"Go, Johnny, Go!" offers a glimpse into the day before "the day the music died" in early rock 'n' roll. Co-hosting a showing on TCM Sunday, March 21

 

 

Rock ‘n’ roll fans and old movie lovers might want to check in at the Turner Classic Movies channel this coming Sunday, March 21, at 11 a.m. CST (12 noon EST) for a showing of the 1959 classic “Go, Johnny, Go!” with yours truly, Labor South’s Joseph B. Atkins, co-hosting along with regular host Alicia Malone.

 

Along with keeping track of labor and working class issues in the U.S. South, this ink-stained wretch has always been a film lover and that’s the why of my recent book Harry Dean Stanton: Hollywood’s Zen Rebel (University Press of Kentucky, 2020) and articles such as “Nehemiah Persoff – Intensity in-Depth” in TCM “Noir Czar” host Eddie Muller’s Noir City magazine back in 2016.

 

 “Go, Johnny, Go!” offers a glimpse into the early days of rock ‘n’ roll, the day before “the day the music died,” as Don McLean would sing in “American Pie”. Rock ‘n’ roll’s first Latino star, Ritchie Valens, makes his sole screen appearance in it, an appearance that came just months before he’d die in the same plane crash that killed Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper. That crash took place before the film was even released.

 

(Eddie Cochran)
 

Eddie Cochran, the solid for-real rocker who gave us “Summertime Blues”, made his third and last film appearance in “Go, Johnny, Go!” He died in a car wreck the year after the film came out. Chuck Berry, a co-star with legendary disc jockey Alan Freed in the film, would be charged with taking a teenager across state lines for “immoral purposes” the same year of the film’s release. That charge would eventually put him in prison.

 

Freed is a major reason the rock ‘n’ roll Hall of Fame is in Cleveland, Ohio. That’s where he gained fame playing rock ‘n’ roll—evening coining the term for the music—as well as R&B and blues before he moved to the Big Apple. A pioneer in bringing black and white artists together on the same stage, he became a target for his race-and-music mixing, one of the reasons his career would begin a downward spiral in 1960 because of a payola scandal.

 

“Go, Johnny, Go!” also features Jackie Wilson, The Flamingos, Jo Anne Campbell, The Cadillacs, and, of course, “Johnny” himself, Jimmy Clanton. Clanton was often dismissed as yet another milquetoast Fabian or Pat Boone type, but the Louisiana native studied at the feet of Dr. John and Allen Toussaint in New Orleans, recorded for Ace Records in Mississippi, and wrote many of his songs.

 

Another treat for this writer is the collection of great character actors in the film. Faces you’ll recognize, but names like Frank Wilcox, Barbara Wooddell, Herb Vigran, Milton Frome, William Fawcett, Phil Arnold, Joe Flynn, Dick Elliott, and Robert Foulkk that you won’t. Harry Dean Stanton would've fit right in.

(Harry Dean in the 1985 film "Fool for Love")

 

Yours truly got this gig Sunday as a charter member of TCM’s “Backlot” club, an organization of fans and film buffs. I entered a competition by naming 10 films I’d like to co-host. Of course, I named four Harry Dean Stanton films, a handful of noir films, and slapped “Go, Johnny, Go!” on as number 10. That’s the one they picked, along with me!

 

I first saw “Go, Johnny, Go!” back at the old Temple Theater in Sanford, North Carolina, in the early 1960s, probably a third or fourth run of the film. Restored today to beauty and prestige, the Temple back then was a musty old movie house, the kind where your shoes stuck to the floor as you walked down the aisle, a time when blacks sat in the balcony and whites below.

 

Years later I found an old DVD of the film at a Memphis flea market and would slip it in and wade through waves of nostalgia every now and then.

 

The plot’s pretty thin, the singers are lip syncing, and the guitars aren’t even plugged in, but it’s a fun romp that seems innocent through today’s world-weary eyes but which also provides a whiff of the rebellion rock ‘n’ roll truly was back in the day, a music that scared parents, preachers, and politicians, and drove racists through the roof for making both whites and blacks want to dance, and maybe even on the same dance floor!

