"Mother Jones" magazine picks up on "Labor South" story about asylum seekers being held in a remote Mississippi prison

You read it first in Labor South! In separate posts in August and September of 2018, Labor South reported on the hundreds of asylum seekers from other countries being held in the remote Tallahatchie Correctional Facility in the Mississippi Delta town of Tutwiler.

In its latest edition, Mother Jones magazine published a lengthy article by Noah Lanard about the prison and the asylum seekers being held there. Here is the link:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/02/ice-is-sending-hundreds-of-asylum-seekers-to-a-private-prison-in-mississippi/

Of course, you read about this in Labor South and also in my column in the Jackson Free Press last September if you are a subscriber to that publication. Here is that link:

http://www.jacksonfreepress.com/news/2018/sep/19/opinion-huddled-masses-yearning-break-free/

It is gratifying to know that national attention is now being given the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s actions toward people seeking refuge in this nation of immigrants. It would have been nice, however, for Mother Jones to have acknowledged who got the story first.

France's Yellow Vest protesters shake the neo-liberal world of the "New Republic" magazine as well as Emmanuel Macron - Would a Zapata help the cause?

(The Gilets Jaunes in Paris)

It was an evening sometime in the summer or early fall of 1973, and my brother John and I were sitting in a café in the Left Bank of Paris near Sorbonne University. Drinking our beers, perhaps an aperitif or two, we were enjoying ourselves by our window table when all of a sudden total chaos broke out in the streets outside.

Hundreds of students carrying placards and crudely written signs, shouting, their faces alive with emotion, rushed past us. Many of them looked back as they ran, and we soon saw why. Hot on their trail were equally hundreds of uniformed police waving their black sticks with intent to use them.

My brother and I weren’t sure how to react so we watched as the crowds disappeared into the narrow streets and alleys of the Latin Quarter. It was just a few years after the major protests of 1968, and I remember seeing huge signs in the streets announcing news of the latest arrests of members of the revolutionary Baader-Meinhof gang, the popular name of Germany’s Red Army Faction led by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof. Both were in jail by that time, but key faction members were still on the loose planting bombs, kidnapping politicians and generally wreaking havoc.

I’ve been thinking about that visit to Paris during the recent protests by the gilets jaunes—Yellow Vests—in the streets of Paris and elsewhere across France, a movement of the French working class in defiance of the country’s neo-liberal president Emmanuel Macron and his policies of giant tax breaks to the rich and corporations while hiking taxes on workers and cutting public services.

With even major labor leaders looking askance at their protests, the Yellow Vests don’t have a clearly identifiable leader. Theirs is a spontaneous protest prompted in part by Macron’s hike on fuel, which has caused a divide with environmentalists. To the protesters, that hike was the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back because it made their already struggling lives even more of a struggle. French workers usually live outside the cities and have to commute. After cutting their public transportation, Macron wanted to raise their already expensive fuel prices.

The protests were so vehement that Macron had to back off his fuel tax plan, but people remained in the streets because their issues went far beyond the cost of keeping the tanks in their vehicles full. Called the “yellow vests” because of the piece of safety clothing French drivers are required to keep in their cars, these French workers are actually part of a much larger and hopefully growing protest against the neo-liberal corporate takeover of this world that major political parties of all stripes in most countries have come to accept.

The U.S. media haven’t paid much attention what’s going on in the streets of Paris. Leftist media have done some admirable work, but what you’re more likely to encounter are articles such as Alexander Hurst’s “The Ugly, Illiberal, Anti-Semitic Heart of the Yellow Vest Movement” that appeared last month in New Republic magazine, a publication that has veered left and right over its long history and as this article indicates seems content to side with the self-satisfied liberal elite who call themselves socially liberal but are anything but on anything else.

Hurst’s article wages war on casseurs (“smashers”) who have joined the Yellow Vests at times and contributed violence to confrontations with the police—sort of like identifying all leftist critics of capitalism with the Baader-Meinhof gang in the 1970s!

