A trail of broken promises, a U.S.-backed coup, and war-mongering politicians and weapons manufacturers contributed to the current crisis on Ukraine's border

 

 

(Pro-Russian protesters in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk in 2014. Photo by Andrew Butko)

 

NATO and the United States assured Russia in 1990 that the organization did not seek military expansion into the former East Germany or in any way that would threaten Russia. Today, NATO includes Poland, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, the last two sharing a border with Russia.

 

Over the past eight years, the United States alone has sent an estimated $2 billion worth of military aid to Ukraine. President Biden is now sending more U.S. troops into Eastern Europe as tensions rise over Russia’s military buildup on the Ukraine border.

 

The CEOs of the weapons companies Raytheon and Lockheed Martin are telling investors that the Ukrainian standoff means more profits for their companies.

 

A U.S.-backed coup in 2014 ousted pro-Russian Ukrainian President Yanukovich and and replaced him with a pro-Western president. The coup featured a mob attack on the nation’s parliament much like what happened in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021. Neo-Nazis were prominent in the coup, and they still have a presence in the current Ukrainian military.

 

It was the 2014 coup that set the stage for Russia’s annexation of Crimea and behind-the-scenes backing of pro-Russian secessionists in Luhansk and Donetsk in eastern Ukraine. Russia's Vladimir Putin wants assurances that Ukraine will not become part of NATO.

 

Joe Biden has had his hands in Ukrainian affairs for a long time. He was Barack Obama’s go-to-guy on Ukraine during Obama’s presidency. That likely is why Biden’s son Hunter got such a lucrative deal earning $1 million a year as a board member of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma. Burisma cut Hunter Biden’s wages in half after his dad left the vice presidency.

 

Biden and both Democrats and Republicans in Congress are waving their bloody swords over the Russian troop buildup on the Ukrainian border, but how did their predecessors feel when the old Soviet Union wanted to put missiles on Cuban soil back in 1962?

 

The current situation comes after a long series of broken promises, including Ukraine’s own promises to grant greater autonomy to Luhansk and Donetsk in the now-ignored Minsk-Normandy agreement in 2015.

 

Russia has a sordid past in its relations with the Ukraine, and this column isn’t trying to claim Vladimir Putin is some kind of hero. He’s not. However, the people of the United States are sick and tired of the perpetual war that the Pentagon, its buddies Raytheon and Lockheed, and warmongers in the Congress seem to want.

 

They were lied to by Lyndon Johnson about attacks against the United States in the Gulf of Tonkin to justify the Vietnam War in the 1960s. They were lied to by the Bush Administration about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to justify the U.S. invasion of that country.

 

The American people are as sick of lies as they are of war, and all the smiles on the faces of the Raytheon and Lockheed bosses, the saber rattling of their buddies in Congress and the White House, and the sycophantic coverage of the corporate media are not going to change that fact.

Starbucks and No Evil Foods bosses want to be hip and cool, but their behavior is more like Mr. Potter in "It's a Wonderful Life"

 

 

(Lionel Barrymore as the banker Henry F. Potter in the 1946 film It's a Wonderful Life)
 

Isn’t it interesting when “hip companies”-- like Starbucks and No Evil Foods in Asheville, North Carolina—face the prospect of unionization they begin to look more like old anti-union troglodyte Walmart than City Lights Bookstore?

 

The pro-union fuse that was lit among Starbucks workers in Buffalo, New York, recently has turned into a wildfire that’s spreading as far south as Knoxville, Tennessee, and Tallahassee, Florida, and as far west as Denver, Colorado. Union organizing is taking place at as many as 15 stores across the country.

 

Led by Labor South publisher Joe Atkins’ former student Jaz Brisack, Starbucks workers at one Buffalo shop voted union in December. Soon afterward, a pro-union election was announced at another Starbucks in the city.  In early January, workers at one of the shops showed their new unity by walking off their jobs to protest the company’s lack of safety measures amid a COVID-19 surge in cases in the area.

