Fighting the "Spirits of Darkness" in 2014: Insight from a 16th century magician

 

(To the right: Cornelius Agrippa)

The 16^th century German occult writer and magician Cornelius Agrippa had this to say about those of us suffering from chilly climes these days:

“As the Spirits of Darkness be stronger in the dark, so Good Spirits, which be Angels of Light, are augmented not only by the Divine Light of the Sun, but also be our common Wood Fire: and as the Celestial Fire drives away dark spirits, so also this our Fire of Wood doth the same.”

The American poet John Greenleaf Whittier used this quote to begin his famous poem, Snow-bound, a fitting way to begin Labor South’s journey into 2014. Aren’t we all hovering near the fire—be it wood, gas or electric—these days to keep warm as we prepare for the challenges of the New Year?

On the labor front, economists are warning that the U.S. income gap is threatening the nation’s economy and future. The richest 10 percent of Americans control 80 percent of stock market wealth. Average income for the middle 20 percent of Americans has risen just 5 percent over the past 20 years. For the richest 5 percent of Americans, income has jumped 17 percent.

Other than securing votes on election day, Republicans could care less about average Americans.  Their solution to our national ills is simple: reduce all spending except for corporate welfare and military contractors. Those out of a job and unemployment benefits need to look for the nearest breadline. To those with no health insurance, just don’t get sick. As for immigration, more fences, more border patrol, and more prisons should take care of it.

Let’s not let Democrats off the hook. Following in the footsteps of his NAFTA-loving predecessor Bill Clinton, President Obama is pushing a similar trade deal with Vietnam and other Asian nations so U.S. corporations, frustrated with rising wages in China, can now go elsewhere to find the bottom-feeders whose sweatshops and slave wages make that 10 percent of Americans who control 80 percent of stock market wealth happy.

 But “Angels of Light” are out there fighting these spirits of darkness. Organized labor is reaching across international borders today, joining with counterparts in other nations and making a difference. Rising wages in China are a result of a vocal workforce tired of getting next to nothing for doing the dirty work of rich corporations. Unions like the United Auto Workers are working closely with unions in Germany, South Africa, Japan and other countries to put pressure on international corporations like Volkswagen and Nissan. Migrant worker organizations both here in the United States and around the world are giving voice to the most downtrodden of modern-day workers.

It’s going to be an exciting year—full of challenge, with some losses and hopefully some big victories. Dig in your heels, join the Angels of Light, and let the “Celestial Fire” keep you warm and full of passion as it “drives away dark spirits”!

The Holy Family: Migrants in a hostile land

 

(To the left is "The Flight Into Egypt" by the 14th century Italian painter Giotto)

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to the followers and readers of this blog! Below is a column I wrote for Christmas 2010. It still is timely, however, because sadly the issues have not changed. Today is also the anniversary of the death of St. Frances Cabrini, the Patroness of Immigrants. Best wishes to all!

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 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.

The U.S. Gulag: Incarceration and the "immorality" of private prisons

(To the right is a 1911 photograph of prisoners at Mississippi's state penitentiary in Parchman)

JACKSON, Miss. - Mariachi guitarist Johnny Mora’s bout with drugs was years in his past, but the legacy of jail time it led to is as much a companion as his guitar when he travels to perform in clubs and restaurants around Mississippi.

“I was afflicted, and by the grace of God I am here today,” Mora said at the recent “Crimmigration: The Tragic Consequences of U.S. Drug Policies on Families and Youth” conference in Jackson sponsored by the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance and Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “It wasn’t because of the jail system.”

Mora was one of several speakers who talked of a painful past that included incarceration in what has become the world’s largest gulag: the U.S. prison system, which holds 25 percent of all prisoners around the globe. After losing his insurance business in California, Mora turned to music and moved to Mississippi to find work.

Kevin Elders is another Mississippian with a jail record because of a past drug conviction. “It was difficult for me to get a job,” said Elders, son of former U.S. Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders. “So many doors slammed in my face.”

An estimated 65 million people in this country have a criminal record, more than one out of every four adult Americans. One out of every three black males now in their early teens will spend time in jail, according to the Justice Department. For Latino males, it’s one of out of every five.

Not even Cuba, China or Russia put as many people behind bars as the United States.

Mora picked one of the worst states in the country for a man with a record to start a new life. Mississippi ranks second in the nation in incarceration—behind Louisiana, a state once described in the New York Times as “the world’s prison capital”—with more than 26,000 inmates behind bars or in custody at a cost of $339 million to taxpayers.