Macron won election in France due largely to the failure of major parties to field candidates who could truly address the concerns of the French people. The same phenomenon happened in the United States, and that’s why we have Donald Trump as president. Demagogues and self-proclaimed saviors thrive in a political vacuum. The same phenomenon occurred more than a century ago in the United States and led to the creation of the People’s Party, also known as the Populists, the largest and most significant third party movement in the history of our nation.

(To the right, Emiliano Zapata in 1912)

The other night on Turner Classic Movies I watched the 1952 film “Viva Zapata!”, the story of the great turn-of-the-last-century Mexican peasant-turned-revolutionary whose legacy as a leader and champion of the people lives on today. Directed by Elia Kazan with a script by John Steinbeck and starring Marlon Brando as Emiliano Zapata, the film showed how revolutionaries like Zapata in the south of Mexico and Pancho Villa to the north filled a vacuum in that country. After their revolution produced results, the weak-kneed Francisco Madero took over the country, thinking he could accommodate the crying needs of the people while still dealing with bullying militarists like Victoriano Huerta. He paid for that mistake with his life, and so did Zapata and Villa.

Do the Gilets Jaunes need a strong leader, a Zapata, to keep their movement alive and well? France has a long and inspiring history of social movements that sprang up from the people—beginning in modern history with the French Revolution and including other inspiring moments in history such as the Paris Communards of 1871. True leaders who never lose sight of the cause, such as Zapata, are rare.

In the film “Viva Zapata!” one of the generals makes a remark about the revolution breaking out in his country. “Ideas are harder to kill than snakes. How do you kill an idea?” Brando’s Zapata points to another truth about people’s movements. “A strong people is the only lasting strength.”

Rising union membership in the South, a UCW-CWA local at Ole Miss, and remembering Brecht and Weill's "Mahagonny"

(A Green Moon Over Alabama, a book of poetry by Bertolt Brecht, published in the German Democratic Republic in 1975)

Back in the late 1990s I traveled to Jena in what had shortly before that time been Communist East Germany. In a small bookstore in that centuries-old university town I found a copy of poems by Bertolt Brecht, the great playwright and committed Communist whose collaboration with composer Kurt Weill produced such works as The Threepenny Opera and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, the latter first published 90 years ago this year and a biting indictment of capitalist greed, hedonism, and corruption that enraged the Nazis back in 1930s Germany.

The most famous song in Mahagonny is the “Alabama Song”, where Jenny, originally played by the great Lotte Lenja, and a group of fellow prostitutes say goodbye to good old Alabama in order to travel to the mythical city of Mahagonny where they’ll find plenty of whiskey, boys, money, and fun.

(To the right, Lotte Lenja)

“Oh moon of Alabama

We now must say good-bye

We’ve lost our good old mamma

And must have dollars

Oh, you know why.”

Here’s Lotte Lenya’s version back in 1958:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6orDcL0zt34

On the cover of the book of poetry is a depiction of a Southern-style, cigar-chomping political boss surrounded by whores and their drunken clients under ramshackle roofs. A little bit of the South in Old Communist Germany!

I pulled out that volume recently after seeing the latest numbers on union membership in the U.S. South and country as a whole. Membership dropped a bit nationwide from 10.7 percent of the workforce in 2017 to 10.5 percent last year, just half of what it was back in the 1980s.

The good news is that membership rose in parts of the South with Alabama adding more union members—44,000—than any other state! Union membership as a share of the workforce also rose in Florida, Louisiana, and Georgia while holding steady in the region as a whole, according to CBS and the Institute for Southern Studies' Facing South.

We’re doing our part here in little Oxford, Mississippi, where the United Campus Workers Local 3565 of the Communications Workers of America recently organized as a non-collective bargaining “organizing local” formed to represent and defend the rights of all campus workers—from faculty to custodians. Yours truly was one of the original 50 members needed to secure union status.

The union has already been active on a number of fronts, including its members supporting a successful effort to get non-tenure-track adjunct faculty representation on the campus Faculty Senate. It is looking at a wide range of future issues to address—from the availability of child care for campus workers to the gender gap in wages to a possible Living Wage Campaign.

