that surrounded them?

The father remembered how his ancestors had been immigrants to this very land many generations before and had prospered here, but then a new leader had turned them into slaves and they had left. Now he and his wife and child had returned because their own land had become hostile. When would it all end? Where was there a refuge?

Eventually the father, whose namesake had been a dreamer and an interpreter of dreams, had yet another dream, and this one told him the time had come to return home. So he and his wife packed their belongings, wrapped up their child to keep it warm, and journeyed back to their homeland. They had to be careful. Dangers still lurked, but at least they were home.

And back in the strange land where they had sought refuge, some indeed missed them. “He did good work,” one said. “You know, they never really bothered anyone,” another said.

But these voices were quickly drowned out by the leaders and their priests who cried “Good riddance!” and then looked for others to condemn.

NAACP protests Trump's visit to Mississippi's new Civil Rights Museum with one fist raised and the other fist full of cash from anti-union Nissan

 

(Union supporters at the giant "March on Mississippi" in support of unionization efforts at the Nissan plant in Canton, Mississippi, last March)

I was sitting down today to write a post on the recent grand opening of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson, Mississippi. As you may have read, the museum opened with major controversy because President Trump came to town to be part of the ceremonies.

Invited by Republican Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant, a stalwart Trump supporter who boasts of being the state’s first Tea Party governor, Trump arrived amid a storm of protest, including boycotts of the event by civil rights-era legends like John Lewis and major progressive leaders in the state.

At the heart of what I wanted to write, however, was an underlying hypocrisy that bothers me about a museum—and I’ve heard that it is an amazing place—whose founders accepted a $500,000 gift from the Nissan corporation, the same corporation that fought tooth and nail against a unionizing effort among its predominantly black workforce in Canton, Mississippi, last August.

Amid the hue-and-cry by state and national NAACP leaders over Trump’s presence at the museum opening—and I agree it was a disgrace to have him there—I kept thinking how that same NAACP has gladly accepted large sums of cash from Nissan, cash that I believe kept the organization from fully joining the unionization effort and condemning the bullying and threatening tactics Nissan employed that ultimately defeated it.

I’m not writing the post, however, because my star student at the University of Mississippi, Jaz Brisack, has written a much better piece that was published this week by LikeTheDew. Mark my word, Jaz Brisack, already an active organizer and fine writer, is a future force to be reckoned with on the labor/progressive front in not only the South but across the country as well. I couldn’t be prouder of her than I am today.

Below is a link to Jaz’s article. Read and enjoy!

http://likethedew.com/2017/12/08/corruption-can-be-classic-in-the-mississippi-way/#.Wi7KsjgWy1s 

  

The shared mission of charter schools, vouchers, the GOP, and charter school-supporting Democrats is to destroy public education

 

OXFORD, Miss. – My high school had one, and maybe yours did, too—the toughest teacher in the school. Feared but respected, she (it was usually a “she”) was polite but didn’t smile much, and when you entered her classroom you knew you’d better sit up straight and pay attention.

Back at my high school in Sanford, North Carolina, her name was Freda Kriminger. She taught English, and her students finished the year knowing a gerund from a regular verb as well as why Lady Macbeth couldn’t wash the blood off her hands.

I thought about Mrs. Kriminger recently as I proudly stood among several high school teachers during our induction into the East Carolina University (my alma mater) Educators Hall of Fame. I’m sure they are doing their best to keep the Kriminger legacy alive.

Still, I know that’s getting harder and harder.

In North Carolina, a state that once served as a Southern model for good public education, the right-wing Republican General Assembly is doing its best to disassemble public education. Between 2002 and 2013, North Carolina’s ranking in teacher pay dropped from 19^th to 47^th in the nation. Although pay increases in 2016 lifted the state to 35^th, millions of taxpayer dollars are being shifted from public schools to for-profit charter schools and private school vouchers.

With a few exceptions such as the administration of Gov. Paul B. Johnson Sr. in the 1940s and Gov. William Winter in the early 1980s, public education has never had much respect or support here in Mississippi.

This is a state that had fewer than 9,000 students in public schools by the beginning of World War I.  First it was the farmers decrying the loss of child labor in the fields. “Children were encouraged to work throughout the year without regard for the importance of completing the school year,” write James W. Loewen and Charles Sallis in their classic text, Mississippi Conflict & Change about early 20^th century Mississippi. “Mississippi ranked last in the nation in average days of school attendance per child … . Mississippi also ranked at the bottom in over-all financial support for education.”

By mid-century it was the race-baiters screaming about mongrelization of their precious whiteness if their children were forced to go to school with blacks.

As reported recently in Arielle Dreher’s compelling story in the Jackson Free Press on Jackson, Mississippi, public schools, the segregationist white Citizens Councils told Mississippians in 1964 that “It is better to miss school altogether than to integrate.” Indeed at the time when Governor Winter was pushing his sweeping education reform package in 1982, school attendance in Mississippi was not compulsory.

Teacher pay in Mississippi today ranks next to last—just above South Dakota—in the nation. A teacher in Mississippi averages $42,744 a year. A teacher in New York state averages $79,637. Teacher pay in the South and border states is so low that some have qualified for Habitat for Humanity housing. Many have to work two jobs to survive.

School districts across Mississippi are experiencing such faculty shortages that the state Board of Education recently agreed to ease licensing requirements.

The ongoing saga of the Jackson Public School system and its failure to meet accreditation standards is a tale of racism, poverty, mismanagement, short-sightedness, and lack of support and will.