Fueling incarceration rates in Mississippi and around the country is the private prison industry—an “immorality” in the words of Father Jeremy Tobin, a Catholic priest who gave the invocation at the “Crimmigration” conference. Close to 50 percent of all immigrant inmates are in for-profit prisons or facilities. The nation’s two largest private detention companies—Corrections Corporation of America and The GEO Group—spent $25 million lobbying politicians and contributing to their campaigns over the past decade.

“They want to keep an indentured class,” Tobin said. “This country was built on slavery. They (immigrants) were asked to come and do the jobs nobody wanted to do, and they came and did it, and now we want to screw them. Think of all the African Americans out there who can’t vote (because of criminal records).”

For a state with as ugly a record on criminalization and racial prejudice as Mississippi, you’d think political leaders would think twice before turning to profiteering private companies with a vested interest in crime and punishment to handle what is morally a state responsibility.

Yet their failure is why the Mississippi prison system today is as bad as it was a century ago when racist demagogue Gov. James K. Vardaman got so frustrated he compared it to the Spanish Inquisition.

Here are a few examples:

- Last June, the American Civil Liberties Union and Southern Poverty Law Center called conditions at the privately run East Mississippi Correctional Facility “barbaric and horrific” and in a class action lawsuit spoke of rat-infested cells and feces-and-urine-covered floors.

- In May of this year, Mother Jones magazine listed the Walnut Grove Correctional Facility in Leake County, when run by the GEO Group, as one of “America’s 10 Worst Prisons,” a “cesspool” in the words of a federal judge where young children were subjected to sexual abuse and solitary confinement for long periods of time.

- In late July 2012, a riot broke out in the Hinds County Detention Center after an inmate protested his 11 months behind bars without an indictment on a marijuana possession charge.

- In May 2012, the undocumented migrant workers imprisoned in the privately run Adams County Correctional Facility got so sick and tired of conditions that they rioted, leaving one guard dead and 19 injured.

- Two years ago, the state Penitentiary at Parchman shut down its Unit 32, which housed death row inmates, as a result of lawsuits decrying conditions that allowed several killings and a suicide.

The first step Mississippi should take to rid itself of the “immorality” in its prison system is to get rid of private prisons. “If you’re getting paid per head, you want to keep ‘em coming in there,” Kevin Elders said about them.

The next step is to decriminalize minor drug offenses and migrant work.

Like usual, Father Jeremy was right. It’s a question of morals. Either you have them, or you don’t.

(This column recently appeared in the Jackson Free Press in Jackson, Miss.)

Remembering the late Mississippi populist Gov. Bill Allain preaching social justice to 3,000 Pentecostals

More than 3,000 Pentecostals had gathered under their giant tabernacle in Raymond, Miss., that July night back in 1985. It was what one preacher called an “old-fashioned, God-sent, Holy Ghost camp meeting,” and on the stage was Mississippi Gov. Bill Allain, a devout Catholic.

Allain died at the age of 85 this past week, and it brought back memories of that long-ago Mississippi District United Pentecostal Church Revival Camp Meeting.

It was a night of foot-stomping, hand-clapping and palm-waving. Choirs sang songs like “He Ain’t Never Done Me Nothin’ But Good” and “I’m So Glad Jesus Lifted Me”. As 74-year-old Christine Craig told me that night, a man has “got to have the Holy Ghost, speak in tongues and be baptized in Jesus’ name” to get into heaven.

“Y’all better sit down,” the governor told the crowd as he stepped behind the microphone. “I might preach a little.”

Just two years before, Allain had suffered through the dirtiest campaign this reporter has ever seen in a nearly 40-year career as a journalist.

A fiery former state attorney general who had shaken Mississippi’s political elite to its core, Democrat Allain was coasting to an easy victory over Republican Leon Bramlett when just weeks before the election, deep-pocketed Republican financiers went across the state in an effort to tar brush him as a man who not only kept pornography in his Jackson apartment but who had paid for sex with three black male transvestites.

The Republican operatives held press conferences and dumped hundreds of pages of so-called “testimony” by Allain’s accusers on reporters. Television journalist Geraldo Rivera even came to the state to report on the sordid accusations, which evoked all the ghosts of Mississippi’s tortured past of race, prejudice and demagoguery. The Mississippi people didn’t buy it, however. On election day, 55 percent of them voted for Allain. He won 74 of the state’s 82 counties.

I’ve never been prouder of Mississippi. The prostitutes later recanted their stories.