(To the right, former Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam)

United Campus Workers is growing across the South with locals at universities in Tennessee and Georgia. It was successful in preventing Republican Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam from a massive privatization effort on the campuses of the University of Tennessee (as well as across state government) in the fall of 2017. Haslam, a billionaire, and a corporate-dominated group wanted to outsource every state facility service job on those campuses, more than 3,500 jobs in the university system. After pressure from UCW, the state’s university system opted out of the plan.

(Bertolt Brecht, from a photo on the back cover of A Green Moon Over Alabama)

The latest statistics on union membership in Alabama and the South probably would bring a smile to the face of Bertolt Brecht, a cigar chomper himself. In that book of his poetry I have is another little song called “Streiklied” (“Strike Song”) in which he urges workers to take the risk to take a stand for their rights. I’m not a commie—my priest wouldn’t put up with it!--but I like the old poet’s spirit.

“Heraus auf die Strasse! Kampfe!” (“Come out into the street! Fight!”

Um zu warten, ist es zu spaet!” (“To wait is too late!”)

Hilf dir selbst, indem du uns hilft; uebe” (“Help yourselves, and you help us; Exercise your”)

Solidaritaet!” (“Solidarity!”)

Singer-guitarist Billy Bragg keeps the protest spirit of Phil Ochs alive. Meanwhile corporate hero Carlos Ghosn sits in jail awaiting trial

(Cover to the Billy Bragg CD "The Essential Billy Bragg")

“Better late than never” is an expression that has often brought me solace as I’m such a late bloomer on many fronts. I was a flag-waiving, protesting ‘60s radical who had heard of Phil Ochs but never much listened to him. So here I am, a half-century later, enjoying his anti-war, pro-union tunes and getting a particular kick out of “Love Me, I’m a Liberal”, a scathing indictment of all those middle-of-the-roaders who are scared of their own—or simply lack—convictions.

(To the right, Phil Ochs)

Like so many of Ochs’ tunes, it’s very timely today when columnist Jennifer Rubin of the allegedly progressive Washington Post interpreted the midterm elections as yet more proof that Democrats need to be moderate and wary of radical types like Bernie Sanders. As reported in the media watch group FAIR’s Extra!, USA Today also joined last November in dumping on Democrats who might to push too hard on climate change. I can see Phil Ochs grinning with a “I told you so” look on his face.

Discovering the genius of the late Phil Ochs led me to another discovery, that of the very much alive and well Billy Bragg, a British working class singer and guitarist who has been belting out leftist tunes since the 1980s, one of which, “I Dreamed I Saw Phil Ochs Last Night” takes the classic labor tune “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night” and makes it a paean to Ochs. With his searing guitar, his licks full of righteous indignation, Bragg keeps alive the Woody Guthrie-Pete Seeger-Sara Ogan Gunning-Florence Reece-Ella May Wiggins-Phil Ochs tradition.

Listen to his updated version of Florence Reece’s classic “Which Side Are You On?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbddqXib814

In these times, and particularly here in Trumpland, you need the fighting words of singers like these to keep your spirits up.

(Carlos Ghosn)

Here in Mississippi, yours truly is the only reporter who has said much about the downfall of the powerful Carlos Ghosn, the corporate hero at Nissan, Renault and earlier at Michelin who became known as “le cost killer” in France for his slashing of as many as 25,000 jobs on the way to fame. As I wrote in my 2008 book Covering for the Bosses, Ghosn reminds one of erstwhile corporate hero Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom before his downfall. The Mississippi press welcomed Ghosn with gushing praise when he announced the coming of the giant Nissan plant in Canton back in 2000 (at an initial cost of $363 million to the nation’s poorest state).

I didn’t know how prophetic these words were until Ghosn’s arrest in Japan last November amid allegations he had been skimming off company earnings for his own gain and understating his own earnings. He has been held in detention in Japan ever since his arrest, stripped of his titles at Nissan and Renault and fired, and most recently accused of receiving “improper payments of as much as $8.9 million from a joint Nissan-Mitsubishi venture. He also allegedly used Nissan funds to make $14.7 million in payments to Khaled al-Juffali for the Saudi businessman’s help in getting a letter of credit to offset Ghosn’s investment losses. Ghosn says he’s innocent.

