Travels in China, plus a story: Hong Kong's foreign domestic workers struggle for an "ordinary" life while living as an "underclass"

(Hong Kong Labour Party chair and independent labor leader Lee Cheuk-yan)

My recent trip to Hong Kong and Beijing came at a time full of news for those cities and the region. During my visit in Hong Kong, whistleblowing fugitive Edward Snowden was staying in a hotel in the city after revealing to the world how the U.S. government is snooping on practically everyone in the world, including U.S. citizens. While Snowden was in Hong Kong, President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping were meeting in California, talking about cyber-hacking, among other things.

While in Hong Kong, I went to the massive June 4 vigil commemorating the victims of the brutal crackdown of the 1989 pro-democracy rally in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. I interviewed the man who organized that vigil. Tens of thousands attended—it was the only such large-scale public acknowledgement of the 24^th anniversary of the 1989 crackdown in all of China.

A poultry plant fire in northern China killed at least 120, sparking yet more outrage after similar tragedies in Bangladesh and Cambodia. Some 300 Nike workers in Cambodia were fired after protesting their working conditions during my visit to Asia. In addition, a Chinese firm bought giant Smithfield Foods, the pork producer that fought unionization for so long in North Carolina, pitting black and Latino workers against each other. (Note Smithfield’s subsequent hypocrisy when it dropped TV chef Paula Deen as an endorser because of her admission to using racially insensitive language in the past.)

One of the reasons I came to Hong Kong—as part of this blog’s commitment to the Global South as well as the U.S. South--was to talk to workers and activists about the recent strike that pitted the city’s dock workers against Asia’s richest man, Li Ka-shing, whose holdings include 70 percent control of port activity in Hong Kong. I also wanted to talk to people there about the migrant worker issue and a recent high court decision denying foreign domestic workers any chance of permanent residency.

Among those I interviewed were: Lee Cheuk-yan, Hong Kong Labour Party chair, general secretary of the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions and thus the city’s top independent labor leader, and key organizer of both the dock workers’ strike and the June 4 pro-democracy vigil; Cynthia Ca Abdon-Tellez, general manager of the city’s Mission for Migrant Workers organization; and Geoffrey Crothall, communications director of the China Labour Bulletin, a non-governmental organization that monitors labor actions and rights in China. I also spoke with migrant workers from the Philippines as well as a Catholic priest whose ministry includes migrant workers.

It was a rich experience, both in Hong Kong and Beijing, and I’ll be reporting on it in various stories over the coming days and weeks. My first story follows below, an account of migrant workers in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong’s Foreign Domestic Workers struggle for an “ordinary” life while living as an “underclass”

HONG KONG - Mariane Carnate, on the steps of the Mariners’ Club after attending mass at St. Peter’s Catholic Church inside, considers herself lucky.

(To the right is Marian Carnate, a foreign domestic worker in Hong Kong)

The 30-year-old native of North Cotabato in The Philippines is a domestic worker for a Russian family in Hong Kong that treats her well and pays her “a little more” than minimum wage. She lives with the family—a requirement of foreign domestic workers here--and works 10 to 12 hours a day. She has been in Hong Kong for eight years.

Others aren’t as fortunate. “Sometimes it is hard,” says Carnate, an attractive woman with long hair, carrying a large brown bag and wearing a green blouse and orange pants during her Sunday break from work. “Hong Kong is full of regulations. … Sometimes families are not easy to get along with. (Expenses) are more than domestic workers earn. I’m lucky. Some of my friends, their employers are not good to them.”

Carnate is one of more than 300,000 foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong. Half of them are, like her, from The Philippines and they’re nearly all female. Others come from Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India. Indeed, life isn’t easy for many of them. Hong Kong laws require them to live with their employer—a law intended to keep them from taking second jobs and thus competing with local workers—and also prohibits them from ever becoming permanent residents and thus eligible for state-run health care services and other benefits.

The city’s Court of Final Appeal ruled in March that foreign domestic workers don’t qualify as “ordinarily resident” and thus can’t apply for permanent residence after seven years like other foreign workers in the city can. The decision overturned an earlier lower court ruling in the workers’ favor.