Of course, what is happening in Mississippi is reflective of the nation as a whole. Republican rule, aided and abetted by Obama-era charter school promoters like former Education Secretary Arne Duncan, have steadily undermined public school support everywhere. Charter schools and vouchers are Trojan horses, and their mission is to destroy, not to rescue.

“Will you teach me how to soar, to see things never seen before?” the poet Victor C. Johnson once wrote in homage to teachers. “But most importantly of all, will you teach me how to be, the only thing I can be … me?”

That’s the mission teachers like Freda Kriminger have always shared. Sadly, mission control is not in their hands.

A version of this column appeared recently in the Jackson Free Press in Jackson, Mississippi.

Werner Herzog: "Do something about it" if you're mad about GOP attacks on workers, education, the poor

 

(Werner Herzog at Rhodes College in Memphis in September)

German film director Werner Herzog, famous for films such as Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Nosferatu, and Lessons of Darkness, told an audience at Rhodes College in Memphis recently that grumbling about President Trump and Republican rule is meaningless unless you’re willing to do something about it.

“The heartland is the best of America, the real core of America,” Herzog said in a wide-ranging talk about film, actors, and current times after a screening of his 2005 film The Wild Blue Yonder. “For the first time, they combined their voices, and no matter who they elected, in this case, Trump, you better take it seriously. … It is very easy to denounce. If there is discontent among you with this president, do something about it. Stand up, vote, rally other people. Things might change.”

Certainly this is the winter of a lot of discontent. And certainly something needs to be done about it.

After losing a bitter election at the giant Nissan plant in Canton, Mississippi, in August, the United Auto Workers went on to lose another election at Fuyao Glass America in Dayton, Ohio, the culmination of an 18-month struggle. The vote was 886-441.

The Republican-led Congress is weighing a tax bill that will damage workers’ lives on a number of fronts, including changes in worker classification in the gig/platform/sharing sectors. Making workers independent contractors rather than employees has long been a trick by companies such as FedEx, and it’s their way to avoid paying pension and other benefits and to keep those workers from unionizing.

Another Republican proposal is to require students who are Pell Grant recipients to repay their grants if they fail to finish college within six years. At present, such repayments are not required. It is yet another assault on education led by elitist politicians who see education as a benefit for their own, not average working people.

According to a UAW statement this month, the GOP tax plan “will make it easier to ship even more good-paying manufacturing jobs overseas by eliminating taxes on offshore profit. This tax plan blows a hole in the federal deficit and sticks you and your grandchildren with the bill. The GOP plan also unfairly raises taxes on the middle class and retirees.”

More and more people in this country struggle while the Dow Jones industrial average grows by double digit numbers. Nation magazine columnist Eric Alterman reports that 5 million more Americans are “food insecure” at the same time the 400 wealthiest Americans saw their net worth grow to $2.4 trillion. In total, some 41 million Americans aren’t sure about their next meal.

Meanwhile Trump wants to cut $191 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, a 25 percent cut.

Is the Democratic Party preparing massive resistance? Well, Will Marshall, a co-founder of the centrist, pro-corporate Democratic Leadership Council that nurtured the likes of former President Clinton, wants the party to adopt what Nation magazine calls a “$20 million program to discover how to talk to working people without alienating Wall Street.”

We wouldn’t want to alienate Wall Street, would we? Not that Wall Street gives a damn.

Not sure this is what Werner Herzog had in mind.

A post-election look at the union loss at Nissan's Mississippi plant, plus farm workers under attack in North Carolina

OXFORD, Miss. – Travis Parks, a 14-year veteran worker at Nissan’s plant in Canton, Mississippi, admits that losing the union election in August was hard.

“Putting a lot of time into it, it was a rough event for me,” says the 43-year-old, who works in the truck system at the plant, “but you have to step back and re-evaluate what went wrong. … I am pretty much taking an optimistic approach to this. I see an opportunity to educate workers who didn’t know what was going on.”

Parks worked hard to get fellow workers to see the benefits of belonging to the United Auto Workers. However, he and other pro-union workers couldn’t counter the anti-union barrage waged against them—the anti-union videos, the one-on-one meetings, the threats of lost jobs and a shut-down plant, the endless stream of anti-union commercials on television.

It was a typical union election in the South, where a phalanx of plant owners and management, politicians, preachers, and radio and newspaper commentators is guaranteed to decry the evils of workers having a joint voice in their working lives.

Parks says the Nissan-Canton management has made a few post-election changes—painting the bathrooms, improving some benefits for temporary workers--but the changes are merely cosmetic. “Small, insignificant things to make it appear that they are concerned.”

A source who works with the national UAW, asking to remain anonymous, says, “there is a natural period of time” after an election loss when people are “being introspective, retrospective.” The UAW still has an office in Canton, but it has reduced its staff there.

In These Times writer Joe Allen says the Nissan-Canton election loss “is nothing less than a knockout punch ending for the foreseeable future any efforts by the UAW to organize the large, predominantly foreign-owned auto assembly plants in the South.” He says the UAW’s loss of militance is partly to blame. “The UAW has become a prison of its modern history … a long track record of making concessions on wages, benefits, and working conditions.” 

What the future holds remains uncertain. Workers are at the mercy of the company, and they have nothing really to say or do about it. It’s a situation facing blue-collar workers across the nation these days.