A decade ago, Ghosn, now 64, was earning an estimated $4 million a year, a sum that does not include stock options and other income sources. He could spend a decade in prison in found guilty on the charges he’s facing.

Labor South readers recall how Ghosn bitterly fought unionization at Nissan’s plant in Smyrna, Tennessee, essentially threatening workers with their jobs and future if they voted pro-union, how he earlier helped keep the classic labor documentary Uprising of ’34 out of a classroom at Spartanburg Technical College in South Carolina in 1995. The documentary dealt with the brutal killing of seven striking textile workers in Honea Path, South Carolina, in 1934.

And, of course, Ghosn told French officials in 2016 he and Nissan were not standing in the way of unionization efforts at the Canton, Mississippi, plant even as managers there threatened and intimidated workers.

Ghosn succeeded in keeping the unions out of his plants in the South, but he was not so successful in keeping himself out of jail.

Oh, and by the way, Nissan recently announced it was slashing 700 contract workers from its workforce at Canton due to sluggish sales. So the Ghosn spirit lives on even if the man himself is in jail.

Happy birthday, Stanley Aronowitz, lion of labor intellectuals and activists, plus a few comments about the U.S. health care system

(Stanley Aronowitz in 2007. Photo by David Shankbone)

Stanley Aronowitz, a lion of labor intellectuals who spent years on the front lines as a factory worker and labor organizer before entering academia, celebrated his 86^th birthday this week. It’s an event that all who seek betterment in the lives of working people should mark. Perhaps no other labor writer/activist in this country has contributed more to the understanding of our own labor history, how we got to where we are, and where we need to go to revitalize the movement.

Born and bred in New York City, Aronowitz has written eloquently about the need to organize the U.S. South. Calling the region “labor’s Achilles heel,” Aronowitz wrote in his compelling foreword to my 2008 book Covering for the Bosses: Labor and the Southern Press, that “the South has become, in essence, another country. … Anti-unionism in the South is preserved and protected by measures that resemble the actions of antidemocratic governments in Asia and Latin America more than the ideal that America is the land of a free people. The struggle for Southern labor is perhaps the greatest struggle for democracy in the land.”

In the 2008 Manifesto for a Left Turn: An Open Letter to U.S. Radicals, Aronowitz and a group of leftist writers offered a plea for a workers’ party that finally will end the largely one-sided allegiance labor has given the Democratic Party and become truly a force for workers’ rights. In a detailed, step-by-step outline describing how labor can once again become a social movement, the manifesto calls for a committed radical media that will help encourage a deepened sense of class solidarity, one that dispenses with all the distracting “middle class” mumbo-jumbo politicians and neo-liberalism-embracing “liberals” use to distract us.

As detailed by Aronowitz’s daughter, writer Nona Willis Aronowitz, in her New York Times op-ed piece in December, this lion of labor activists and intellectuals has suffered health problems since having a stroke a few years ago and even with a decent pension has experienced financial strain like many older Americans because of this country’s broken health care system. Her sister, fighting breast cancer, has faced a similar struggle.

Even as a respected and honored intellectual, philosopher, and author of many books, Stanley Aronowitz has always stood with the working class, and their fight has always been his fight.

Speaking of our health care system ...

I’ve had my own experience with this broken system with the recent injury of my stepson in a serious truck accident in Little Rock, Arkansas. Having started a new job just a couple months before with still a few days before his health insurance kicked in, Andy soon found himself not only in a hospital with serious leg and hip injuries but also without a job and then without insurance to pay for his care. His company let him go nine days after the accident. Shortly thereafter, his scheduled departure from the hospital got expedited from weeks to days to one day.

He’s now on Medicaid and staying with his mother and me in Oxford, Mississippi, as he recuperates. The latest struggle is to find him a primary care physician, and so far it’s not easy.