(Cynthia Ca Abdon-Tellez of the Mission for Migrant Workers)

“It is becoming more clear that we are creating an underclass unfortunately,” said Cynthia Ca Abdon-Tellez, general manager of the Mission for Migrant Workers, during an interview at her office in St. John’s Cathedral in Hong Kong’s Central District. “When you go down deeper into this worker migration … it is forced on the people. Their home countries do not provide their people decent pay jobs. Domestic workers’ salary here is equal to a junior executive’s in their home country.”

The Mission for Migrant Workers is one of several organizations in the city devoted to providing assistance to a vulnerable population that is easily exploited and yet blamed for societal ills.

The church, whether Catholic, Anglican, or non-Christian, is an important resource as well as a refuge for this population, said Father Valan Arockiaswamy, himself a native of India as well as priest at St. Peter’s Catholic Church. “There’s discrimination, racial abuse, exploitation. … They’re on call 24 hours a day. No proper facility to sleep. They may sleep in the living room or share a room with the children, with teenagers.”

(To the right is Father Valan Arockiaswamy)

Indeed, a 2013 study of Hong Kong’s so-called “live-in policy” conducted by the Mission for Migrant Workers showed that 30 percent of foreign domestic workers do not have a room of their own, 37 percent work 16 hours a day, and 9 percent said they worked 19 hours straight. More than half have suffered verbal abuse, and 18 percent reported physical abuse. Some 6 percent reported sexual abuse.

“It is important to support migrant workers,” said Lee Cheuk-yan, chair of Hong Kong’s Labour Party and general secretary of the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions, the city’s largest independent labor organization. “This is the part of solidarity that is very important. It is very important to make sure they have the same rights as the local workers. … They had to leave their home to come to Hong Kong to take care of our families, and they are very badly treated.”

Activists Lee and Ca Abdon-Tellez said the fight for domestic and other migrant workers continues despite the high court’s ruling. “Workers’ rights should be entrenched everywhere in the world,” Lee said.

Back in the USA after travels to Hong Kong and Beijing: From dock workers & migrant workers to a whistle-blower seeking refuge

Just a quick note to say that I'm back in the USA now after travels in Hong Kong and Beijing over the past three weeks.

In Hong Kong I interviewed Lee Cheuk-yan, chair of the Hong Kong Labour Party, organizer of the giant June 4 pro-democracy rally in remembrance of the Tiananmen crackdown in Beijing in 1989, and key player in the recent dock workers strike in Hong Kong. Lee Cheuk-yan is the top independent labor leader in Hong Kong.

I also met with migrant workers from the Philippines, activists on their behalf, and Geoffrey Crothall of the China Labour Bulletin, which monitors labor rights in China.

Later in Beijing, I traveled to Tiananmen Square as well as the neighboring Forbidden City and other sites in China's capital city.

It was all a rich experience, a good time to be in Asia. While I was in Hong Kong, of course, the story about whistle-blower Edward Snowden's leaked documents on U.S. cyber-surveillance of practically everyone broke wide open. Snowden was in Hong Kong himself, and the question was whether he would face extradition back to the United States.

How ironic that this story should break at a time when President Obama was meeting with Chinese President Li Jinping in California,  cyber-hacking being a key issue between the two nations.

Expect reports from this trip over the coming days as well as updates on ongoing stories here in the South and Global South, such as organizing efforts at the Nissan plant in Canton, Miss., and Walmart's actions in the aftermath of the tragic Bangladesh factory fire.

On the road to Hong Kong and China: Reliving old memories while tracking a rising labor activism

 

(To the right: Yours truly overlooking Hong Kong in 1972)

My Army buddy Bob Vanover sadly admired the Hong Kong skyline our final day there back in April 1972 and sighed, “Take 

a last look, Joe. We’ll never see this place again.”

Always the optimist, I shook my head and proclaimed: “You never know, Bob. We could be back someday.”

We were both soldiers based in Plantation, Vietnam, on a week-long R&R (Rest & Recreation) in Hong Kong, taking a needed break from Hueys, dusty villages, water buffalo, lambrettas and the occasional pajama-wearing Viet Cong. We were in one of free Asia’s biggest cities, a teeming anthill of skyscrapers and crowded markets, back alleys and waterfronts, rickshaws and Chinese junks. Hong Kong was Asian but to us it was also “The World,” which then meant any place other than Vietnam.