 

Joe Biden's endorsement of the union drive at Amazon's Bessemer, Alabama, plant is a needed breath of fresh air for the U.S. labor movement

(President Joe Biden)

President Joe Biden’s endorsement of the union drive at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse is a shot in the arm for the labor movement in the U.S. South and in the country as a whole. He’s the first president to go full-scale public with his support of unions since Franklin Roosevelt, who was president when Biden was born in 1942.

 

Voting is underway at the 6,000-worker plant, and Amazon has pulled out all the stops to kill the union drive, subjecting workers to anti-union meetings and videos, using social media to identify labor activists. This is a drive even more historic than the United Auto Workers' Nissan campaign in Canton, Mississippi, when the most prominent politician to support that effort was Bernie Sanders. Amazon is the very face of modern-day capitalism.

 

Every four years Democratic leaders have paid lip service to labor, one of the party’s strongest constituencies, but more often than not they failed to follow up. Meanwhile, the Republican Party has waged a relentless anti-union war ever since it pushed through the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 over then-President Truman’s veto. That act made union organizing even more difficult by allowing states to outlaw the closed shop and thus allow workers to benefit from union contracts without joining the union. Every Southern state took advantage of that law to try and kill unions.

 

As reported recently by Labor South and also in The Atlantic, Donald Trump loved to boast his populist credentials and claim he was pro-worker. He lied about that just as he lied about a lot of things. He gutted the National Labor Relations Board and was your typical CEO in his attitudes toward labor.

 

Of course, Biden has played the neoliberal game for years, a game that generally put corporate interests on top and labor on the bottom. He worked under Barack Obama, who could speechify wistfully about the grand traditions and history of the U.S. labor movement but who as president showed limited interest in continuing those traditions and history.

 

Still, Biden has always had a working-class edge in his public persona, talking his Scranton, Pennsylvania, roots, moving easily among the strap hangers and other blue-collar folks in the crowd. From a close perspective as vice president, he witnessed the failed promises of the Obama administrations, the loss of Congress under Obama, GOP virulence, the rise of a progressive movement under Bernie Sanders, and he sees himself in an important moment of history, here as he moves toward the end of a long career that finally put him in the top job.

 

His strong endorsement of labor not only on the campaign trail but now as president of the United States is a breath of fresh air. Labor needed that.

 

Why are so many black politicians and civil rights leaders silent about the union vote at Amazon's Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse, where a majority of the workers are black?

 

(As a Feb. 22 addendum to this piece black Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams, who made a strong bid for governor in 2018, posted on Saturday, Feb. 20, the same day the editorial below appeared, a strong endorsement of unionization at Amazon's Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse. That's a welcome show of support that the workers need. It'd be nice to hear from Vice President Kamala Harris, too, wouldn't it?)

 

Why is there a deafening silence among many black politicians and civil rights leaders regarding the historic union vote taking place at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse?

 

On Feb. 8, the 5,805 workers at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse began receiving ballots on whether to vote in the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU). Most of them are black in a 70 percent black city.  Ballots must be filed by the end of March.

 

Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont and erstwhile presidential candidate, and a group of U.S. House members led by House Education & Labor Committee member Andy Levin have been vocal in their support of the workers, who’ve been on the front lines risking their own health during the pandemic while frantically getting merchandise to customers who can no longer shop without fear of the COVID 19 virus.

 

Long-brewing issues with their working conditions and warehouse safety at the bustling plant have fueled a union drive that has deeply frightened anti-union Amazon even in a right-to-work, Deep South conservative state. The massive company has waged a bitter war against the effort that has even included an online campaign to determine who might be pushing for the union.

 

Levin got 50 members of the U.S. House to sign a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos expressing support for the union drive and asking the company to desist in its anti-union campaigning. Missing from that list of members are prominent Democratic black congressmen such as Bennie Thompson of Mississippi and James Clyburn of South Carolina, the self-styled kingmaker who helped Joe Biden make a sweep of the South in the Democratic presidential primaries.

 

Also little or nothing has been heard from the NAACP and the Black Congressional Caucus about the Bessemer vote.

 

Could the reason be Amazon money? The company boasted last July that it was matching the $8.5 million that its employees across 33 companies had donated to programs and organizations aimed at fighting racism. With an earlier donation of $10 million, the company said its contribution would total $27 million.

