Labor South roundup: Rural Mississippi private prison may be getting asylum seekers as it benefits from Trump's migrant crackdown; Coca-Cola strike on Gulf Coast ends with no contract but hope for better negotiations

It’s time for another Labor South roundup: Strange goings-on at a private prison in rural Mississippi, and the Teamsters end their strike at Coca-Cola facilities in Mississippi and Alabama without a contract but hope for better negotiations

  

Trump inaugural contributor CoreCivic gets nearly 1,400 new federal detainees and maybe hundreds of asylum seekers, too

(This includes updated information from the earlier post. More updates may be coming)

News broke in late June that the Tallahatchie Correctional Facility in the Mississippi Delta town of Tutwiler is getting 1,350 new federal detainees, courtesy of the U.S. Marshals Service. That’s the kind of thing Wall Street loves to hear, and accordingly CoreCivic—formerly known as the Corrections Corporation of America---saw a 20 percent increase in the value of its stock between early April and late June.

Shares of its stock rose 3.5 percent on the very day President Trump signed an executive order ending the migrant family separations on the U.S.-Mexico border, according to Michelle Liu with Mississippi Today.

Analysts say Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy toward undocumented migrants crossing the border has been a boon to CoreCivic and other private prison companies.

What makes the Tutwiler story even more intriguing is that a source who has had dealings with the private prison told Labor South this month that as many as 500 of its latest residents may be asylum seekers who have committed no crime but sought asylum in the United States due to war, terrorism or other threatening issues in their home countries.

Earlier media efforts to get CoreCivic and the U.S. Marshalls Service to clarify who would be housed at the facility after the Marshals Service deal have been unsuccessful.

CoreCivic spokesman Rodney King in Nashville, Tennessee, told Labor South this week, however, that the Tutwiler facility houses inmates and detainees from six federal, state and local partners, including South Carolina, Wyoming, U.S. Virgin Islands, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and those who came through the U.S. Marshals Service. "Regarding asylum seekers, CoreCivic does not enforce immigration laws or policies or have any say whatsoever in an individual's deportation or release. Decisions related to asylum status are solely the discretion of our government partners," King said in an August 30 e-mail letter.

The Labor South source says asylum seekers at the Tutwiler facility come from Latin America, Africa and Asia, with many coming from India and Nepal.

The Tallahatchie facility was the scene of a violent riot in 2004 in which inmates set fire to a portable toilet, clothing and mattresses. Another CoreCivic facility in Mississippi, the Adams County Correctional Center, was the scene of an inmate riot in 2012 with inmates taking guards hostage. One correctional officer died in the incident. The next year CoreCivic lost its contract with the state of Mississippi to operate another facility in Wilkinson County.

Coca-Cola workers end their strike with hope for better negotiations

Workers at Coca-Cola Bottling Company facilities in Mississippi and Alabama are hoping the 11-day strike that ended last week will ultimately lead to a better contract with the company even though they went back to work without an agreement.

Some 250 Teamsters with Mobile, Alabama-based Local 991 went back to work after protesting the company’s treatment of new employees—their pay is up to $8 an hour less than what it had been in the past—plus higher insurance costs. “We needed to go back to work,” union steward David Stephens told Real-Time News from Alabama. However, “I think the company realized that they needed us back. Progress is being made in negotiations.”

Picketing during the strike took place at Coca-Cola bottling plants in Mobile and Ocean Springs on Mississippi's Gulf Coast, plus two other sites.

Let's look at U.S. interference in the politics of other countries if we're going to continue this "tsunami of coverage" about Russian involvement in the 2016 election

(The front entrance to the old headquarters of the United Fruit Company in New Orleans)

Back in 1910, New Orleans fruit company boss Samuel Zemurray got sick and tired of Honduran tax levies on his business interests there and sent a gang of mercenaries to overthrow the Honduran government. They did, and his United Fruit Company, today known as Chiquita, became a giant in the region.

Eighteen years later, the U.S. Navy helped the United  Fruit Company overcome a crippling workers’ strike in Colombia by supporting army leaders there in an attack on the strikers that killed as many as 2,000. Famed writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote about this in his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.

In 2009, almost exactly a century after the Zemurray-engineered coup d’etat, then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave her support to the overthrow of Manuel Zelaya, the democratically elected president of Honduras.  Not liking Zelaya’s left-leaning politics, Clinton preferred the military-backed regime that replaced him and has since made Honduras one of the world’s most dangerous, crime-ridden countries.

I wonder what the average Honduran today thinks about U.S. corporate media’s obsessive coverage of alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

In 2017, MSNBC, the “liberal” counterpart to right-wing Fox News, ran 1,385 broadcasts on Russia and its political meddling. By comparison, Yemen and its deadly bombing by Saudi Arabia with U.S. military assistance got 82 MSNBC broadcasts.

It’s not unusual today to see terms such as “traitor” and “treason” in USA Today and other corporate media applied to President Trump because of his relationship with the man U.S. media increasingly love to refer to as Russia’s “thug” leader, Vladimir Putin.  As valid as the story of Russian interference may be, is it worth this “tsunami of coverage”, media critic Norman Solomon asks? And why, in this “tsuanami”, are there so many missing elements to the story?

“It’s very rare … to see any mention of the fact that each country, Russia and the US, has several thousand nuclear weapons basically pointed at each other,” Solomon says, “4,000 in each country … at the ready to basically be able to incinerate, not just the two countries, but billions of people on the planet.”

Trump has rankled not only liberals and the Democratic Party but also corporate interests because of his trade policies and also military-industrial interests that would love to see another Cold War, or even hot war, with Russia.

Missing in all this discussion is a sense of history and awareness of the utter hypocrisy of much of the U.S. handwringing about outside interference in a sovereign nation’s politics. Politicians on both sides of the aisle join in this hypocrisy.

Trump loves to wave his saber at Iran, threatening it and raising the specter of yet another war as if the American people weren’t sick to death of war after 17 consecutive years of it.

Why is Iran no longer the close U.S. friend that it was under the pro-Western rule of the Shah of Iran?  Let’s examine.

When Mohammed Mossadegh became Iran’s prime minister in 1951, Iranians cheered at his strong stand against the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company that had soaked Iran’s resources while only paying back as much as 16 percent of its profits.  England’s response was to join with the United States in launching Operation Ajax to oust Mossadegh and install in his place a CIA puppet. They succeeded, and the Shah subsequently consolidated his rule into a dictatorship that lasted until the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

A long list of countries could be added to Honduras, Yemen, Colombia and Iran as examples of U.S. political interference—Guatemala, Libya, Vietnam, Cuba, Chile, the Democratic Republic of Congo, among them.

(To the right, a 1952 poster supporting agrarian reform in Guatemala) 

Let’s look at Guatemala. When Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán tried to redistribute land to benefit the legions of poor in his country in 1952, the United Fruit Company raised a hue and cry in Washington, D.C., which was all the CIA needed to get its tentacles into the country and assist with Guzmán’s overthrow in 1954.

And we have to have a few words about Vietnam. Now there’s a story. Consider the U.S.’s crucial supportive role in Ngo Dinh Diem’s consolidation of power in South Vietnam in the mid-1950s, and then in his overthrow by South Vietnamese generals in 1963. That coup d’etat, intended to find a more suitable leader in the fight against the Communists, resulted in the United States’ irrevocable involvement in Vietnam’s political future and the bloody war that lasted into the 1970s.

I could go on, but this is a column, not a book.