 

Based in Seattle, Washington, Starbucks is a nationwide company—230,000 workers at upwards of 9,000 coffee shops—that prides itself on being a hip, swinging outfit as cool as its tasty coffee latte is hot. That’s its brand—cool and hip. Young staffers who are progressive “about climate change, fighting racism and (for) labor rights” and whose hero is Bernie Sanders are “the kinds of people the company has hired over the years to reinforce its progressive branding,” Noam Sheiber wrote in the New York Times this month.

 

Yet, the company definitely didn’t want a union in its midst. Like so many companies in today’s capitalism, it prefers to call its workers “partners”—hmmmm—and feels they don’t need a union to protect their rights. The company sent out officials and managers to one shop facing an election to observe and discuss unionization with the workers, an effort seen as threatening by some of the workers.

 

Pay and pensions are comparatively good at Starbucks. However, the union sympathizing baristas want “more input at work,” Sheiber wrote.

 

 Compare the experience at Starbucks with that of the workers at No Evil Foods in Asheville, North Carolina. Labor South wrote about this very hip and cool vegan food company back in April 2020. This was a company with a leftist schtick, offering vegan meat products like Comrade Cluck and the chorizo-like El Zapatista. The owners called themselves “revolutionary leaders”.

 

When workers tried to unionize, No Evil Foods’ response was to hire the union-busting law firm of Constangy, Brooks, Smith and Prophete. That’s the kind of thing you’d expect from Walmart or that other old troglodyte of the past, J. P. Stevens, not from an outfit that sells El Zapatistas!

 

The union lost the vote, but workers did finally get the company to agree to give them “hazard pay” during the pandemic. The workers considered that a victory.

 

Sadly, No Evil Foods abruptly fired all of its Asheville workers in June 2021 after agreeing to partner with another company to stave off sharply declining revenues. Workers lost their pensions as well as their jobs.

 

“They preached all this stuff, but then when it came down to it … they were very, very cutthroat,” worker Mike Rapier to the Huffington Post.

 

Whether they’re in Silicon Valley or an old mill town in the Carolinas, companies in today’s world of capitalism aren’t that much different from the old top-down companies of the past. The bosses cling to their power like Old Man Potter in It’s A Wonderful Life, and they’ll be damned if they're going to allow some pesky union to muscle in.

 

Good things can come out of bad things. A good thing coming out of this pandemic is a growing consciousness among workers across the nation (and maybe the world) of their rights and of their need to band together to speak with a united voice that demands to be heard. That's what's really cool, and more power to them!

Saint Nick, that jolly old elf, the antithesis of greed, said some prayers for workers in 2021

 (To the right, German immigrant artist Thomas Nast's depiction of Saint Nick in 1881.)

 

Old Saint Nick is not only alive and well in the hearts and minds of countless children as Christmas approaches but maybe many of the rest of us, too. He’s surely been saying some prayers for working people.

 

The jolly old elf is a counter-cultural hero in these modern times.  Fat and bearded with a red nose that attests to a real appreciation of spirits and food, he’s religious, loves his pipe, and doesn’t mind smudging his shiny red suit with chimney soot if it means bringing smiles to the faces of his most devoted followers. He’s the antithesis of greed, the very soul of helping and thinking of others, not himself.

 

We’ve almost forgotten his roots as a 4^th century bishop and monk from what is today Turkey. During his life, he was devoted to the poor and became famous for providing dowries for three sisters of a poor Christian family who faced a life of prostitution without his help. He’s the patron saint of bakers, pawnbrokers, archers, sailors, and, of course, children. Wherever he goes, he reminds us to be considerate of those in need and thankful for our blessings even in hard times.

 

As 2021 comes to an end, another year in the grip of the deadly Coronavirus and one of sharpening political and economic divisions that seem to threaten not only the nation but also the world, regular working folks can look to some milestones that give encouragement for the year ahead.

 

Kellogg workers in Memphis and other cities ended their 77-day strike with a contract that got them cost-of-living raises and provisions to improve conditions for lower-tier workers. The 1,400 members of the Bakery (Thank you, Saint Nick, for those prayers!), Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM) braved the cold weather and union-busting management to stand up for their rights and to proclaim their solidarity with all workers, whether rookie or veteran.