Many of them voted for Donald Trump to be president. Unlike Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, Trump at least talked about bringing good-paying blue-collar jobs back to America and an end to job-killing trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement.  

Trump ended TPP, but he’s done little else to live up to his campaign populism. His tax reform plan is the same old Republican saw that tax cuts to the rich trickle down prosperity to everybody else, the same lie today that it was when Ronald Reagan pushed that bill of goods.

Every demagogue has to have an “other” to blame for the nation’s troubles, and Trump’s was the immigrant. No Mexican-financed wall yet, but he has called for a major increase in jails and prisons for the tens of thousands of immigrants agents at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have been arresting. Some of these facilities are little more than modern-day concentration camps for people whose big crime is to seek work that U.S.-pushed trade deals destroyed in their home countries.

Trump is feuding with establishment Republican leaders like U.S. Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee. However, don’t kid yourself. Those Republicans are on the same page with Trump when it comes to serving their corporate friends and doing nothing for workers.

In my native North Carolina, the Republican-ruled General Assembly passed a law this year aimed directly at destroying the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, farm workers’ best hope for justice in the fields.

Republican N.C. state Senator Brent Jackson, a farmer fined and cited in court rulings repeatedly for mistreating his workers, pushed through legislation that bans farmworker unions from deducting union dues from workers’ wages. The law even prohibits farmers from agreeing to a union contract as a means to settle lawsuits.

To whom can workers turn for support? The Democratic Party? Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez has undertaken a purge of party leaders who supported pro-union Bernie Sanders during last year’s presidential primaries. In their place are Clintonite corporate lobbyists.

Travis Parks, I admire your optimism at a time like this. I often call myself the last optimist in the room, but I’m worried that maybe now you are.

A version of this column appeared recently in the Jackson Free Press in Jackson, Mississippi.

Post-election report on UAW-Nissan election in Mississippi coming, plus farm workers' struggle in North Carolina and Canada negotiators' call for an end to "right to work" laws in the U.S.

Apologies to readers of Labor South. Teaching and other writing duties have kept me away from the blog recently, but I’ll be posting soon an update on some of the key labor activities in the South and beyond.

Expect a report soon on the situation at Nissan’s Canton, Mississippi, plant in the wake of the August election that saw workers vote against joining the United Auto Workers by nearly two-to-one odds. It was a tough election with Nissan and its allies waging a fierce battle against unionization.

In many ways, it was a typical union election in the South, where a phalanx of plant owners and management, politicians, preachers, and radio and newspaper commentators is guaranteed to decry the evils of workers having a joint voice in their working lives.

On the other side of the South in North Carolina, the state General Assembly is waging war against the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, an organization that has scored a string of victories for farm workers over the past number of years. Brent Jackson, a state senator with a long record of fines and court rulings against him for worker abuses on his farm, was prime sponsor of legislation that included provisions specifically targeted against FLOC. That legislation is now law.

Workers sometimes have to look far and wide to find support. NAFTA negotiators in Canada recently pushed the United States to get rid of its “right to work” laws as both nations and Mexico take a fresh look at the trade deal. Of course, those laws’ purpose is to gut unions wherever they are, and the laws exist throughout the South. President Trump has been critical of trade deals like NAFTA, but I’ve got a suspicion that has nothing to do with right to work laws.

Harry Dean Stanton, Hollywood's Zen Loner, celebrated at the festival that bears his name in Lexington, Kentucky

 

(On the Red Carpet for the premiere of the film Lucky at the Harry Dean Stanton Festival in Lexington, Kentucky, this past weekend.)

LEXINGTON, Ky. – I first noticed him in the 1967 film Cool Hand Luke. He played Tramp, the guitar-picking inmate who crooned “Just A Closer Walk With Thee” as Paul Newman walked out to see his soon-to-die mother for the last time.

It was a film that evoked the bad old days of places like Mississippi’s own Parchman Farm, where a special kind of Southern cruelty ruled.

He was a Southerner himself, son of a Kentucky tobacco farmer and a hairdresser. His mother liked to dangle a black sock in front of her infant son just to scare him. After a tough Depression-era youth, he served as a ship’s cook during the Battle of Okinawa in 1945, and he felt lucky none of the Japanese suicide bombers overhead hit their target.

Maybe those experiences added a degree of poignancy to his roles in the 100-plus movies he made and 50-plus television shows.

Maybe what attracted me most to Harry Dean Stanton, who died last month at the age of 91, was that lean, weather-beaten look of the classic underdog. He was a “character actor”, a term he didn’t particularly like, one of those working stiffs of the Big Screen whose faces are known to everyone but not their names.

Stanton’s life and work (I'm writing a biography of him for the University Press of Kentucky) were celebrated this past weekend at the seventh annual Harry Dean Stanton Festival in Lexington, Kentucky, an event that included the premier of his last film, Lucky, and its director, John Carroll Lynch, and co-writer Drago Sumonja. Also on hand was musician and actor John Doe, who joined Stanton in the cast of the 1987 film Slam Dance. Created and organized by Lucy Jones of the Lexington Film League, the festival not only draws Stanton fans from far away but also a good many Stanton family members.

(To the right, Lucky director and noted actor John Carroll Lynch with Labor South author Joe Atkins at The Kentucky Theatre in Lexington, Kentucky)

I’ve always loved character actors. Cool Hand Luke was full of them. Who’ll ever forget Strother Martin as the warden saying, “What we have here is a failure to communicate”? George Kennedy, Dennis Hopper, Joe Don Baker, Ralph Waite and Stanton perfectly portrayed “the great mix of faces and personalities” you might find in a prison, said director Frank Darabont, whose own prison films, The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and The Green Mile (1999, with Stanton in the cast) are classics of the genre.