 

Recipients of that largesse included: the NAACP, Black Lives Matter, National Urban League, the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, and the United Negro College Fund.

 

Did Amazon’s money buy silence?

 

During the United Auto Workers’ drive to organize workers at Nissan’s giant plant in Canton, Mississippi, some years back, the company funneled plenty of cash into 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 martyred Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers. Although Hollywood actor 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 monetary help in 2016 that it named the company’s North American operations “Organization of the Year”.

 

Yet Nissan, like Amazon, waged a fierce campaign against the organizing effort at its Canton plant, yet again an operation with a majority black workforce.

 

The late labor troubadour Anne Feeney called for grassroots power, and Southern workers are hearing that call

(To the right, Anne Feeney) 

The American Labor Movement lost one of its greatest troubadours this week to Covid, Anne Feeney, the Pittsburgh songbird, activist, protester, and granddaughter of a violin-playing, labor organizing mineworker.  A trained lawyer as well as musician, she once lamented how workers in this country have lost a sense of labor tradition.

 

“So many lessons that we have learned—both bitter and glorious—are remembered in labor songs,” she wrote in a May 2008 column in The Guild Reporter. “One of the reasons we don’t know our history is because we don’t know our songs.”

 

Knowing history is to know that movements rise from the bottom up, not the top down. “Professionals, politicians and philanthropists are helpless to effect social change without mass movements behind them. … France has a fantastic labor movement even though its union density is lower than ours. But French workers have something that we do not have—class consciousness. This is something that has been drilled out of us by corporate America.”

 

A lot of labor buzz has been created by Democrat Joe Biden’s rise to the presidency. Calling himself “the most pro-union president you’ve ever seen,” Biden has promised that “unions are going to have increased power.”

 

As Anne Feeney told us, however, real power is going to depend on grassroots organization and mobilization. Here in the South, where workers have always faced what I call the “phalanx” of opposition by big business, politicians, religious leaders, and corporate media, such grassroots efforts have been paying off, paying off in a region with a proud-but-tortured-and-largely hidden labor history and one with its own strong musical tradition as well.

 

On Feb. 8, the 5,805 workers at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse will begin receiving ballots on whether to vote in the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU). Although Amazon’s facilities in places like Germany and elsewhere in Europe are fully organized, the company is fighting like hell to make sure its Bessemer warehouse stays non-union. A pro-union vote in the Deep South, of all places, might inspire workers at other U.S. Amazon sites to go union. It’s enough to make billionaire Jeff Bezos have nightmares even if he’s relinquishing some of the reins of his power.

 

Organizers at Bessemer are “cautiously optimistic,” as people like to say when they want to remain clear-eyed even as they see rays of hope. Workers get paid comparatively well at the plant, but many feel the company needs to do more to protect them during the pandemic and that management makes too many arbitrary decisions about shifts and working hours without notice to employees.

 

Farm workers in the South these days tend to come from Mexico or farther south, and that makes them the most vulnerable of workers. Federal programs like the H-2A visa program put them under the control of employers who too easily and without consequence break promises on wages as well as living and working conditions. In recent years, however, organizations such as the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, Coalition of Immokalee Workers, and Southern Migrant Legal Services have used class-action lawsuits and pressure tactics on the long-insulated corporations that contract with growers and buy the products the workers produce to achieve significant gains for those workers—better wages and a better system to voice and resolve complaints.

 

As reported earlier in Labor South, nurses at Mission Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, overwhelmingly won their union drive last September, a historic milestone for the allegedly anti-union South. Over the past 10 years, union membership here in Mississippi grew 2.6 percent, according to the Institute for Southern Studies' Facing South. Neighboring Louisiana saw a 1.6 percent increase. The Carolinas saw increases from 2019 to 2020.

 

(Ella May Wiggins, martyred labor troubadour and activist during the textile mill strikes in North Carolina in the 1920s)

What if these workers knew more about Southern labor heroes like Ella May Wiggins, Mother Jones, Lucy Randolph Mason, Howard Kester, Scipio Jones, H.L. Mitchell, or songsters like John L. Handcox, Hazel Dickens, Florence Reece, and Zachary Richard? They’re not taught in the classroom or played on the radio, but watch out once their words and their music are heard.  There’s a newly arrived songbird in heaven who knows what would happen.