 

My former student, Jaz Brisack, was in the middle of another union fight way up north in Buffalo, New York, where workers at her Starbucks location voted for union representation, a first for the giant company. She was even featured in nationally televised reports about the historic victory. Jaz took seven courses that I taught at the University of Mississippi and went on to become a Rhodes Scholar and earn a master’s degree at Oxford University.

 

Workers across the land in 2021 showed new muscle as employers complained about labor shortages and blamed COVID-related government checks. “Help wanted” signs appeared on the front doors of many businesses. One benefit of the pandemic has been a new awareness of worker rights, a demand for better wages and working conditions, and the benefits of a real home and family life away from the workplace. Strikes, walkouts, and protests have been the proof of that new awareness.

 

Far to the south in Chile, the country where the CIA helped engineer a right-wing coup back in the 1970s that sunk it into the brutal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, voters elected this week progressive presidential candidate Gabriel Boric with a 56 percent majority. Only 36, Boric gained fame a decade ago as a student protester. He’s a supporter of women’s rights and gives hope to the nation’s long-ignored poor.

 

Of course, it’s not all roses in the land as 2022 approaches. Mainstream U.S. media continue to ignore the dismal treatment of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange even as they decry anti-press actions in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. U.S. Senator Joe Manchin threatens to destroy the Biden presidency to keep his corporate financiers happy.  Donald Trump continues to cast a dark and threatening shadow across the nation’s political future.

 

Old Saint Nick knew hard times himself. During his life, he suffered during the rule of Roman emperor Diocletian. What’s important, however, is to remember that the message he sends us is not only one of thanksgiving but also hope.

 

Oxford, Mississippi, a literary town where--from Stark Young & William Faulkner to Barry Hannah & Willie Morris to Tom Franklin, Ace Atkins, Mary Miller & William Boyle--the creative well never runs dry

(William Faulkner, photo by Carl Van Vechten in 1954)
 

 As I did once recently on the subject of labor, I was asked by the Reverend Gail Tapscott to join a panel discussion on Oxford, Mississippi, and its literary tradition today (November 28, 2021) for the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Oxford. I joined my friend Kaye Bryant, who told of meeting William Faulkner as a young girl and hearing his ghost tales. Below are some of my prepared remarks for today's service: 

Many people think it all began with Faulkner, this identification of Oxford, Mississippi, as a literary town. That’s not true. I’d say it began with drama critic, playwright, and novelist Stark Young, whose home still stands on Oxford’s University Boulevard, next door to William Faulkner’s novelist brother John’s home.

 

By the time William Faulkner started writing fiction seriously in 1925, Stark Young was already a well-known theater critic and the author of The Flower in Drama: A Book of Papers on the Theater (1923). He would also gain renown as a novelist. Ellen Glasgow said of his 1934 novel So Red The Rose: “There has never been a novel of the South … that can compare with it.”  Born in Como, Mississippi, Young graduated from the University of Mississippi in 1901 and taught there from 1905 to 1907. He became drama critic at the New York Times and the New Republic magazine. Young was one of the Nashville-based Southern Agrarians, which also included Robert Penn Warren and other poets and writers who yearned for a non-industrial South that held true to its better values of the past.

(To the right, Stark Young)

 

Faulkner’s brother John deserves mention here. Always in the shadow of his more famous brother, he wrote novels such as Men Working (1941) and Dollar Cotton (1942).

 

Of courses, there’s Faulkner himself, the Nobel Prize winner, the creator of the Yoknapatawpha series. My late friend Jere Hoar, a widely published short story writer and author of the classic hardboiled novel The Hit (2002), was one of the last living links to Faulkner before he recently died. He attended the wedding of Faulkner’s daughter at the writer’s fabled home, Rowan Oak, and was close enough to the family to have been asked to drive to Chicago to pick up Faulkner at the airport and drive him back to Oxford. Unsure of his navigational skills, Jere declined, a decision he regretted the rest of his life.

