A Tale of Two Cities: Memphis and Nashville

I'm driving along Nashville's West End Avenue in my 10-year-old Buick LeSabre (a veteran of 155,000 miles and still counting). I'm on a story assignment with a young journalist from Chicago. Memphis comes up in the conversation, and she asks about something she's heard: "Nashville and the rest of Tennessee hate Memphis, right?"

It wasn't the first time I'd heard about the Bluff City's uneasy relationship with the rest of the state. I remember back in the 1970s when an Ivy League-educated, Knoxville-reared journalist colleague of mine in North Carolina described Memphis this way: "It's the largest city in northern Mississippi."

He didn't mean it as a compliment.

I'd asked him about Memphis because the city had held a fascination for me since the early 1960s when I was a teenager. That was when I discovered the blues and first really appreciated rockabilly. I've since spent a lot of time in Memphis (including maintaining an apartment there with my wife for the past four years), and I've developed some ideas about what makes the city different.

Let's start with politics. Today, with all the Tea Party shouting and Republican resurgence, Memphis is a blue speck in a sea of red. One reason, of course, is that the majority of the approximately 700,000 people who live there are black. The farther east you travel from Downtown and Midtown, the whiter and more Republican it gets.

The racial divide that killed Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 remains an old sore that's not completely healed. It's not uncommon to hear white people call Memphis Memphrica. Willie Herenton, the city's first black mayor, a brooding, thin-skinned man obsessed by race, didn't help much despite nearly two decades of rule. His successor, A.C. Wharton, also black, offers promise that some long-missing salve may now be applied.

"Boss" (E.H.) Crump, the city's political dictator for much of the first half of the 20th century, has been dead a long time, but his legacy still casts a shadow. Crump was every bit as powerful in his city as Richard Daley Sr. was in his. Maybe moreso. When Herenton ran unsuccessfully for Congress this past year, he was inevitably compared to Crump, who also served for a time in Congress.

In my mind's eye, Memphis is dark, Nashville is light.

I was in Nashville much of the past week, and the city seemed to be thriving despite the devastating flood of last May. The skyline that Bob Dylan once sang about gets more sleek and impressive every year. Broadway, the main thoroughfare, was jam-packed this past Saturday night as college football fans (Vanderbilt played the University of Tennessee) crowded Tootsie's and the dozens of other venues, elbowing for room with the thousands of other folk who still flock to Nashville to see or become country music stars.

Memphis from Beale to Union can hop at night, too, but a northerly stroll up Main or Front Street is a journey into noir land. In many ways, Memphis remains the haunting metropolis Jim Jarmusch depicted in his 1990 film Mystery Train even if it's thankfully less desolate. That desolation once got nailed by legendary basketball coach Phil Jackson, who said downtown looked like "Dresden after the war."

"Memphis Noir" is a major reason I love the city the way I do.

For all of Nashville's Hank-Roy-Lefty-Webb-Kitty-Patsy-driven mystique, it still pales in comparison to the city where Elvis would only come out in the wee hours, dragging his mafia with him, to ride the Zippin Pippin in Libertyland when no one else was there, or the city where Jerry Lee Lewis showed up at the gates of Graceland late at night drunk and wielding a .38 while the oblivious boy from Tupelo was asleep at the top of the hill. Jerry Lee always figured he was the true king of rock 'n' roll.

Crime-wise Memphis routinely ranks just behind Detroit, enough to inspire the cop television show The First 48 before Police Director Larry Godwin complained about the bad publicity and made the show look for another city to embarrass. The crime, by the way, includes more than its share of political corruption, with John Ford of the Ford political dynasty leading a long line of pols-on-the-take who've marched off to prison or into other halls of shame. I interviewed Ford in the early 1980s while doing a story about Memphis politics. When His Majesty deigned to look at me, it was usually with disdain or at best utter impatience.