 

Trump as Citizen Kane, and the challenge to the Left to prove to workers that it, not right-wing populists, truly represents them and will fight neoliberalism

 

(Orson Welles in Citizen Kane)

 

Watching the recent film Mank about the 1941 classic Citizen Kane and the writing of its script by Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles got me in a mood. Having seen Citizen Kane many times, I bought a book that included a copy of the script. As I read it, I was struck by how much Charles Foster Kane there is in Donald Trump.

 

“You don’t love anybody!” Kane’s paramour-turned-second wife Susan Alexander tells him.  “Me or anybody else! You want to be loved—that’s all you want! I’m Charles Foster Kane. Whatever you want—just name it and it’s yours! Only love me! Don’t expect me to love you—“

 

Psychoanalyzing Trump is beyond the scope of this column, but like most demagogues he revels in the cheers and applause he gets from his people at rallies. He talks of how he “loves” them and would do anything for them. As seen in the recent takeover attempt of the U.S. Capitol by thousands of Trumpsters, what he truly demands is that they will do anything for him.

 

Still, Trump’s appeal has always reached far beyond what the naysayers at CNN, MSNBC, NBC, the New York Times, and the Democratic National Committee claim. Sure, many of his followers are racist, narrow-minded Neanderthals. Others, however, found in him—however falsely—a voice in the wilderness left by the neoliberal Democratic and Republican parties, beyond the rhetoric of austerity and the utter obeisance to Wall Street and global capitalism.

 

Trump promised them jobs in 2016. He promised to stop the bleeding of U.S. manufacturing into the cheap-jobs world that is Mexico, China, and Vietnam. His speeches bristled with their same contempt for the elitists on either side of the flyover zone who told blue-collar workers to take computer classes and who made empty promises how that would redefine their lives.

 

And those workers—many of them in former union strongholds like Michigan and Wisconsin—voted for him. They sure weren’t going to vote for Hillary Clinton, the elitist war-mongering neoliberal who didn’t even deign to campaign in those places.

 

Of course, Trump never delivered on those promises. The be-all and end-all of Donald Trump is the rich huckster born with a silver spoon in his mouth, trained at the feet of Joe McCarthy’s lawyer, Roy Cohn, and thus providing a link between two of the most fascistic eras in American history. Trump did everything he could over the last four years to undermine worker rights and protections, including the complete neutering of the National Labor Relations Board.

 

“Remember the working man?”  the once-raging populist Kane is asked at one point in Citizen Kane. “You used to defend him quite a good deal. Well,--he’s turning into something called organized labor and you don’t like that at all.”

 

Workers’ dilemma in the United States is a reflection of the same dilemma around the neoliberal world, a world in which global finance has triumphed, co-opting left-leaning as well as traditional conversative parties, undermining labor unions and workers’ rights, and sending Marxists and much of the hard-core Left into an ideological spiral—Do they support the internationalism Marx preached even if it means abiding by an utterly compromised European Union that preaches austerity, the elimination of the welfare state, and the gospel of free market economies along with the mass immigration that such economies require to ensure cheap labor? Do they look at Brexiters as just a bunch of nationalistic bigots, or recognize legitimate concerns that workers have about job threats from masses of immigrants who were forced from their homelands by neoliberal policies and the endless wars that global capitalism promotes?

 

So where have those workers outside the United States turned? To the new, anti-establishment parties that, unlike Trump, have indeed delivered on promises even as they preach a new kind of nationalism and refuse to get bogged down in the endless identity politics that have undermined the Democratic Party’s credibility with much of the U.S. working class.

 

In Poland, the so-called “right wing” and since-2015 ruling Law and Justice Party (PIS) may be jingoistic, proudly Christian, fiercely pro-life, and sharply critical of immigration, but it has also created a child allowance for poor families equal to one-third of the minimum wage while also increasing the minimum wage, lowered the retirement age from 67 to 65, and “significantly improved” the lives of workers and the poor in Poland, according to writer Adam Rogalewski in London-based International Union Rights magazine.