Countless hours in front of the television or in a movie theater in my youth made me as much a fan of actors like Royal Dano, James Best, Dub Taylor, Cloris Leachman, Thelma Ritter, and R.G. Armstrong as of the big stars I also loved, such as Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, and Robert Mitchum.

Many of the greatest character actors were Southerners. Stanton, Warren Oates and James Best were Kentuckians. Armstrong was from Alabama, Dub Taylor from Virginia. Let me add here Johnny McPhail and his wife Susan McPhail of Oxford, Mississippi, where I live.

Character actors are “not gorgeous enough to be stars,” write Melissa Holbrook Pierson and Luc Sante in their 1999 book O.K. You Mugs: Writers on Movie Actors. “Their noses have been broken one too many times. … In short, they are real.”

Stanton is unique among them, however. His career began in the mid-1950s with cowboy and other roles that led to regular appearances on TV Westerns like Gunsmoke, Have Gun, Will Travel, Rawhide and Bonanza. He played an Oklahoma hitchhiker in Two-Lane Backstop (1971), a bogus blind preacher in Wise Blood (1979), a member of Billy the Kid’s gang in Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973), and the crew member in Alien (1979) who is killed by the monster after calling out “Kitty, kitty, kitty” to the crew’s missing cat, Jones.

Stanton finally got his big break to play a starring role in Wim Wenders’ 1984 film Paris, Texas. His character, Travis Henderson, was a silent, lone wanderer in the desert in search of some sort of penance for past sins. “It got more and more hard to say that this is Travis and this is Harry Dean,” Wenders has said of the film. Stanton himself agreed. “I don’t know what happened to Travis. I’d say … it’s me. Still searching for liberation, or enlightenment, for lack of a better way to put it, and realizing that it might happen, it might not.”

Such comments point to another side of the actor, a lifelong bachelor, the one in Hollywood known as “Harry Zen Stanton”. A philosopher of Buddhist-tinged fatalism, Stanton has attained a kind of cult status that may be due as much for his musings about life as for his work as an actor and his musicianship. “In the end, you end up accepting everything in your life—suffering, horror, love, loss, hate—all of it.”

Besides, he said, “It’s all a movie anyway.” Okay, Harry. Then I say what a great movie your life was.

A version of this column appeared recently in the Jackson Free Press in Jackson, Mississippi.

Confederate statues both offend and remind as the South still fights on old war

 

(The Confederate statue on the Square in downtown Oxford, Mississippi)

OXFORD, Miss. – My young self must have killed thousands of imaginary Yankees in the woods next to our house in central North Carolina. Inspired by Civil War-themed television shows like “The Gray Ghost”, I put on the nearest gray cap, armed myself with my toy rifle, and went to war to defend the South.

Even then, however, I knew that hanging over my TV heroes, Confederate Major John Singleton “The Gray Ghost” Mosby and crusty old Sergeant Myles Magruder, was the ugly specter of slavery.

Today, sad to say, we’re still fighting that war. With the events in Charlottesville and protests against Confederate monuments in Memphis, Durham, and Baltimore, the nation is going through what folks here in the Confederate-laden culture of Oxford, Mississippi, and the University of Mississippi wrestle with all the time.

What do you do with all the Confederate reminders that are everywhere in the South? I grew up in Robert E. Lee County, North Carolina. I live near Robert E. Lee County, Mississippi. I live in a town with two Confederate statues, one of them dedicated to those who “gave their lives for a just and holy cause.” They attract countless literary scholars who come here to see William Faulkner’s inspiration in writing, “the Confederate soldier … his musket at order arms, shading his carven eyes with his stone hand.”

Like most Confederate statues, they appeared long after the Civil War at a time when the white South was celebrating the rise of Jim Crow.

The Neo-Nazis and white supremacists came to Charlottesville ostensibly to protest the removal of a statue to Robert E. Lee. I’m sure they didn’t know about Lee’s own disdain for Confederate statues. According to Business Insider writer Daniel Brown, Lee wrote the statues “would have the effect of retarding rather than accelerating (the nation’s) accomplishment.”  

President Trump faced a political firestorm for his reaction to those white supremacists in Charlottesville. The CEOS on his Strategic and Policy Forum and Manufacturing Council walked out in protest. The corporate media got so enraged they even stopped talking about Russian influence in the 2016 election.

Maybe it’s just me, but I have to look askance when the CEOs of JP Morgan Chase and General Electric join the nation’s moral vanguard. Those guys never do anything that doesn’t have to do with the bottom line.

While Russia and Confederate statues deserve media coverage, they are also easy targets that don’t challenge the corporate state. Less easy are the Trump-and-GOP-led military buildup in this country and the systematic dismantling of the nation’s social safety net and environmental protections.

CNN health producer John Bonifield said this summer that CNN CEO Jeff Zucker actually told staff members to drop their climate accord reporting and “let’s get back to Russia.” Prior to Charlottesville, you couldn’t turn on CNN and MSNBC without hearing endless chatter about Russia, a neo-McCarthyite obsession that is manna from heaven for military contractors.