Interstate 40, the "Music Highway", connects Nashville and Memphis, but the disconnect begins with Nashville's corporate music infrastructure. Corporate Nashville has always fought a kind of war with roots music. Sticking with roots is hard when all you really care about is the bottom line. That's why it put an orchestra behind George Jones at the height of his career, hoping he'd cross over like Jim Reeves did.

Whether at Sun Records, Stax, Alex Chilton's garage, or in the 1920s-era blues saloons along Beale, Memphis music has always had an edge, a rawness, a real-ness that scared the bejeebers out of the corporate suits on Music Row. No wonder Willie and Waylon had to go back to Luckenbach. No wonder Steve Earle had to leave "Guitar Town". For new, rootsy talents on the scene today like Jamey Johnson, it may be just a matter of time.

Memphis, you scary, dark city by the Big Muddy, city of neon and shadows, you may be as poor and sometimes as rejected as an orphan in a Dickens novel, but unloved you are not. Believe me. I'm a witness, and I just gave you my testimony.

Apologies: New posts coming!

Apologies for not posting during the past week or so. I've been in Nashville, Tenn., going through a "multi-media boot camp" hosted by the John Seigenthaler Center, Freedom Forum Diversity Institute, to better equip myself in understanding and utilizing the technology so essential to the journalism profession today. These were 10-hour days with little time for anything else. Hopefully readers of this blog will soon see some of the results of this training.

The "Bottom" to "Top" Low-Down on Recent Worker Activity in Dixie and Beyond

Ever hear the song by country music singer Jamey Johnson in which a country music star laments his loneliness on the road to an unknown, down-on-his-luck bar mate? The bar mate has this to say in response: “It might be lonely at the top, but it’s a bitch at the bottom.”

It’s a great song, one that hearkens back to some of Ol’ Hank’s best, and it speaks to an economic divide in this country and beyond that continues to grow every day.

Here are some news items from the U.S. South and beyond that speak to that divide—folks at the bottom fighting for their rights, and those at the top fighting just as hard against them. It's getting tougher and tougher for workers to take a stand, but they're doing it, and sometimes they even win.

Management at Atlanta-based Delta gets a narrow victory—and a wake-up call
Less than 350 out of nearly 19,000 votes was the margin of victory for Delta management recently as flight attendants said “No” to joining a union.

The vote was not a surprise but still a disappointment to the thousands of flight attendants, including 300 in Memphis, who've worked for Northwest—now merged with Delta—and have long supported union representation.

Votes from ramp workers and others at the merged airlines are still to come. Industry observers say management shouldn’t be popping the champagne just yet. The vote by the flight attendants was so close that unionization remains a “threat” to the company, which, by the way, waged an expensive, high profile anti-union campaign prior to the vote.

Fed-Ex’s Fred Smith enjoyed the Nov. 2 elections
With the Republican takeover of the U.S. House and defeat of pro-labor House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman James Oberstar, D-Minn., Federal Express CEO Smith can breathe easier about Oberstar’s push to apply the same rules to the Memphis-based company that now apply to its major U.S. competitor, UPS.

Contract drivers at Fed-Ex have been saying they’re essentially full-time employees but can’t unionize because of their job designation. The Teamsters union and others say Fed-Ex should operate under the same rules as its competitors instead of the rules of the Railway Labor Act that now apply.

Piedmont agents vote union
Salisbury, Md.-based Piedmont Airlines fought unionization tooth and nail, but its 3,000 fleet and passenger service agents recently cast their ballots overwhelmingly in favor of joining the Communications Workers of America.

It was a two-to-one landslide for the union, which means workers can indeed stand up to union-busting tactics, intimidation, and “captive-audience meetings” decrying unions, according to the AFL-CIO Now Blog.

European hypocrisy in Arkansas
Despite European firms’ claims of allegiance to International Labor Organization codes of conduct, many are quick to take advantage of lax labor laws in the United States. Take the Dutch-based Gamma Holding firm, for example.

When workers at its National Wire Fabric company in Star City, Arkansas, went on strike, management wasted no time hiring permanent replacements, a direct violation of those same codes.