Phil Ochs wanted Mississippi to "find another country to be part of." Now it's the very heart of America

(Phil Ochs in the 1960s)

OXFORD, Miss. – Way back in 1964, the year of “Freedom Summer” and the disappearance and death of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, the “singing journalist” Phil Ochs offered this elegy:

 “Here’s to the land you’ve torn out the heart of

  Mississippi, find yourself another country to be part of”

More recently an anonymous writer who calls himself the “Socialist Wizard” composed and published a new version of Ochs’ classic with President Trump taking Mississippi’s place. In the song, the singer asks that the president find “another country to be part of”—another sign perhaps of what writer Peter Applebome has called “the Americanization of Dixie.”

As 2018 draws to a close, and 2019 looms ahead, Mississippi, as extreme as it has always seemed to many Americans, is indeed a microcosm of the nation. In the 2018 election, Mike Espy, a black Mississippian with impressive credentials as a former congressman and U.S. secretary of agriculture, came closer than any Democrat since 1982 to winning, garnering 46 percent of the vote in a racially divided state.

Still, he lost to Trump devotee Cindy Hyde-Smith, who made her president, gun rights and the evils of abortion and illegal immigration the most important election issues to her white supporters in the nation’s poorest state. No matter that Mississippi already has the nation’s most restrictive laws on abortion, or that illegal immigration is at a 12-year low.

Espy, hardly a wild-eyed radical as a former supporter of Republican Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and card-carrying member of the National Rifle Association, campaigned largely on the need to do something about the state’s (and nation’s) deteriorating health care system.

Nationally, the Democrats took over the U.S. House of Representatives in the elections, but they lost ground in the U.S. Senate, where Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has already indicated he’s once again going after Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid along with the complete dismantling of the Affordable Care Act. The pretext for a renewed assault on Social Security and other popular safety net programs? The U.S. budget deficit, of course! Never mind that McConnell and his fellow Republicans deeply worsened that deficit with the gigantic 2017 tax cut they bestowed on the nation’s richest (and most solidly Republican voting) citizens.

With Democrats in charge of the U.S. House, new momentum in the longstanding investigation into Russian meddling in U.S. political affairs can be expected. Looking beyond just the 2016 election and Trump’s White House, let’s hope investigators will give close scrutiny to K Street lobbyists such as former U.S. senator from Mississippi Trent Lott, who gave up his office to join with his buddy and former Democratic U.S. senator from Louisiana, John Breaux, to form a powerful lobbying team in 2008. Lott and Breaux were principal lobbyists for Gazprombank, a subsidiary of Russia’s biggest natural gas supplier, in 2014, according to journalist Craig Unger’s new book House of Trump, House of Putin.   

Unger goes on to write that Haley Barbour’s lobby firm, Barbour Griffith & Rogers, has been the beneficiary of $2 million in payments from the Russian conglomerate Alfa. These are all part of a wide-ranging network of Russia’s big money influence in Washington, D.C.

These days Trump is rattling his saber at General Motors for the firm’s recent announcement that it was shutting down five plants, four of them in the United States, and cutting 14,000 jobs, all in the wake of Trump’s self-ballyhooed deal to replace NAFTA with a  new, worker-friendly trade deal.

Just days before GM’s announcement, Nissan chairman Carlos Ghosn was arrested and soon to be fired in connection with allegations he had dipped into company coffers for his own further enrichment and at the same time underreported his earnings at the company.

Yes, this is the same Carlos Ghosn who bitterly fought workers’ efforts to organize at his plants in Mississippi and Tennessee and who was welcomed in Mississippi as a corporate hero for bringing Nissan’s giant plant to Canton.

Phil Ochs, what would you say to this turn of events? Mississippi, no need to find another country to be part of. You’re very much the heart of this one.

A version of this column will appear as my last regular monthly column for the Jackson Free Press, although I hope still to appear in those pages from time to time. My Labor South blog continues, of course, and I hope to be able to devote more time to it and make it stronger than ever. I’ve been writing a regular column for Mississippi newspapers for 35 years, the last six at the Jackson Free Press, but book writing, teaching and other duties have made it difficult to continue. The column has been a great ride, but I’ll be still firing away in this blog and elsewhere! Best wishes to all for a wonderful Christmas and Happy New Year!