Money compromises everything in this country, including the media. In the late 1990s, CBS actually killed investigative reporter Roberta Baskin’s story about Nike’s connection to Vietnamese sweatshops after the two companies formed an Olympics partnership that made Nike a CBS sponsor.

Money even compromises civil rights organizations like the NAACP, the recipient of such Nissan largesse over the years that one of its Tennessee branches named the company’s North American operations “Organization of the Year” in 2016. Is this why the NAACP avoided boycotts or other pressure tactics to get Nissan to act fairly in the recent union election for the largely black workforce at Nissan’s Canton plant?

Yes, take down and replace the Mississippi flag with its embarrassing Confederate insignia. Take those statues of Jefferson Davis and Nathan Bedford Forrest in Memphis and put them in a military park or a cemetery.

Still, for the adult version of that Yankee-fighting youth back in North Carolina, many of those statues deserve a place even if it’s just in a museum or a cemetery. Many of them depict a simple, country-boy soldier who fought a war not of his own making, upholding an evil, profit-obsessed institution of which he had no part, a soldier whose “carven eyes” and “stone hand” are the South’s most searing reminder of the horror and tragic waste of war, particularly one fought to enslave fellow human beings.

This column appeared recently in the Jackson Free Press in Jackson, Mississippi.

Where were the NAACP boycotts and other major efforts to support Nissan's Canton, Mississippi, workers in their struggle for a union? Too many $$$$ from Nissan?

 

(Bernie Sanders at the March 4 "March on Mississippi" rally in support of the workers at Nissan's Canton, Mississippi, plant)

Looking back at workers’ rejection of a union at Nissan’s Canton, Mississippi, plant earlier this month, I, like many others, still wonder what might have made a difference in that election.

After a dozen years or more of slowly, methodically helping to build a pro-union community network that included civil rights-era veterans, area preachers, students from several colleges and universities, activists, supporters from as far away as France and Brazil, and, of course, workers, the United Auto Workers mustered only 36 percent of the vote on election day.

Here’s one thing I’ve come up with: One of the key elements that was missing was a national, concerted effort by the nation’s leading civil rights organization, the NAACP, to use it prestige and leverage to make a difference. The NAACP gave lip service to the rights of the 80 percent African American workforce at Nissan Canton to form a union, of course, but where were the boycotts or other high profile efforts to show its unity with those workers? Nowhere to be seen.

 “If Nissan allows workers in Brazil to collective bargain, why not workers in Canton, Mississippi?” Mississippi NAACP President Derrick Johnson told thousands at the March 4 “March on Mississippi” rally in Canton in support of the union.

Echoing those sentiments was national NAACP President Cornell William Brooks at the rally.

Words are cheap, however. Where was the action?

Was it missing because Nissan has funneled plenty of cash in the direction of the NAACP, which partnered with Nissan for the 50^th anniversary of the March on Washington in 2013? That same year Nissan gave $100,000 to the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute to commemorate the life of the martyred Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers. Although Hollywood celebrity and strong UAW supporter Danny Glover had been a featured speaker at past annual Medgar Evers dinners, he was significantly NOT invited at the 2013 event.

The NAACP’s Murfreesboro, Tennessee, branch was so thankful for Nissan’s largess in 2016 that it named the company’s North America operations “Organization of the Year”.

Yet this is the organization that virulently fought against its Canton workers’ efforts to organize, much as it did years before at its plant in Tennessee. Workers were subjected to meetings with management—interrogations might be a better word—and anti-union videos, threats of lost jobs and a shut-down plant. Charged by the National Labor Relations Board with various labor violations, Nissan waged such a media campaign that workers said they couldn’t turn on the television without seeing an anti-union commercial.

“Labor rights are civil rights” was the rallying cry of the union effort at the Canton plant. As former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders told workers and supporters at the March rally, “the eyes of the country and the eyes of the world are on you!”

The eyes of the NAACP were, too, but only briefly, very briefly, before they returned to the $$$$$$$$ signs that Nissan was waving in the distance.

Threats, intimidation and use of inmate labor to pull down union signs won the day in Canton, Mississippi, this week but not the war. A solid pro-worker community network promises the battle will go on.

 

(Actor Danny Clover--center-right--addresses Nissan workers at a pro-UAW rally in 2014. To the left with tie and sunglasses is veteran civil rights activist Bob Zellner)

Threats of lost jobs and a closed plant, fear-mongering, intimidation, interrogations of pro-union workers, and even the use of state inmate labor to pull down pro-union signs on roads and highways paid off Thursday and Friday as Nissan workers at the Canton, Mississippi, plant voted against United Auto Workers representation 2,244 to 1,307.

The 64 percent victory for anti-union forces, however, was quickly followed by UAW officials filing a new set of charges against the company for violating legal labor and labor election practices.

“The result of the election was a setback for these workers, the UAW and working Americans everywhere, but in no way should it be considered a defeat,” UAW president Dennis Williams said in response to the vote. “The courageous workers of Nissan who fought tirelessly for union representation alongside community and civil rights leaders should be proud of their efforts to be represented by the UAW.”

The National Labor Relations Board, which has already made previous charges against the company for labor violations, has the option of ordering a new election and also taking the case to federal court and even determining a fair election is impossible under present conditions.

With the ascendancy of the Trump Administration, the NLRB’s attitudes toward unions remain hugely in question, however.

The company and its allies in Mississippi’s political and business establishment formed a powerful phalanx of opposition that included filling the airways, Internet and newspaper pages with anti-union commercials and advertisements, speeches by Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant and state business leaders attacking the union, and a climate of fear within the plant.