“If you are not clapping your hands … I said if you go out there and you’re not clapping your hands, you either took the wrong road and are on the wrong campgrounds or you are spiritually dead inside,” the Catholic governor told his Pentecostal audience that night. An organ played in the background, and cries of “Amen” came from the crowd.

Jesus “fed the hungry, clothed the naked, healed the sick and infirm,” Allain told them. “That is the standard by what we must love one another.”

As much as any political leader in Mississippi’s modern history, Allain tried to live by those rules.  “Many times I sit in my office and think I only have four years,” Allain said. “Then I think: Jesus did what he did in three short years. Look at all the good things that can be done.”

As a young assistant attorney general in the early 1960s, Allain found himself on the wrong side when he had to represent the state in such cases as segregationist Gov. Ross Barnett’s fight to keep James Meredith from becoming the University of Mississippi’s first black student.

However, as attorney general and later governor in the early-to-mid 1980s, Allain fought the good fight – taking on the big utilities and the all-powerful state Legislature, led as it was then by entrenched pols such as state House Speaker C.B. “Buddie” Newman from the Mississippi Delta. Allain succeeded in getting legislators kicked off executive branch committees and winning approval of successive terms for governor (although he himself declined to run for a second term). He also appointed women and blacks to important positions. That includes appointing Reuben Anderson as the first black member of the state Supreme Court.

“He overcame a lot of stuff,” said Faye Moser, a 52-year-old housewife from Jackson, at that camp meeting back in 1985. “When a Christian has a trial and they overcome it, it makes them stronger.”

Allain did overcome his trial, and he helped Mississippi become stronger, too.

Walmart protests, South African pressure on Nissan, child labor in the tobacco fields, and taxpayers subsidizing fast-food profits - the latest Labor South round-up

This latest Labor South round-up finds Arkansas-based Walmart all prepped for its big sales extravaganza but also facing demonstrations across the country protesting its Scrooge-like treatment of its workers, labor leaders in South Africa promising to pressure Nissan there to treat Southern workers better, and new reports on child labor in North Carolina’s tobacco fields and how taxpayers subsidize fast-food industry profits.

Walmart’s Black Friday

Just weeks after the National Labor Relations Board found Walmart in violation of labor laws by punishing workers for striking or trying to join a union, the retail giant faces protests across the country on the biggest shopping day of the year, today, November 29, also known as “Black Friday”.

The Arkansas-based company expects to rake in plenty of profits from hordes of shoppers, but protesters in cities across the country, including the South, will also be reminding those shoppers that more than a million Walmart workers are forced to work on this day, most of them at bottom-level wages and minimal benefits. In the meantime, the Walton family can comfortably watch its $144 billion pile of personal gold grow.

“These big-box stores are killing mom-and-pop shops, profiting off our local dollars, and then they can’t even pay their workers enough to pay the rent and put food on the table?” said Jess Morales of the national AFL-CIO in a press release. “We can’t let them get away with that.”

South African union members plan to put pressure on Nissan

According to a recent United Auto Workers Solidarity report, South African labor leader Cedric Gina, who was also interviewed by Labor South after a recent visit to Mississippi, said he and other union activists in South Africa will “raise the issue of why the company is interfering with its American workers’ right to form a union,” and they “will demand that the next meeting” of Nissan corporate and labor leaders “be held in Mississippi or Tennessee.”

Nissan’s South African plant is unionized, as are other Nissan plants across the world. However, the auto giant has fought organizing efforts at its plants in Smyrna, Tenn., and Canton, Miss.

Nissan workers in South Africa even won a corporate agreement in 2010 to ban the use of brokers or agencies that hire temporary workers, a huge issue at the Nissan plant in Canton.

Meanwhile, an anti-union campaign by major right-wing groups is gearing up and targeting UAW efforts at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., and Nissan plant in Canton. In These Times magazine recently reported on leaked documents indicating Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform has committed huge amounts of cash to fighting unionization in the South. The National Right-to-Work Legal Defense Foundation and Center for Union Facts are also involved in the campaign. In a recent op-ed piece for the Huntsville Times in Alabama, Center for Union Facts Executive Director Richard Berman brought out the same old tired tirade about labor bosses only wanting to organize workers so that they, the bosses, can continue to live in luxury from union dues. You’d think the anti-unionists could come up with something original after all these years!