Hey, Bob, wherever you are, you were wrong and I was right.

(Yours truly--out of uniform--and Bob Vanover in Vietnam)

Yep, Bob, I’m going back to Hong Kong next week, and I’ll spend much of the next three weeks there and on the mainland in Beijing, Xi’an, and possibly Shanghai. I doubt the Suzie Wong Bar is still in Hong Kong, but surely Thieves’ Market—also known as Cat Street--is still clogged with humanity, including a few of the kind who gave it its name.

(A crowded street--possibly Cat Street--in Hong Kong in 1972)

This will likely be my last posting on Labor South until my return in mid-June. The trip will be part play, part work. The working end will take place in Hong Kong, where I’m hoping to talk to folks about the recent successful dockworkers’ strike there and about the migrant worker issue, a long-term project of mine.

Some 450 Hong Kong International Terminals (HIT) dockworkers struck for 40 days between March 28 and early May to demand better wages and working conditions. The strike at the world’s third-busiest port pitted the members of the Union of Hong Kong Dockers and Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions (HKCTU) against billionaire Li Ka-shing, Asia’s richest man. Li Ka-shing controls the HIT and 70 percent of all port traffic in Hong Kong.

The strikers won and went back to work after securing a 9.8 percent boost in wages. They received local and global support for their cause with many Hong Kong citizens as well as activists from the mainland contributing to their strike fund.

“Our union works from below persuading worker by worker to join and get organized, with the effect of enabling rank-and-file workers to make their voices heard,” dockworkers union secretary Wong Yu Loy told labor scholar and writer Stephen Philion in a recent interview (http://www.labornotes.org/2013/05/hong-kong-dockers-claim-victory).

Wong Yu Loy told Philion—whom I hope to see while I’m in Hong Kong—that dockworkers occupy a unique and crucial link in the global economy, serving as a “vital cog in the corporate supply chain.” This was seen in the historic labor action by dockworkers in Charleston, S.C., back in 2000 when they successfully forced back a union-busting effort by a Danish shipping line. They got international support and won the day, just as their counterparts in Hong Kong have now done.

It’s another promising sign—in this eternal optimist’s viewpoint—of a rising worker consciousness around the globe. Tracking that is one big reason for this trip to Hong Kong.

Look at Bangladesh, where the garment industry moved to take advantage of the least-paid and most vulnerable workers of the world. Six months after 112 workers died in a fire at the Tazreen factory near Dhaka, another 1,127 were killed when the building housing the Rana Plaza clothing factory, also near Dhaka, collapsed. Another 2,000 workers face lifelong physical injuries and impairment as a result.

But these tragedies may bring about change. The underpaid, vulnerable workers in Bangladesh are standing up for their rights and making demands. The Bangladesh government recently agreed to raise the minimum wage and allow workers to form trade unions without factory owners’ prior approval.

Still, some 20,000 workers continued their protests in the Bangladesh garment center of Ashulia this week and faced police forces firing rubber bullets at them. Dozens were injured.

European retailers have responded to the tragedies by agreeing to a plan to improve working conditions in Bangladesh. U.S. retailers like Walmart are balking, however, citing concerns about the legal implications. Protesters plan to be in Bentonville, Ark., at Walmart’s shareholders’ meeting on June 7 to bring home the message that even giant U.S. corporations have to recognize the basic rights and dignity of workers, no matter where they are. At the protest will be Bangladesh workers.  

Anti-union Nissan makes big gift to Evers Institute but forgets civil rights martyr Medgar Evers was a big union supporter

(To the right is a photograph I took of Ray Smithhart in Jackson, Miss., in 2004)

OXFORD, Miss. - My old friend Ray Smithhart would have loved the irony of union-fighting manufacturer Nissan making a gift of $100,000 to the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute.

Known in his later years as the “dean of Mississippi’s labor organizers,” Smithhart worked closely with civil rights martyr Medgar Evers in the late 1950s and early 1960s, forging a link between the labor and civil rights movements that Martin Luther King Jr. himself saw as key to the future of both.