“On my way to visit workers and discuss the upcoming vote, I saw someone removing the signs (“Union Yes” signs she’d earlier put up) along the highway exit ramp as a MDOT (Mississippi Department of Transportation) truck blinked idly nearby,” student labor activist Jaz Brisack (one of my stellar students at the University of Mississippi) wrote this week in the web magazine, LikeTheDew. “Looking closer, I noticed that the man yanking up our morning’s work was wearing striped trousers beneath his neon vest.

“The irony of the fact that these inmates’ forced, free labor is being used to silence the support for the beleaguered Nissan workers in their push for unionization is rich and complex. The prisoners are being subjected to the `involuntary servitude’ that the 13<sup>th</sup> Amendment continues to allow as a `punishment for crime.’”

Those familiar with labor history know that some of the greatest victories have come after heart-breaking losses. Crystal Lee “Norma Rae” Sutton and the members of the Textile Workers’ Union of America had to fight 17 long years before they finally won their victory at the J.P. Stevens plant in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, in 1974. Legendary labor organizer Sol Stetin called J.P. Stevens the nation’s “number one labor outlaw.” Textile workers at Pillowtex in Kannapolis, North Carolina, waged a 25-year struggle, losing election after election before finally winning their union battle in 1999.

Critics of unions point to those victories as reasons to reject a union because those plants eventually shut down. NAFTA and other international trade deals were significant culprits in those shutdowns, however, as the textile industry moved wholesale into Asia and its world of cheap labor and sweatshops.

It’s one thing to shut down a textile mill, and quite another to uproot a mile-long, 6,400-worker plant that produces some of the top vehicles in the Nissan line and is a significant factor in the international company’s overall business plan.  Where would it go? Every other Nissan plant outside the U.S. South is already unionized.

A story on the Canton campaign by veteran labor writer David Moberg in In These Times this week was headlined “UAW Vote in Mississippi is a Battle for the Soul of the U.S. Labor Movement”. This echoes a quote I’ve often used in this blog as well as in my book on the Southern labor movement, Covering for the Bosses: Labor and the Southern Press (University Press of Mississippi, 2008): Labor organizing in the South is a “venture into unplowed fields.”

Sidney Hillman, longtime leader of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, said this in 1946 as organized labor launched its “Operation Dixie” campaign. Mississippi AFL-CIO President Robert Shaffer adds this truth: “It’s a fight everyday of your life in this state.”

The workers in Canton and their advocates, such as labor organizers Richard Bensinger and Sanchioni Butler and student activist Jaz Brisack, worked countless long, hard hours on this campaign. For Bensinger and Butler, that effort stretches back many years. I’ve been its most faithful chronicler since 2005.

The 12 years of this struggle have created a rich and solid community network of workers, preachers, activists, students, organizers, politicians, and supporters that is not going away. These folks are in for the long haul. They’re fighting the good fight, and someday they’re going to win. The road to justice is hard and often treacherous, but the courage and steadfastness and faith that it takes to walk it have already been proven tenfold.  

Nissan workers in Mississippi begin vote today on whether to join the UAW as state political and business leaders align with the company against the union

 

(A pro-union rally at the Nissan plant in Canton, Mississippi, in 2014)

On the podium in Jackson, Mississippi, stood Mississippi’s leading corporate boosters decrying a possible victory by pro-union workers at Nissan’s plant in nearby Canton in the August 3-4 election to determine whether they can join the United Auto Workers.

At their July 20 press conference, Mississippi Economic Council interim president and CEO Scott Waller, Greater Jackson Chamber Partnership President and CEO Duane O’Neill and others made clear whose side they’re on: the Nissan bosses whose threats and intimidation of workers have led to international condemnation.

On the other side are the workers, Mississippians, 80 percent of them African American, who have little say in work and safety conditions, complain of minimal at best medical treatment for work injuries, and even lost a colleague in 2015, Derick Whiting, who collapsed on the plant floor during working hours.

It’s not just the pro-union workers doing the complaining.

The U. S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration has fined Nissan tens of thousands of dollars for safety violations at the plant. The National Labor Relations Board has charged the company with violating workers’ rights. Nissan was forced to pay Iraq and Afghanistan military veteran Chip Wells $6,500 in disability and back pay after treating him with such hostility for his pro-union views that he had to go on medical leave.

(To the right, the mile-long Nissan plant in Canton, Mississippi)

Joining Waller, a former business editor with the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, and O’Neill on the side of the company bosses is Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant, one of those old-school conservatives who always cry about outside interference in state affairs unless, of course, that outside interference is anti-union. If so, then welcome to Mississippi!

Hypocrisy—another word for lying--is a common phenomenon in union battles.

Witness Carlos Ghosn himself, the CEO of Nissan and partly French-owned Renault who told the French Parliament in February 2016 that Nissan always cooperates with unions. In fact, every single Nissan plant around the world is unionized except the ones in Mississippi and Tennessee. Yet this is the same Carlos Ghosn who told Nissan workers in Smyrna, Tennessee, the day before their union election in 2001 that a union “is not in your best interest.” They got the message.

When a union election was scheduled at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 2014, U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., initially pledged he’d stay out of it. He lied. He soon joined Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam in an anti-union smear campaign that included secretly making a $300 million state-funded expansion of the plant contingent on keeping the union out.