 

In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of the ruling (since 2010) Fidesz party rose to power bemoaning the disappearance of “national sovereignty, autonomy” and warned that unelected international powers like the EU and International Monetary Fund have practically destroyed democracy.

 

“According to the threat presented by the ruling party, the traditional local elites and left … are amoral, serve foreign interests, that of international companies, organisations (sic), local comprador bourgeoisie, and as their `agents’ help the settling of multinationals and their parasitism,” writes Hungarian trade union leader Károly György in International Union Rights.

 

The response of political parties and organizations on the Left in Europe thus far has largely been to fight among themselves and ultimately to fail to respond to the challenges posed by these populists on the right. Many of their members vote for those populists. Add to this a 50 percent decline in trade union membership in Western Europe between 1980 and 2015.

 

“The Left has become increasingly cut off from its historic constituency, the workers and the poor of Europe, who have naturally sought a political voice elsewhere,” says University of London economics professor Costas Lapavitsas in the Monthly Review, an independent socialist magazine.  “Inevitably the vacuum created by the Left has been steadily filled by some of the worst political forces in European history, including the extreme right.”

 

Here in the United States, the incoming Biden Administration faces the same challenge. The neoliberal background of Biden and the establishment Democratic Party raises strong concerns, but memory of the losses they suffered in the 2010 mid-term elections could force them finally to work seriously to re-establish the strong working class ties that the party of Franklin Roosevelt once enjoyed. On the campaign trail Biden indeed talked a lot about the need for good union jobs, and he will have Bernie Sanders looking over his shoulder.

 

Here’s hoping. Hope. Maybe I’ll make that a New Year’s resolution.    

 

Looking to Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" for hope in 2021

 (Charles Dickens at his desk)

This is a rerun of my Christmas 2017 post, a column that looked to Charles Dickens to give us some hope for better things to come. What it says pretty much still rings true today, but let's take hope from Dickens' tale that 2020 will have opened some eyes and hearts, and indeed better things will come in 2021.

 

OXFORD, Miss. – I settled comfortably into my favorite chair one recent night and popped in a DVD of the best Christmas movie ever, the 1951 version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

 

No one ever portrayed a better Ebenezer Scrooge than Scottish actor Alastair Sim, who plays to perfection the “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner” whose ghost-and-spirit-inspired conversion later in the story will have him declaring, “I’m not the man I was!”

 

“I have endeavored in this ghostly little book to raise the ghost of an idea,” Dickens once wrote about his 1843 tale. “May it haunt (readers’) pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it by.”

 

I’ve seen the film a dozen times, yet I keep discovering new things in it. “You were a good man of business,” Scrooge tells the ghost of his dead partner, Jacob Marley. “Business!” cries out Marley, rattling the heavy chains his life of greed and lack of compassion for the poor earned him in eternity. “Mankind was my business! Their common welfare was my business!”

 

Dickens scholar Norrie Epstein says the writer “never failed to weep” whenever he read his story out loud.  I’m afraid he’d be sobbing uncontrollably today if he saw how his “ghost of an idea” has fallen on deaf ears.

 

Here in Mississippi, nearly one out of every three children live in poverty worse than that of Tiny Tim, whose father Bob Cratchit is so poorly paid by Scrooge than he can’t get Tim the medical treatment he needs to save his life.

 

In fact, Tiny Tim might consider himself fortunate even to be alive if he were in Mississippi, which has the highest infant mortality rate in the nation. Mississippians are more likely to die prematurely than people from any other state. The fact is Mississippians, young or old, typically don’t live as long as people from other states.

 

When Bob Cratchit begs to take Christmas day off, Scrooge grumbles, “a poor excuse to pick a man’s pocket every twenty-fifth of December.” Who knows how the old miser (before his conversion) would’ve reacted if Bob had slipped and hurt himself after coming back to work on December 26?

 

Probably much like Mississippi’s Republican leadership. With their gutting of the state’s Workers’ Compensation protections back in 2012, then-Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant and his fellow Scrooges in the state Legislature made sure workers here are the nation’s least compensated for work-related injuries and thus the least protected. They are among the country’s most at-risk workers. A Mississippi worker is twice as likely to be killed on the job as the typical U.S. worker.