Jazz guitarist Calvin Newborn jumped and flew while his pianist brother Phineas Jr. quietly pondered, and both created magic. A Memphis jazz dynasty comes to an end.

The best thing about Beale Street in Memphis some years back was at the King’s Palace where the great jazz guitarist Calvin Newborn played regularly. He was with organist Charlie Wood’s small band at the time, and he was the highlight with his wry smile and long, mellow, perfect riffs.

Long after Calvin left his native Memphis and moved to Florida, I found a copy of his CD New Born at Shangri-La Records on Madison Avenue. For the next few months, I rarely drove in, around, into or out of Calvin’s city without having “The Streetwalker’s Stroll” or “Spirit Trane/Omnifarious” playing on my car’s CD player. Both tunes had an urban vibe that matched the scenery around me, a uniquely Memphis urban vibe that’s never too far from the same rich Delta soil that has forever fed the city musically.

Calvin died this week at the age of 85 at his home in Jacksonville, Florida. With his passing goes a Memphis jazz dynasty that included his father, bandleader Phineas Newborn Sr., and his brother Phineas Jr., whom jazz critic Leonard Feather once called “the greatest living jazz pianist.”

(To the right, Phineas Newborn Jr.)

Even in death, Calvin remained somewhat in the shadow of his more famous brother. Phineas Jr., whose troubled story was beautifully told in Memphis-based writer Stanley Booth’s classic 2000 book Rythm Oil: A Journey Through the Music of the American South, suffered mental problems his entire life—he had his first nervous breakdown before he turned 30—yet produced music of such surpassing beauty and genius that Count Basie and another Memphis jazz great, bandleader Jimmie Lunceford, became two of his biggest champions. Phineas Jr. and Charles Mingus joined to do the soundtrack for John Cassavetes’ 1959 film Shadows.

Among my vinyl treasures is a copy of Phineas Jr.’s album Solo Piano with its cover depicting the pianist as the Sphinx he truly was in life.

Calvin and Phineas grew up in the working class Orange Mound neighborhood in south Memphis, where “on nearly every block, there’s a reputed crack den covered in gang graffiti, or a few stray bullet holes from a recent drive by shooting,” writes Andria Lisle in the liner notes to New Born. “In the summer time, the kids play outside, but not too far from their own doorsteps.”

Their father was a famous bandleader who would hang out with traveling musician friends like Count Basie and Jimmie Lunceford when they came through town. When the boys got old enough, they’d play in their father’s band at Plantation Inn in West Memphis, where whites went to party at night. Then they’d cross the river back into Memphis and go to Mitchell’s on Beale Street, where they’d jam into the early morning.

Phineas Jr. was a year older than Calvin, and the two boys were as different as night and day in many ways. Phineas Jr. was quiet, cerebral, withdrawn, all he wanted to do was sit at the piano and play, play, play. Calvin was like his grandfather, who played electric guitar at the Church of God in Christ and jumped around the altar shouting the glory of God to the hand-clapping, foot-stomping congregation. Memphis writer Robert Gordon tells the story through the eyes of the boys’ mother, Mama Rose, in his recent book Memphis Rent Party.

“That’s why Calvin’s got to move,” she said about her youngest son, who never knew his grandfather. “It was just in ‘em both to move! And it was in their daddy and me, too. I used to dance and play the piano, played organ at church. Just music lovers.”

Calvin was the extrovert all right, full of antics and jumping high on stage. “I was about six feet in the air, playing the guitar” he told Robert Gordon.

Phineas Jr. just sat at his piano, the Sphinx weaving beautiful melodies or bebop magic with his gliding, sliding, jumping fingers, letting those fingers do the acting up.

By the time I got to Memphis and saw Calvin, he had slowed down a bit, no longer jumping six feet high, calm in his chair, watching his fingers glide and slide up and down the neck of his guitar. Still, he’d glance up at the audience from time to time, a little grin on his face, a glint in his eye that told you he was still his own man, and he still might jump if he had a mind to.