Poor ol’ Mississippi, so poor it can’t even keep its roads paved and bridges repaired, has thus far spent $1.3 billion on taxpayer subsidies to keep Nissan in Canton. Nissan is a $38.4 billion company. Carlos Ghosn earns $10 million a year and has a net worth of $100 million.

The biggest charge against Nissan workers organizing is that they already earn good wages for Mississippi. Nissan refuses to reveal what it pays its fulltime workers. However, an estimated 2,900 of its 6,400 workers in Canton are temporary or contract workers, with temporary workers earning between $13.46 and $14.21 an hour. Guess what the average central Mississippi production worker earns? The answer: $16.70.

Still, the campaign is not really about money. A decade ago, two years after it began, Nissan-Canton worker Yvette Taylor told a gathering at the Canton United Methodist Church how Nissan threw her into a tangled web of bureaucracy, disrespect, missteps in treatment, and finally dismissal after she injured her hands and knees on the job.

“So many things happened that I just don’t know where to begin,” the mother of 10 said. Finally “I got a letter in the mail saying I was terminated.”

Workers join a union to get respect, to have a collective voice that they can’t have as individuals, to have a say in working conditions. They have a legal right to join a union, yet when they try to exercise that right, they face life-crushing threats.

Veteran labor organizer Rose Turner knows all about this. She helped catfish workers at Delta Pride in Indianola win their historic union election in 1986: “We were at the crossroads. Either we were going to change things or … our kids were going to have the same situation, “ she once said. “I’ve never been afraid of anything because before I do anything, I put God first.”

This column also ran in the Jackson Free Press in Jackson, Mississippi.

Union vote at Nissan in Canton, Mississippi, set for August 3-4

Thousands of workers at the giant Nissan plant in Canton, Mississippi, will be able to cast their ballots on whether to join the United Auto Workers in an election set for August 3 and August 4.

A petition had been filed earlier for a July 31/August 1 vote, so the actual election will come only a few days later.

The vote marks the culmination of a 12-year struggle by workers for an intimidation-and-threat-free union election at the plant, where the workforce is 80 percent African American. Local Nissan managers have strongly opposed unionization even thought the company ownership claims neutrality. Workers have been forced to watch anti-union videos, and pro-union workers have complained of harassment on the job.

With the rallying cry "Labor Rights Are Civil Rights", the campaign has include a widespread community grassroots effort with local ministers, civil rights-era veterans and students from nearby Jackson State University and Tougaloo College as well as the University of Mississippi standing side-by-side with the workers. International attention has also focused on the campaign--from as far away as Brazil and also France, where the government controls a percentage of Nissan's partner firm, Renault, and thus has influence on Nissan operations.

However, Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant and the Republican leadership of the state Legislature in Mississippi, along with the Mississippi Manufacturers Association and outside groups such as the influential Koch Brothers, can be expected to use their influence to help defeat pro-union forces. This is what happened in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 2014, when workers at the Volkswagen plant sought a union. U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., even promised that Volkswagen would expand operations if the union was voted down. Workers narrowly rejected the union in the vote.

Nissan workers in Mississippi push for a union vote by the end of July / A call from LabourStart to help farm workers fend off legislative attacks in North Carolina

Workers in the South are standing up for their rights and making gains. Autoworkers at the giant Nissan plant in Canton, Mississippi, this week asked the National Labor Relations Board for a vote on July 31 and August 1 on whether to join the United Auto Workers. This marks the culmination of a 12-year campaign, which Labor South has followed more closely than any other news outlet. An NLRB petition for a vote requires that at least 30 percent of the workforce approve the vote. A union victory requires 50 percent plus one.

(To the right, civil rights-era SNCC activist Bob Zellner in sunglasses at the center and actor Danny Glover to the right of him at a pro-worker rally at the Nissan plant in 2014)

In North Carolina, farm workers have made steady gains in securing worker rights with the help of organizations like the Farm Labor Organizing Committee. However, the state's arch-conservative legislators, backed by deep-pocketed anti-union moguls like Art Pope (North Carolina's version of the Koch Brothers), aim to destroy those gains. LabourStart, the London-based international labor activist network and publisher of my recent collection of essays by writers around the world on the migrant worker issue, The Strangers Among Us: Tales from a Global Migrant Worker Movement, recently filed this report from the U.S. South, asking for help in keeping those farm workers' hard-earned gains. Labor South posts this call for help on behalf of Eric Lee, who heads LabourStart:

(To the left, a typical North Carolina tobacco field harvested by migrant workers from Latin America)

Following a series of recent farmworker wins in the southern United States, farmers elected to the North Carolina State Legislature are trying to use their legislative power to stop workers on their own farms from organizing for better wages and working conditions. 

On 28 June, the North Carolina General Assembly passed Farm Bill S615 with no debate. The bill aims to stop the progress that farmworkers are achieving by making it illegal for farmers to deduct dues from union members as well as making it more difficult for farmworkers to win union contracts.

The bill would make it illegal for farmworkers to ask growers to sign an agreement with their union as part of settling a lawsuit over wage or labor violations.

US farmworkers are excluded from the National Labor Relations Act and other worker protections like minimum wage, child labor, and workers compensation laws, among others.

However, through the efforts of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC), farmworkers have won union contracts that include wage increases, job security, and improved working conditions.

This bill aims to roll back this progress.

Please join FLOC and the International Union of Foodworkers (IUF) in calling on North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper to veto the bill. Your message will be sent by email to the Governor and delivered as part of a signed petition.