(Medgar Evers)

“Medgar Evers told me I was the first white man who ever talked to him,” Smithhart told me during an interview the year before he died at 88 in 2005. “We had good relations.”

That’s why he must be smiling in heaven. Nissan, unionized around the world but fighting unionization at its plant in Canton, Miss., made its donation to the Evers Institute last month. “This organization talks about and looks at youth education, diversity, and racial reconciliation, and those are the same things Nissan looks at,” Nissan spokesman Jeffrey Webster said.

If Smithhart were alive today, he would likely ask Nissan to look deeper into Medgar Evers’ beliefs. “All people need their civil rights, especially the working people,” said Smithhart, who served as president of a United Rubber Workers local and secretary-treasurer of the state AFL-CIO.

Mississippi and nation are marking the 50^th anniversary of Evers’ slaying with a long series of tributes to the late activist and field secretary of the Mississippi NAACP. Evers was killed in front of his home in Jackson, Miss., on June 12, 1963. Events include the annual Medgar Evers Dinner in Jackson next month. Among those on hand will be Hollywood actor and labor activist Danny Glover, a vocal supporter of the union effort at Nissan.

“I think about Medgar Evers,” Glover said at a gathering of pro-union Nissan workers last July. “He was only 37 years old when he died. Medgar Evers would be right out here supporting you.”

Activists, community leaders and the United Auto Workers have been building support to get Nissan to allow a fair election for the 5,000 workers at its Canton plant. Workers say the company is already waging an intense anti-union campaign within the plant that includes one-on-one meetings with managers, videos and threats of plant closings and layoffs if workers choose to join a union.

Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn has opposed unionization at the company’s plants in Mississippi and Tennessee even though its workforce in other parts of the world is largely unionized.

The UAW has taken the Canton story to the world. Rallies have been held in Atlanta, New York, Detroit, and as far away as Brazil. Hundreds turned out for an evangelical-style gathering at Tougaloo College in January that featured Glover as well as an array of preachers, students, activists, and workers.

The $100,000 gift to the Evers Institute may be a sign that Nissan is feeling the pressure. The company also recently announced a $500,000 education grant to the Canton Public School District. Nissan reported $84.4 billion in net revenues and $4.37 billion in operating profit for the nine months ending in December 2012.

Yet things aren’t all rosy for Nissan’s relations with predominantly black Canton. Efforts by state lawmakers to back a $100 million plant expansion and supplier support plan in Madison County have rankled local political leaders, who are still miffed at a state-backed prohibition against Canton annexing the plant.

Nissan’s cash handouts, welcome as they may be, say nothing about the fundamental question of workers’ rights, itself a civil rights issue.

           

Evers died in the cause for those rights. Smithhart, too, was on the front lines, integrating water fountains, pressuring Jackson leaders to hire black police officers.  In 1962, goons fired 200 pellets into Smithhart’s car near Ripley. A Port Gibson police chief told him “no one would hear” from him again if he didn’t leave town.

“I would not let the anti-union forces intimidate me,” Smithhart said. “I stood my ground, and they did not like it.”

Claude Ramsay, state AFL-CIO president at the time and another Evers associate, told me this during a 1981 interview: “They’d call me and threaten me. I kept a double-barreled shotgun on the floorboard of my car, and I told them I’d take at least two of them with me.”

The labor movement “transformed misery and despair into hope and progress,” Martin Luther King Jr. once said. “The two most dynamic and cohesive liberal forces in the country are the labor movement and the Negro freedom movement.”

Poor, uprooted, and on the margins: Writer Steve Stern's tales of Old World Jews in Memphis' Pinch District

 

When the one-legged, one-eyed rags peddler Lazar Malkin left on his journeys into the Mississippi hinterland to find customers for his collection of “shmattes and tools,” he liked to remind his fellow Jews on Memphis’ North Main Street, “The Pinch ain’t the world.”

Old Malkin was right, but he was wrong, too. The Pinch, the former Jewish quarter of Memphis, Tenn., located along North Main between Downtown and Uptown, was, after all, a world unto itself. Along with its “jewelers, tailors, and watchmakers,” its Hasidim, rabbis, meshuggener and various luftmensch, were Klotwog’s Feed Store, Rosen’s Delicatessen, Ridblatt’s Bakery, Hekkie’s Hardware, the Neighborhood House, and the Anshei Sphard Synagogue.