 

Another important Faulkner link in Oxford today is writer and publisher Larry Wells, whose late wife Dean Faulkner Wells was the great writer’s niece and grew up in Rowan Oak after her father, Faulkner’s brother, died in an airplane crash. I loved listening to her many tales of “Pappy” as she was growing up.

 

New York Times bestselling writer Ace Atkins (no relation but a kindred spirit!) and I would gather at Jere’s farmhouse off what is now called “Faulkner Highway) every month or so and talk about books, writing, and film over glasses of bourbon and platefuls of fried chicken. I miss those days. Jere would regale us with tales of his writer friends like Jim Harrison and another Oxford writer, Barry Hannah. Barry loved guns and often came over to target shoot on Jere’s many acres. Barry’s own short stories were always razor edged, even poison tipped, a shot to the heart. Like this line from his story “Ride, Fly, Penetrate, Loiter”: “You may see me with the eye-patch. In almost any city of the South, the Far West, or the Northwest. I am on the black and chrome Triumph, riding right into your face.”

 

(Barry Hannah, from the back cover of his 1985 collection of stories, Captain Maximus)

 

Another is, and I’ll paraphrase: “See that beautiful blonde sitting over there. Somewhere there’s a guy who’s glad as hell she’s no longer in his life.” 

 

Jere’s home was a step into Faulkner land. The walls were covered with paintings of prized bulls, horses, and dogs. He loved to hunt and kept horses till his dying day.

 

I first met Barry Hannah as a political reporter in the early 1980s. I came to Oxford to cover a political fundraiser at the old Downtown Grill (now called Boure's), and there was Barry deep in his cups on one side of the room, and fellow Oxonian Willie Morris on the other. Both holding court, neither particularly interested in talking to one another. A rivalry of sorts existed between the two very different writers. Morris was journalist-in-residence at the University of Mississippi for many years. His books North Toward Home and Terrains of the Heart are personal favorites.

 

In Terrains of the Heart, he waxes nostalgic about the bar at the old Holiday Inn near the Oxford town square, arguably, he said, the best Holiday Inn bar in the country. I once wrote a column on the locally famous bartender there, Clyde Goolsby.

 

(To the right, Willie Morris on the University of Mississippi campus)

 

I met Willie several times and once interviewed him on the phone. I’ll never forget his visit to Oxford to help commemorate the Faulkner statue by the City Hall. The historian Shelby Foote was there, too, and I remember remarking what two classic Southern faces on that small stage.

 

One of my prized possessions is a signed copy of Larry Brown’s collection of short stories, Facing the Music (1988) (another is a signed copy of Eudora Welty’s collected works. I met her once when I was working as a reporter in Jackson). A local firefighter before he became a nationally known writer, Brown wrote tough, gritty stories about the people in the rural environs around Oxford. I never actually met him, but I saw him sometimes at a favorite watering hole, the City Grocery bar, and walking—or should I say staggering—along the Square at night.

 

Soon after I first moved my little family to Oxford in 1990, I took my late wife Marilyn and two small children, 7-year-old Rachel and 6-year-old Michael, to a reading by Larry Brown at one of the courthouses on the Square. Brown’s writing could be full of expletives and raw scenes, and so was his reading. I began to squirm as I realized my two were the only children in the room, and they were getting an earful, or so I thought. Near the very end of Brown’s reading, he said something like “hell” or “damn”, and Rachel turned to me and said, “Daddy, he just said a bad word!” Apparently she hadn’t been paying much attention during the reading!

 

Oxford today is still chock-full of top-notch writers. My gosh, too many to even name. There’s Mary Miller, a Grisham Writer-in-Residence whose short play “A Young Ghost” I was pleased to direct for an Oxford Theatre production last year. Noted short story writer and screenwriter Chris Offutt writes and teaches here. William Boyle’s 2013 novel Gravesend is one of the best I’ve read in the past decade or more. He works at a local vinyl store when he’s not in New York City or somewhere in France being touted as one of the best young writers on the scene.