Click here to show your support for North Carolina's farm workers:

http://www.labourstart.org/go/floc

And please share this message with your friends, family and fellow union members.

Thank you!



Eric Lee

A visit to Munich and a reminder of the poor state of mainstream U.S. journalism--from Fox News propaganda to MSNBC's Russia obsession

 
(To the right, Munich's famous Rathaus in the heart of the city)

MUNICH, Germany – After my stint in the Army and Vietnam, this city became the scene of my salad days, where I enjoyed the carousel of my mid-20s studying philosophy and journalism at the university, working part-time in a warehouse, and spending far too many hours in the beer halls and beer gardens.

A flood of memories passed through me when I recently returned to my old stomping grounds. One of them was something my journalism professor here said. “If you really want to learn journalism, go to the United States.”

(To the left, my old apartment--the red-tiered rooftop in the center of the photograph--in Munich's Schwabing district) 

It was the mid-1970s. Woodward and Bernstein were chasing Richard “I am not a crook” Nixon out of the White House. Vice President Spiro T. Agnew was so busy fending off bribery charges he had to stop attacking the media’s “nattering nabobs of negativism.” I took my professor’s advice. My expatriate days were over.

This go-round I couldn’t help making all sorts of comparison, and the good ol’ USA came up short on many of them. Why does Europe have such a fantastic train system at a time when Donald Trump wants to end subsidies for the last passenger train service in the United States? Why do so many Americans have to worry about health care when Germans like my 89-year-old farmer cousin Georg know they’ll get the care they deserve after a life of hard work?

And then there’s that great U.S. journalism that my professor at the University of Munich cited as the crown jewel of my craft.

I thumbed through the pages of Munich’s major mainstream newspaper, the Süddeutsche Zeitung (South German Newspaper). The Wednesday, June 21, edition included 41 news-and-feature-filled pages, the kind of news hole (newsroom lingo for written content) U.S. reporters can only imagine in some drug-induced fantasy. The pages themselves are 30 percent larger than those of major U.S. newspapers. And, yes, there’s an online edition, too.

Even tabloids like Munich’s Abendzeitung (Evening Newspaper) with their screaming headlines and giant photographs have far more stories than most mainstream U.S. newspapers.

The contrast really hit home when I arrived at the Memphis International Airport and read in the local alternative newspaper that the Gannett Corporation, master of the shrunken news hole and owner of the Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi, and many other papers across the country, has put the headquarters for its newly purchased Memphis Commercial Appeal up for sale. Plans are to move elsewhere into smaller space.  Gannett is doing the same at its newspaper in Nashville.

I read further and learned the Memphis Newspaper Guild has filed a complaint against Gannett for its refusal to make severance payments to the 23 Commercial Appeal employees it laid off when it bought the newspaper. Several current workers have joined the protest by hanging “Shame on Gannett” signs around the newspaper office.

Of course, these kinds of developments in Memphis and elsewhere are taking place at a time when U.S. journalism is under severe attack by President Trump, Congress, and other politicians across the land.

Television journalists were recently forbidden to interview U.S. senators outside the Senate chamber. Trump is waging a constant battle with what he considers the purveyors of “fake news”, while those same news outlets struggle to keep up with the stream of misinformation and falsehoods coming out of the White House. Case in point: Trump’s claim of a United Nations “slush fund” to support the Paris climate agreement.  What he referred to is actually the so-called “Green Climate Fund” to aid poorer countries put into place better environmental policies and actions.

A Repubican state senator in Alaska recently slapped a reporter because of a story the reporter wrote. Montana Republican congressional candidate Greg Gianforte physically attacked reporter Ben Jacobs after Jacobs asked a question he didn’t like during the campaign. Gianforte subsequently received a donation from the director of a conservative broadcasting group, and voters elected him despite the attack.

The nation’s most popular news outlet, Fox News, is largely a mouthpiece for conservative propaganda, while its supposed ideological opposite, MSNBC, spends most of its time on a constant drumbeat about Russia’s alleged interference with the 2016 presidential election.

Speaking of that drumbeat about Russia, FAIR, the flagship publication of Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, noted recently how all the reporting on Russia and the 2016 election has come at the expense of other reporting on climate, the economy, healthcare and President Trump’s proposed travel restrictions despite polls that show people want to know more about those issues.

The Russian focus “helps to defuse the ticking time-bomb of accountability for last year’s electoral loss” by Democrats, and it “shifts activist energy and attention away from the issues that could challenge the interests of the elites who run the networks,” FAIR says. In fact, CNN CEO Jeff Zucker told his staff to go back to the Russia story after its recent coverage of climate accords, according to a report by Project Veritas. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow spends an estimated 53 percent of her air time on the Russia story, Intercept says.

Thank goodness, good journalism is out there if you look hard for it.  As most reporters on the national scene scurried to find the latest “revelation” about Russian subterfuge, Alec MacGillis of Pro Publica probed the financial holdings of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and found that he’s a slum lord in Baltimore whose “Kushnervilles” are home to 20,000 low-income residents and countless rats, maggots, clogged pipes, and sewage-ruined carpets. Residents who complain have to face Kushner’s lawyers and a court system that mimics the legal maze Charles Dickens described in his 19^th century novel Bleak House.

That’s the kind of reporting my professor in Munich had in mind. Just wish we had more of it.

 A shorter version of this column appeared recently in the Jackson Free Press of Jackson, Mississippi.