Child labor in the tobacco fields

As a young boy growing up in central North Carolina, I worked many summers in the tobacco fields owned by my cousins. One year my father and a cousin leased a handful of acres for tobacco, and I was able to witness and partake in the entire process of growing and harvesting tobacco. We planted, topped (removing the flowers and tops that drain the plant’s energy), pulled suckers, primed (harvested), and hung the tobacco in barns. I did this in my teen years.

Federal labor laws have long allowed child labor in family-run farms. However, family-run farms today often are partnered with agribusiness giants, and those children working in the fields are likely to be poverty-stricken migrants from Mexico or further south.

A compelling report by writer Gabriel Thompson in The Nation magazine in November revealed widespread use of children on North Carolina’s tobacco farms. The state’s 90,000 migrant farmworkers do much of the fieldwork today, and they’re exposed to nicotine poisoning that can be potentially debilitating. A worker in a tobacco field in summer is daily exposed to nicotine levels that are the same as smoking a pack-and-a-half of cigarettes, Thompson reported.

Modern-day tobacco workers are exposed to pesticides and other hazards that endanger their health, particularly if they’re children. Monsanto and other companies have fought congressional efforts to provide better protection for these workers, much like Southern legislators in the 1930s worked hard to keep farm workers exempt from labor laws.

Russia, Kazakhstan and other countries have passed laws banning children from working in tobacco fields, Thompson reported. Ironically, the United States government has even given millions of dollars to efforts to ban such child labor in the country of Malawi.

Subsidizing fast-food profits

A recent editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch blasted the fast-food industry for low wages and benefits that have resulted in a $7 billion taxpayer annual subsidy to the industry.

“Seven billion dollars a year is what it costs taxpayers for Medicaid, food stamps and the other public assistance programs for fast-food workers who are paid poverty wages,” the editorial said.

The editorial cited a study by University of Illinois and University of California economists that said taxpayers last year funded $1.2 billion in assistance to workers at McDonald’s, a company that reported $1.5 billion in third-quarter profits.

Modern-day Southern "nullifiers" continue a tradition going back to John C. Calhoun and later Strom Thurmond

(To the left is the late U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C.)

Way back in 1988, I sat across from Strom Thurmond in his Capitol Hill office in Washington, D.C., and listened as he explained his opposition to federal anti-lynching laws and any other federal encroachment on states’ rights during his long career.

“I felt it was dangerous to shift it all to Washington,” the then-85-year-old U.S. senator and former Dixiecrat presidential candidate from South Carolina told me.  “Lynching was nothing but murder. All states had laws against murder. … I’ve never had any feelings against minorities.”

Never mind that Thurmond, who died at 101 in 2003, led the Dixiecrat revolt out of the Democratic Party in 1948 and into the Republican Party in the 1960s largely as a reaction against civil rights legislation. Never mind that he was a segregationist superstar during much of the civil rights movement.

Thurmond’s disdain for the federal government that provided him a paycheck through much of his life was in classic Southern tradition. As far back as the 1830s, another South Carolinian, John C. Calhoun, led the so-called “nullification” effort to allow states to “nullify” federal laws on tariffs and other issues. It took a fellow Southerner, President Andrew Jackson, to put the lid on that campaign after sending troops down to Charleston.

The tradition is going strong today. Southern conservatives in Congress deserve much of the blame for the recent federal government shutdown that cost the economy $24 billion. In the U.S. House vote to re-open government, 73 Southern Republicans voted “No” and only 18 voted “Yes,” according to Zack Beauchamp in ThinkProgress. The much-talked-about Tea Party leading the charge against government speaks with a decidedly Southern accent.

Yet who have these Southern leaders represented through the years? Calhoun and his fellow nullifiers risked civil war in large part to defend planters worried that higher tariffs would cost them British customers for their cotton. Three decades later, hundreds of thousands of Southern farm boys went to war to defend the right of those same planters to own slaves.

When Thurmond and his vice-presidential candidate, Fielding Wright of Mississippi, led the Dixiecrat ticket in 1948, a major plank in their platform was opposition to organized labor. Like their predecessors, their hot-button issue may have been race, but they were also determined to protect the interests of the Southern business and political elite.

Today, the Tea Party rank and file rants against the federal government, but just try to take their Social Security and Medicare away from them. Thanks to the demonization of not only Uncle Sam but also labor unions by Fox News and its counterparts here in Mississippi and elsewhere, the progeny of those same Southern farm boys who fought for slavery think they now have to fight for the rights of business owners and corporate CEOs to enrich themselves at the expense of a docile and voiceless workforce.

