(To the right, Huey Long)
OXFORD, Miss. – When Huey Long first swept onto the political
scene in Louisiana in the 1920s, the state was the quintessential Southern
backwater. Ruled by a wealthy oligarchy of landowners, sugar and lumber
magnates, and oilmen, it had less than 200 miles of paved roads.
It was sunk in a dismal swamp of poverty, isolation,
corruption and ignorance. Its workers had little or no say over their pitiful
wages or working conditions. Some 16 percent of its adult population was
illiterate.
“The hierarchy was smug, satisfied with things as they were,
devoted to the protection of privilege,” writes historian T. Harry Williams in
his classic 1969 biography, Huey Long.
“The ruling hierarchy was little interested in using what resources the state
had available to provide services and was even less interested in employing the
power of the state to create new resources so that more services could be
supported.”
Then Huey Long bounded onto the political stage, first as railroad
and public service commissioner, later as governor and finally U.S. senator.
Hearing the cries of the voiceless, he chased the moneylenders out of the
temple. He pushed through a severance tax on the pampered oil industry,
revamped the state’s tax and bonding system, and used the money to put free
textbooks into the hands of school children and 2,300 miles of paved roads and 111
new bridges across the state.
With its own ruling oligarchy entrenched in the Governor’s
Mansion and state Capitol in Jackson, Mississippi is looking more and more like
pre-Huey Long Louisiana.
Just like the ruling clique in Baton Rouge and New Orleans
in the 1920s, the ruling clique that gathers in Jackson every legislative
session is less concerned about public education, good roads and highways,
public health, mental health, and child poverty than it is about corporate
welfare and the proper pampering of the state’s wealthy.
With all the talk of charter schools and vouchers, the
underfunding of public education in Mississippi has resulted in an adult illiteracy
rate of 16 percent, exactly what it was when Huey Long began his political
career. In the gulag that the modern-day South has become, Mississippi has always
excelled in throwing people behind bars. Today 60 percent of the state’s prison
inmates are functionally illiterate.
The Republicans in charge won’t raise taxes, so some of them
now talk about instituting a lottery system to ease pressure on the shriveled
state budget. Here’s a prediction: they’ll do the same with lottery revenues
that they did with gambling revenues, which is to use the money as an excuse
for another tax cut on the rich and corporations.
Look at Nissan, a global firm with a current market value of
$38.4 billion. After an initial $363 million incentives package to get the
Nissan plant in Canton back in 2000, Mississippi has provided the company with
an additional $1 billion in tax breaks and other subsidies over the years.
Politicians defend such corporate welfare by saying it
provides citizens with needed jobs. Yet when those citizens complain about poor
working conditions and ask for a fair vote to decide whether they can have
union representation, the politicians raise a hue and cry, and in the case of
Gov. Phil Bryant, extend an invitation to outside groups to come in and help him
fight against Mississippi workers who want a union.
Mississippi lawmakers say the state simply cannot afford
good medical and mental health services. That’s why the Department of Mental
Health is eliminating 650 positions, and the University of Mississippi Medical
Center in Jackson has cut nearly 200 jobs.
Poor Ol’ Mississippi has the lowest median income in the
nation, the highest poverty rate, and one of the highest child poverty rates.
Her roads and bridges are terrible. However, she’s not so poor that she can’t
continue to pamper Nissan and Toyota (beneficiary of an initial $356 million
state handout) while handing out $274 million in tax breaks to Continental Tire
the Americas and Edison Chouest last year.
“Where are the schools that you have waited for your
children to have, that have never come?” Huey Long asked voters in his famous
“Evangeline” speech in St. Martinsville, Louisiana, 90 years ago. “Where are
the roads and the highways that you send your money to build, that are no
nearer now than ever before? Where are the institutions to care for the sick
and the disabled?”
After casting out the temple’s moneylenders, Huey reached
for more and more power, and an assassin finally brought him down. Still, those
questions he asked in St. Martinsville so long ago could be asked today in
Mississippi.
This column appeared
recently in the Jackson Free Press in
Jackson, Mississippi.