A new study by the Human Rights Watch organization, A Strange Case: Violations of Workers’ Freedom of Association in the United States by European Multinational Corporations, details how officials with companies such as Gamma Holding talk out of both sides of their mouths, something U.S. Southerners are used to hearing from their politicians and own business leaders.

This latter entry reminds me of corporate consultant Richard A. Beaumont’s essay, Working in the South, of some years back. In that essay, Beaumont talks of European industrialists coming to the South and reacting in shock to the virulent anti-unionism of their Southern counterparts. “Five minutes later, (the European industrialist) is saying, `Now, when I go to the South, how do I operate on a nonunion basis?’”

Elephants make Dinosaurs of the Blue Dogs in the Cottonfields

What's the future of the "Blue Dog" Democrat? It's a legitimate question to ask in the wake of Tuesday's election.

Here in Mississippi, two "Blue Dog" Democrats--1st District Congressman Travis Childers and 4th District Congressman Gene Taylor--lost their re-election bids to Republicans Tuesday. They lost despite major efforts to distance themselves from the president and from outgoing U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and by voting against such Democrat-led initiatives as health care reform.

Stalwart fiscal conservatives both of them, they lost because they're Democrats and they represent majority white districts in the South. Roughly half of the U.S. House's 54-member Blue Dog Coalition lost their seats in the Nov. 2 election.

A bit of history helps put Tuesday's results in perspective.

The white South has been trending Republican ever since former Democrat Strom Thurmond of South Carolina campaigned for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964. Thurmond had first broken from the Democratic Party way back in 1948 when he led the so-called Dixiecrat revolt out of the party and served as the States' Rights presidential candidate that year. Thurmond and other conservatives in the once Solid (Democratic) South just couldn't tolerate their party's tolerance of civil rights and labor any longer.

Thurmond was a pioneer to Southern Democrats-turned-Republicans--from North Carolina's Jesse Helms to Alabama's Richard Shelby.

Southern Democrats had been a key--if often unlikely--part of the coalition that put and kept Franklin Deleanor Roosevelt in the White House. They included raging liberals like Claude Pepper of Florida and ol' mossback (social) conservatives like Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi. Of course, some unreconstructed Confederates like Harry Byrd of Virginia and "Cotton" Ed Smith of South Carolina eventually became FDR enemies.

After Roosevelt died, the coalition fell apart, and many Southern Democrats joined with a new Republican majority in Congress in supporting the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, a repudiation of everything FDR stood for as regards labor and working people.

The Dixiecrat revolt did not lead to a viable third party for conservative Southern Democrats after 1948, but their disgruntlement grew as the civil rights movement gained steam in the 1950s and early 1960s. By 1964, Strom Thurmond was campaigning throughout the South for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.

However, even as more and more elephants appeared in the cotton fields (to paraphrase writer Wayne Greenhaw's description), many Southern conservatives chose to stay within the party that their daddies, mamas, granddaddies and grandmamas had belonged to since Abe Lincoln held office. Especially at the local level, Democrats remained strong in the South. For one reason, they knew government and how to make it work for the voters they needed, something still alien to anti-government Republicans.

The immediate predecessor to the "Blue Dog" Democrat in Congress was the "Boll Weevil" Democrat of the 1970s and 1980s, best personified by U.S. Rep. G.V. "Sonny" Montgomery of Mississippi, a military veteran who once during the Vietnam War angrily charged an anti-war protester on the steps of the Capitol.

Montgomery had a long, successful career in politics before retiring, and before the Congress became so intensely partisan that Southern conservatives either had to become an elephant or a dinosaur.

That appears to be the choice that Childers, Taylor and a lot of other Blue Dogs faced. Partisanship, guilt by association, Tea Party madness, voter anger and frustration at an economy that still rewards the rich while punishing everybody else--it's enough to make a blue dog howl the blues.

"High Popalorum and Low Popahirum" on the 2010 Campaign Trail

OXFORD, Miss. – The evening is cool, the sky is clear, and the air is thick with talk of politics and the smell of the best barbecue chicken I’ve eaten since my daddy passed away.