A South African delegation led by Cedric Gina, president of the National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa, visited the Jackson, Miss., area recently and was shocked at the uphill fight Nissan workers in Canton, Miss., have to wage just to exercise their legal right to a union election. “We think this is not supposed to be happening in a so-called First World country, a so-called bastion of democracy,” Gina told me in a telephone interview. “To be so fearful, the workers, with no intervention. This is not supposed to be happening.”

NUMSA represents 325,000 workers in South Africa, including 2,000 Nissan employees near Pretoria.

Workers at the Nissan plant in Canton say they have been subjected to repeated meetings with managers who threaten a plant closure and lost jobs if they opt to join the United Auto Workers. Although well paid by Mississippi’s low standards, most of them have gone years without a pay raise and are subjected to arbitrary decisions by management on health and pension benefit changes, work hours, and working conditions.

Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant has gone on record saying he supports outside groups that help keep unions out of his state.  He’s probably happy now that the Virginia-based National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation has issued a special notice to Nissan workers in Canton warning them of the horrors of joining together and speaking with a united voice.

After a majority of workers at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., indicated their support for a company-and-union-backed, German-style works council at the plant, the same foundation filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board alleging UAW coercion. The UAW says the claims are ridiculous.

A thread that runs through Southern history even stronger than race is class. The ruling class in the South doesn’t tolerate challenges to its rule well—whether that challenge comes from united black people or from united working people.

(This column ran earlier in the Jackson Free Press in Jackson, Miss.)

A "Crimmigration" conference, Walmart on the dole in Mississippi, and Kellogg locks out Memphis workers

It’s time for another Labor South roundup, and this one tells of the upcoming “Crimmigration” conference sponsored by the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance (MIRA), a report by the Good Jobs First organization on how the nation’s poorest state has shelled out $27.1 million to the Walmart corporation in addition to more than $750 million in subsidies to Nissan and Toyota, and Kellogg’s lockout of hundreds of union workers in Memphis.

Crimmigration

The 7^th annual MIRA and Southern Christian Leadership Conference “Unity Conference” will feature speakers and panel discussions on “Crimmigration: The Tragic Consequences of US Drug Policies on Families and Youth”.

The conference will take place in Jackson, Miss., Nov. 15 and 16 and include a keynote address by Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, and also feature Javier Sicillia, poet and leader of the Mexican Movement for Peace and Justice.

MIRA has worked tirelessly for years on behalf of immigrants in Mississippi and along the Gulf Coast. By developing a close coalition with the Black Legislative Caucus and white moderates and liberals, the organization has been successful in keeping draconian anti-immigrant legislation from becoming law in Mississippi. This is despite the fact that Republicans dominate both houses of the state Legislature and Mississippi’s Republican governor, Phil Bryant, owes his political success in part to his demagoguery of the immigration issue.

The nation’s poorest state has plenty of cash for corporations on the dole

In its report “AccountableUSA”, the Good Jobs First organization, a self-proclaimed “resource for grassroots groups and public officials seeking to make economic development subsidies more accountable and effective,” says state and local governments in Mississippi have given $27.1 million in subsidies to 13 or more Walmart locations in the state. This is in addition to the three-quarters of a billion dollars Mississippi gave away in subsidy packages to land and nurture Nissan and Toyota automobile plants.

“Many Wal-Mart workers are ineligible for health coverage from their employer or choose not to purchase what is available, because it is too expensive or too limited in scope,” Good Jobs First reports. “These workers often turn to taxpayer-funded health programs such as Medicaid.”

Good Jobs First made news in Mississippi back in May when it reported that state and local governments have actually provided more than $1.3 billion in subsidies to the Nissan plant in Canton alone since 2000. This includes the $363 million subsidy package awarded by the state Legislature plus a wide range of other subsidies, amounting to the equivalent of $290,000 per job at the plant.

Kellogg locks out workers, idling hundreds in Memphis

 The cereal-making giant Kellogg, based in Battle Creek, Mich., has locked out 220 workers at its plant in Memphis after failing to win union approval of its plan to hire new “casual” workers at what will likely be reduced wages and to change production scheduling as well as staffing.

The Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union has filed a charge of unfair labor practices against the company. The lockout does not extend to Kellogg’s plant in Rossville, Tenn. The lockout affects Memphis because of the expiration of the previous agreement at that plant.

Kellogg’s Memphis plant produces Apple Jacks, Froot Loops and other cereals. It announced plans to lay off 70 workers at the plant back in April. Kellogg profits totaled $352 million for the quarter ending June 29, up $28 million from the same period last year.