It’s the world you enter in writer Steve Stern’s wonderful collection of short-stories The Book of Mischief (Graywolf Press, 2012), a lost world, that perennial of Yiddish literature, that existed in a little corner of a Deep South city, a threatened world where “at night rabid animals stalked the perimeter … with now and then a werewolf among them; and never mind the marauding Klansmen” who’d taken the place of the Cossack troops that tormented these Jews back in Russia and Poland’s Carpathian Mountains.

Stern, a winner of the National Jewish Book Award and teacher at Skidmore College in upstate New York, spent formative years in Memphis and found in the Pinch District—now largely blighted but possibly facing a rebirth--a bottomless source of inspiration.

(To the right is an abandoned synagogue in today's Pinch District)

The Pinch is Memphis’ oldest neighborhood. It was here where Davy Crockett and Sam Houston caroused at the old Bell Tavern in the early 1800s, where waves of Irish and German immigrants came and worked along the nearby levees of the Mississippi River, where many of them perished or fled during the 1878 Yellow Fever Epidemic that nearly destroyed Memphis.

Jews from Eastern Europe and Russia settled in the Pinch after the epidemic. They came here just as they came to New York’s Lower East Side and other places of refuge to escape the pogroms launched against them after Czar Alexander’s assassination in St. Petersburg in 1881.

This collection of Stern stories also includes tales from New York’s Lower East Side, the Catskills Mountains, and Eastern Europe, those shtetl and city ghettoes we know mainly today through “Fiddler on the Roof”, the paintings of Marc Chagall, the haunting pre-World War II photographs of Roman Vishniac, and the tales of Isaac Bashevis Singer.  Stern revisits the horrible last moments of the immigrant women at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York just before it goes up in flames in  1911. He juxtaposes the world destroyed at Auschwitz and Treblinka with today’s Prague, where that most iconic of Jewish writers, Franz Kafka, has become “Elvis”. His “jug ears stretched to satanic points … the forehead receding to a vampirish widow’s peak,” Kafka is everywhere—in the windows of bookstores and cafés, on T-shirts and coffee mugs.

Stern quotes Kafka to get to the heart of things Jewish: “In us all still lives—the dark rooms, secret alleys, squalid courtyards, and sinister inns. The fetid old Jewish town within us is more real than the hygienic town around us. With our eyes wide-open we walk through a dream, ourselves only a ghost of a vanished age … ”

(An alley today in Memphis' Pinch District)

And one “old Jewish town” was to become the Pinch District of Memphis, Tenn. Here along its alleys and narrow streets were refugees from a distant and hostile world, eternal wanderers it seemed, who now must contend with “a river … awash with dead men and snakes. Beyond our neighborhood the poor people married their own mothers and had two-headed children. For sport they wrestled pigs and cut the private parts off Negroes, which they framed and hung up in the barbershops. The South beyond the Pinch was Gehinnom, it was Sichra Achra, the other side.”

(To the right is another back street in today's Pinch District)

As is obvious here, Stern has a Jewish sense of humor, and it’s no accident he spends some time in this book in the Catskills amid the ghosts of “Sophie Tucker ... Fat Jackie Leonard, Danny Kaye né David Daniel Kaminsky.” In his story “The Wedding Jester”, his character Saul Bozoff may be Stern himself, a curious Jewish Southern writer who discovered in the Pinch a haunting of ghosts--“immigrants crying hockfleish and irregular pants, pumping their sewing machines like swarming hornets in the tenement lofts, braiding Yiddish curses into their yellow challah bread.”

Or preparing for the occasional visits of Memphis’ political czar, Edward H. “Boss” Crump, who would boast “Our sheenies are good sheenies” with just the hint of a threat behind that frozen smile and “rakish straw skimmer.”

These stories are filled with golem, dybbuks, tzaddik, and there's even a daughter of Lilith, the original “femme fatale,” Jewish, of course, a succubus as dangerous as she is seductive. Stern takes you to fantastical heights that require the suspension of Gentile logic and practicality. You fly in the air with Rabbi Shmelke “above the telephone lines and trolley lines” of the Pinch. You accompany Zelik Rifkin into a dream world of Pinch District doppelgängers who exist just above the tallest oak in the quarter. You swing with Felix Meltzer over the rooftops of Prague as he escapes the golem.