 

In fact, no one really knows how bad workers have it here in Mississippi because this is one of the nine states that refuse to collect reliable data on serious workplace injuries. Yet hear Gov. Bryant’s response to the 2012 Workers’ Compensation gutting—which added a host of hurdles for workers to jump before they can qualify for compensation: Mississippi has “the most job-friendly environment in America.” Friendly for whom? You know.

 

Here’s another way to say it: employers in Mississippi don’t have to worry about the “humbug” of being responsible for the safety of their workers.

 

Like Dickens himself, I confess to shedding a tear or two every time I get toward the end of “A Christmas Carol”. After Jacob Marley scares the wits out of the skinflint and then the spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Future do their work on him, Scrooge is a changed man. No more is he the soulless moneylender who tells a Christmas donation seeker that the poor might be better off dead. That way they could help “decrease the surplus population.”

 

At the end, Scrooge is indeed a new man, one whom people would come to say, “no man could keep Christmas as well as Ebenezer Scrooge.”

 

Dickens offers us hope at the end of his tale. Indeed, isn’t hope the very heart of the Christmas story? Maybe there’s hope even in poor ol’ Mississippi, hope that political leaders one day will see in those less fortunate a common humanity—not simply shirkers or ne’er-do-wells—and thus realize “their common welfare” is the business of us all.

 

To borrow an old political cliché, the time has come to throw the (cry) baby (Trump) out with the bathwater

 

For all his faux-populism and talk of making America great again, Donald Trump never did much of anything for working people during his four years in office. Their votes secured his victory in 2016 when he at least talked the talk about bringing back jobs. The spoiled rich man’s son never meant to walk the walk, however.

 

When the pandemic hit, one of Trump’s first actions was to make sure poultry and meatpacking plants stayed open, regardless of what safety conditions their cheapskate owners likely didn’t put in place.

 

“It is nothing short of outrageous for the president to use this power to protect an industry notorious for mistreating workers and putting profits above safety,” The Southern Poverty Law Center said a statement late last April. “The industry has already proven unwilling to protect the people working in these plants in the face of this pandemic, a failure that has resulted in community spread, illnesses and deaths.”

 

And who works at these plants? Immigrants, Latinos, black people, poor whites, that’s who. Not exactly a group Trump has ever given much attention.

 

With the closing of polls in the November election, Trump’s Labor Department froze the wages of farmworkers. The ruling against frontline, essential workers came at the same time the Trump Administration predicted a sharp increase in the profits of agribusiness.

 

In addition, growers are hoping the conservative U.S. Supreme Court next year will dump the so-called “access rule” that allows union organizers to talk with workers on the grower’s property mornings before work begins. The Agriculture Labor Relations Act of 1975 made such access legal and protected under federal law.

 

Trump has waged war against unions even within the federal government, working to undermine the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) and its efforts on behalf of the 250,000 members who work with the Veterans Administration. He has issued orders limiting union rights and access to workers, and created what In These Times magazine called “an atmosphere of fear and retaliation” while miring contract negotiations into an impasse.

 

Workers have little recourse under Trump’s National Labor Relations Board, which has become what Michelle Chen of Nation magazine called “a watchdog for the national Chamber of Commerce and Trump’s buddies.” Led by anti-labor, pro-big business appointees, the board has dumped Obama-era rulings and decisions that favored workers while consistently sided with management in making organizing more difficult. At the same time, the NLRB workforce itself has undergone a 20 percent reduction in the past three years.

 

All of these actions bring to mind something I read recently in author Al Price’s compelling memoir Gravel and Grit. Recalling the virulent opposition to a unionization effort and strike at a textile plant in his hometown of Water Valley, Mississippi, in 1952, Price wrote, “Why would others want to keep you down economically? Afraid you might get ahead of them? Is greed and selfishness that ingrained in our culture and psyche?”

 

Well, it is for some people, and one of them sits in the White House.

 

The big crybaby in the White House still clings to his delusion that he actually won the election and that only massive fraud can prevent him from serving a second term as president. However, as far as workers are concerned, this is one time, if ever there was a time, that the old political  cliché of “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” is a most appropriate thing to do.