There’s also a generous hint of bourbon in the air, but the hundreds of people here at Johnny Morgan’s “Good Ole’ Boys and Gals” semi-annual cookout are high on politics, not booze. Here are sheriffs, chancery and city clerks, county supervisors, aldermen, state legislators, judges of every make, shape, stripe, and judiciary level.

In the crowd are dozens of past, present, and future candidates for every conceivable public office in North Mississippi and beyond, and a few old-time politicos and legends like Flick Ash of nearby Potts Camp. When I ask Ash how active he is in politics these days, he eyes me curiously and gives the cryptic answer you’d expect from a master. “I’ve got a few friends. I’d like to think I have a little influence.”

Located at Lafayette County Supervisor and former legislator Morgan’s metal barn off Highway 7, this is the best political party Mississippi offers north of Neshoba County. The people here are the movers and shakers at the local level, the men and women who work the precincts, know the numbers, and help get out the vote, so the two major candidates in Mississippi's hotly contested 1st congressional district race weren’t about to miss this.

I listen as both U.S. Rep. Travis Childers, D-Miss., and the Republican who wants to oust him, Alan Nunnelee, take their turns on the podium. Nunnelee wastes no time slapping the dreaded U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tag on Childers. The California Democrat is a bête noire in GOP circles. Childers responds by putting the horrid “tax hiker” tag on Nunnelee for supporting Gov. Haley Barbour’s 2009 hospital tax.

An old leftie like me can’t help but shake his head. I want to quote Shakespeare (and my hero, Franklin D. Roosevelt) and say, “A plague on both your houses.”

“Blue Dog” Democrats like Childers and 4th Cong. District Rep. Gene Taylor are in unusually tough fights this year because of the “D” behind their names. Both come from predominantly white districts, and, let’s face it, “white” in Mississippi increasingly means conservative—no, make that arch-conservative—and Republican.

This is the year of Republicans-Marching-in-Lockstep in Congress, and in the hustings the Tea Party Ascendance, the so-called “grassroots” movement that is actually fueled and financed in part by the likes of right-wing billionaires David and Charles Koch.

Alongside the mysterious Koch brothers and their Americans for Prosperity organization is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, taking full advantage of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling by pumping millions into what Nation magazine calls “the most expensive midterm election in history.” Just how much of that money comes from foreign countries like India and Bahrain we don’t know.

I listen to Childers and remember how he voted against health care reform. So did Taylor, who even signed a petition to repeal the legislation. Nunnelee would be no different. Maybe they think Americans are just hunky-dory with their doctor bills and insurance premiums and the fact that a pre-existing condition can mean no insurance.

I’m also remembering Louisiana’s long-ago political boss Huey Long and his famous “High Popalorum and Low Popahirum” speech. “The only difference that I’ve found between the Democratic leadership and the Republican leadership is that one of them was skinning from the ankle up, and the other from the ear down.”

Still, I know what’s at stake in Tuesday’s election. If the Republicans do as predicted and take over the House, any real government action to deal with this recession will likely come grinding to a halt. What we’ll get instead will be House investigation after investigation aimed at embarrassing and ultimately toppling a Democratic administration with the hope of a restoration of the good ol’ days.

Remember those days?

Privatizing pols, union-busting companies, and protesting workers

As election day looms, here are a few of the stories percolating in the South that affect the region's working folks:

In West Virginia, Republican Senate candidate John Raese has called for the elimination of the federal minimum wage, which he calls an "archaic system" even though some 60,000 West Virginians got a pay raise when the federal minimum wage was last increased. As reported recently by Nation magazine, Raese is not the only right-wing Republican Senatorial candidate taking aim what remains of the nation's social safety net.

Rand Paul in Kentucky has caused a stir by criticizing the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Ken Buck in Colorado wants to privatize Veterans Administration hospitals, and Joe Miller in Alaska wants to eliminate unemployment compensation, Nation reports.