Stern tells us Saul Bozoff, the writer in “The Wedding Jester”, was never to be a bestselling author, lost as he was in “the place where history and myth intersected,” a writer “saturated in Jewish arcana” whose books are “catalogued as Fiction/Judaica.”

As literary critics Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg once wrote, the writers of Yiddish or Yiddish World literature, “virtually unknown to Americans,”  navigate a world that is “internally a community, a spiritual kingdom,” and “externally a society in peril, a society on the margin.”

Indeed, by and large, these are poor immigrants, dealers in rags and legends, refugees from oppression defiantly true to their faith and culture yet also fearful of those outside their world, the holders of power in whose smiles lies an ever-present threat of bad things to come. Yet what stories these lost world denizens have to tell.

Death in Bangladesh and Texas: Will bottom-feeder industries and their corporate customers ever put people over profits?

 

(A late 19th century sweatshop in the garment industry)

How many tragedies will it take before the bottom-feeders of the global economy stop their relentless, immoral search for the world’s cheapest wages and decide that fair labor costs and safe working conditions are a part of doing business?

When textile workers stood up against their bosses in New England and joined unions like the Industrial Workers of the World in the early 1900s, the industry packed its bags and moved to the U.S. South, where a new generation of oligarchs had succeeded antebellum plantation owners and promised a climate that may be post-slavery but not post-slave wages.

After six decades of what North Carolina mill worker Eva Bradshaw once described to me as being “just dollar bills to them, not humans,” the South’s textile workers also stood up and joined the Textiles Workers’ Union of the America and its later emanation, the Union of Needletrades Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE).

Aided by the North American Free Trade Agreement and other government intervention on behalf of Big Business, the textile and garment industries’ response was to pack their bags and move south to Mexico, where instead of paying a veteran Carolina mill hand $11 an hour it could get a Mexican worker for $1.47 an hour.

Then when Communist China decided that a capitalist underbelly works quite well with an authoritative regime that mouths Marx but tolerates little or no dissent among the proletariat, the textile and garment industries said, “Hmmmmmmmm.”

Chinese workers earn a mere 64 cents an hour, industry leaders noticed, and soon their factories were off on the Orient Express of New Liberalism!

Then those pesky Chinese workers started complaining. After all, they were living in the last bastion of the “workers’ paradise”, right? Protests, strikes and walkouts became regular events along southeast China’s industrial corridor in the 2000s. Finally Communist Party leaders realized they had to stop the constant turnover of Marx, Lenin and Mao in their graves and do something about workers’ demands. For example, increase wages and let workers elect their own union leaders instead of having the government appoint a factory manager to wear both hats.

That wasn’t welcome news to the gypsy textile and garment factories. So next stop: Bangladesh, which now ranks only behind China in the garment business, a country where the typical garment worker earns the equivalent of $37 a month.

 That’s why it should be a surprise to no one that yet another horror has been dealt workers in these industries. A poorly built, eight-story structure that housed multiple garment factories in Savar, near Dhaka, Bangladesh, collapsed last week, killing at least 400 and injuring many more. An unknown number of people remain trapped.

According to Bangladesh reports, workers were told to go to work despite the discovery of cracks in the building the day before the collapse.

Just last November, 112 workers were killed after a fire broke out in the Tazreen garment factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh. They burned to death in a building without fire exits. The factory produced apparel for Walmart and Sam’s Club as well as Sears, Disney, Sean Combs’ Enyce and other Western companies.

Walmart and the Sears Holding Corp. have thus far opted out of joining a group of companies that have pledged to compensate victims of the Tazreen fire. In fact, Walmart apparently took a lead role in 2011 in opposing an effort to have companies step forward and fund improved safety measures among their suppliers in the South Asian garment industry.

More than 800 workers have died in Bangladesh factories since 2005.

Of course, the textile and garment industries don’t have a monopoly on poorly monitored plants that endanger the lives of workers. This became clear in Texas last week with the explosion of a plant owned by the West Fertilizer Co. in West, Texas.  The explosion killed 14 and injured more than 160.