What these politicians really want is a return to the late-19th century era when robber barons like John D. Rockefeller organized trusts to control entire industries and wielded more power than the president himself. It took "muckraking" journalists like Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens to expose the depths of economic and political corruption in the country. Where are the muckrakers today? Hard to find in a world in which the media are corporate-owned and bound to a corporate view of the world that looks at government as an inconvenience when it's not serving corporate interests.

Close to home here in Oxford, Mississippi, a recent newspaper story headlined "Union vote could send jobs to Oxford" detailed how the Olin Corporation's Winchester operations in East Alton, Ill., may relocate to Oxford now that union workers rejected by a 2-1 margin concessions in a new proposed contract. Olin is now threatening to move the plant to Oxford.

If so, it would just be another example in the long parade of companies that have headed South to avoid unions. If only a workforce with a strong working-class consciousness were here waiting for them.

Approximately 900 workers are at the East Alton ammunition plant. Members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers District 9 union felt the ammunition plant shouldn't be seeking concessions at a time when its net income totaled $21.1 million at last report, the second-best in the division's history.

Oxford is already the location of a Winchester ammunition and military packing plant.

And finally in the border city of Baltimore, Md., workers are protesting their recent firing by the ESPN Zone restaurant in the city's Inner Harbor area. They said they were only given a week's notice in violation of legal requirements that 60-days notice be given in cases of mass layoffs.

As reported by In These Times magazine, about 150 workers lost their job at the restaurant, which is owned by the Disney corporation. Some 50 workers and their supporters marched recently in protest. Supporters include the United Workers labor group.

Five workers have filed a class-action lawsuit against Disney.

The arrests of striking workers in India affect workers everywhere

The neo-liberal business model that has global firms raking in profits without allegiance to workers or home countries is coming under increasing pressure from the very ones whose backbreaking labor make that model possible: workers.

Approximately 500 striking workers at electronics manufacturer Foxconn's operations in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu have been placed under arrest by the government, thus pitting Taiwan-based Foxconn and an Indian government against Indian workers.

Foxconn, which produces iPhones and Nintendo among other products, is where at least 10 workers committed suicide in plants in Shenzhen, China, north of Hong Kong, over the past year or so. Chinese media reported that Foxconn workers were being forced to work as much as 80 hours overtime, more than double the legal limit.

Following the story is the international, pro-labor Web publication, LabourStart, whose editor, Eric Lee, urged this week that "we need to flood the offices of state officials with the demand that the jailed workers be released."

The growing unrest among workers in China, India, and other countries is watched closely by neo-liberal leaders. Nearly 2,000 workers for Honda in China’s Guangdong province, went on strike in mid-May, shutting down production at the company’s four plants there. They were protesting low wages and poor working conditions. Workers at the Hyundai plant in Chennai, India, shut down operations there, too, in June.

The rash of suicides by workers at Foxconn’s plants in China prompted the company to raise wages twice within a single week—first by 30 percent, and then by 70 percent.

The Chinese government has given indications that it is hearing the workers' protests, and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao has called for reforms to help the workers.

Although Labor South focuses on labor issues in the U.S. South, it also addresses "Global South" issues because this South is intimately connected to a greater South that stretches from Singapore to Cape Town to Buenos Aires to New Orleans.

When German Chancellor Angela Merkel said recently that her nation's efforts to build a multicultural society have failed and that future immigrants essentially need to become German-speaking Germans, she placed the onus nearly completely on the immigrants themselves, ignoring the economic factors (in a global economy dominated by the free-trade, cheap-labor neo-liberal model) that are forcing many millions of workers around the globe to leave their homes and families and seek a livelihood in an often-hostile society--as if they do that gleefully with dollar (Euro) signs in their eyes.

Let's bring it back to Dixie. One company that has benefited wonderfully from global trade is Arkansas-based, virulently anti-union Wal-Mart, which exports billions of dollars worth of goods from China and which has benefited from that nation's undervalued currency as a result.

Working people are all in this together. That's why Eric Lee is right. Support those workers in Tamil Nadu. They're our neighbors--in more ways than one.