Labor writer Mike Elk has reported that the plant had no sprinklers, fire alarms and shut-off valves but it did have “1,350 times the legally allowed amount of highly explosive ammonium nitrate.”

Mississippi & the South: Still ruled by "the handful" as GOP guvs say "No" to Medicaid expansion

(Fannie Lou Hamer in 1964)

Fannie Lou Hamer, a folk philosopher of the civil rights movement in the Mississippi Delta, knew what she was up against in a state and region where an entrenched hard-right oligarchy ruled at the expense of the majority.

“With the people, for the people, by the people--I crack up when I hear it,” said the former field hand, a woman wise far beyond her sixth grade education. “I say, with the handful, for the handful, by the handful, ‘cause that’s what really happens.”

Hamer spoke those words decades ago, but they’re just as true today as hard-right political leaders in Mississippi and across the South once again circle the wagons to make sure they stay in power even if it means suffering across the land.

Witness the spectacle of Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant and the Republican bosses in the state Legislature opposing an expansion of Medicaid that would help 300,000 needy Mississippians even though the federal government will largely fund it. They’re not going to threaten their party or their own political necks by giving Obamacare a chance succeed.

Even the pleas of some 200 doctors and other health advocates who recently gathered in Jackson, Miss., fell on deaf ears as Bryant and Co. stood in the door to block any expansion, much like segregationist Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett tried to block integration at Ole Miss back in 1962.

The comparison is fitting.

In Mississippi you have the poorest state in the nation, where one in five nonelderly residents lacks health insurance, a state that recorded the nation’s largest growth in the gap between the rich and poor between the late 1990s and mid-2000s. This is a state that in the last two decades enjoyed a net gain (over what it paid in taxes) of $240 billion in federal aid to the poor and needy.

It’s the same story across the South, a region that will forever be the nation’s poorest so long as it continues to be ruled by oligarchies of self-interested pols and the business and corporate interests they serve. That has been the South through much of its sad history.

From Virginia to Texas, what Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson called the Confederacy, Republican governors have led the charge to oppose the Affordable Health Care Act and the Medicaid expansion that is a key part of it. Florida’s governor is the only exception.  “Many of the citizens who would benefit the most from this live in the reddest of states with the most intense opposition,” Kaiser Family Foundation President Drew Altman told the Associated Press.

The assault on the needy takes many forms. The Republican governor and legislature in North Carolina recently agreed to slash weekly benefits to the unemployed from $535 to $350. North Carolina has a 9.2 percent unemployment rate, fifth highest in the nation. It joins five other Southern and border states—Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, and South Carolina—that have slashed benefits to the unemployed.

Back in Fannie Lou Hamer’s day, white Delta planters and their pet pols fought racial integration with every fiber of their being. Their minions killed and maimed activists. They burned churches and homes. They threw blacks like Hamer into jails and tried to beat them into submission.

The same federal government that finally forced Mississippi and the Delta planters to accept the black vote and black civil rights also allowed that same leadership to control federal aid to the poor. Planters grew rich on federal farm subsidies but were misers when it came to doling out food stamps or other poverty assistance.  They had no compunction about withholding assistance to any black upstart who challenged the system.

Read historian James C. Cobb’s The Most Southern Place on Earth about those times. It’s painful but an education. Mississippi was “a kind of prison in which live a great group of uneducated, semi-starving people from whom all but token public support has been withdrawn,” said one observer, a physician from North Carolina who refused to believe how bad things were until he saw them in person.

The same hypocrisy exists today. State leaders in Mississippi managed to find $356 million in incentives to lure Toyota at a time when they wouldn’t even fund a burn center, forcing burn victims to leave the state for treatment.

“Nothing could be a greater threat to the Southern cheap-labor economic strategy than universal, standardized federal social insurance,” author Michael Lind of the New America Foundation has written. “In order to maximize the dependence of Southern workers on Southern employers in the great low-wage labor pool of the former Confederacy, it would be better to have no welfare at all, only local charity (funded and controlled, naturally, by the local wealthy families).”

In other words, government “with the handful, for the handful, by the handful.”