 

My buddy Ace Atkins has written dozens of novels and generally enjoys a commanding presence on the New York Times bestselling lists. Another top writer is novelist Tom Franklin, and his wife, Beth Ann Fennelly, is a major poet who served as Mississippi’s poet laureate.  Legendary journalist Curtis Wilkie lives here. Ralph Eubanks writes and teaches here. Lisa Howorth’s novels have gotten much attention. Jack Pendarvis lives and writes here. Many others have come through, lived for a while, and moved on, including Richard Ford, Megan Abbott, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, and, of course, John Grisham, whose commanding home on a hill just outside of town provides shelter to the Grisham Writers-in-Residence.

 

This is a literary town. It’s in its life’s blood. The well is deep, and I don’t think it will ever run dry.

 

 

Is the U.S. South a different nation? A Journey into Deep, Dark Dixie

 

(Highway 49 in the Mississippi Delta)

 

The journey was something out of an Eric Ambler or Graham Greene novel. It was roughly 20 years ago, and I was on a train from Krakow, Poland, to Bratislava, Slovakia. My mission was to meet with journalist Pavol Mudry to hear his tales of dealing with Slovakian strongman Vladimir Meciar, who had done his best to destroy Mudry’s Slovak News Agency (SITA).

 

I had left sunny Krakow, where black-robed priests walk the ancient streets of the Stare Miasto, the city’s Old Town, and where steel workers at the giant Nowa Huta factory joined with shipyard workers in Gdansk to create Solidarity and bring down the brutal communist regime and breathe political freedom back into Poland.

 

I traveled through the night to a darker place than Poland, one where the threatening shadows of post-communist demagogues like Meciar still loomed over the land. I didn’t speak Polish but I did know a little Russian. When I tried to speak it, people just stared at me coldly. My good Polish friend Ala Kopycka from Lodz later told me, “Joe, don’t speak Russian in Poland.”

 

Late in the night, the train stopped at some remote station, and a peasant woman carrying a huge sack of potatoes came into my train car and sat across from me. She had a broad, pleasant face and began talking to me in Polish as if I were a native. I simply smiled, nodded, and acted as if I knew what she was talking about.

 

Pavol met me at the station in Bratislava and became my tour guide through the city, where what were likely Meciar goons had broken into SITA headquarters and stolen its computers and other equipment. The police never investigated.

 

I thought about my Slavic adventure recently after reading a couple recent articles about my native South, itself an exotic outpost in the USA where political demagoguery and authoritarian impulses have made it at times practically a nation on its own, yet one with a profound impact on the rest of the country.

 

I’ll never forget reading years ago Sally Belfrage’s 1965 book Freedom Summer, her account of traveling to Mississippi along with other idealistic young people who’d trained in Ohio and come south to register black voters and fight racial segregation in 1964.

 

“(We) were behaving as warily as a band of illegally documented refugees on the Orient Express approaching a forbidden Balkan border. The night seemed peaceful enough, but the change from light to dark was becoming substantive, and everything ahead was dark. SOUTH! … Flat, endless Delta land of cotton, straight two-laned road, monotony, with only an occasional shack to interrupt a landscape that was a visual forever. … At a crossroads, pointers to towns named Savage, Coldwater, Alligator. The heat was still and dazzling … a weird silence, which seemed to spread outward without an end.

 

"The country was foreign, resembling Spain or Syria or anywhere where heat and poverty combine to overwhelm attempts at the streamlined."

 

Mississippi and the rest of the South might seem much less threatening today, but a difference remains, certainly in the eyes of Maine-based writer Wayne O’Leary.

 

The sharp divides that have split the nation go far beyond urban-rural differences, O’Leary wrote recently in the Texas-based Progressive Populist. “The split is between the South, the states of the old Confederacy (along with some border states), and the rest of the country. It’s a division that’s been there since the Civil War ended in 1865, but lately it’s become an ever-widening chasm impossible to bridge except with the utmost difficulty. Differing values and beliefs that have coexisted uneasily well over a century have become seemingly irreconcilable under the psychic pressure of the Trump years and can’t be smoothed over.”

 

 A once Solid South for the Democratic Party is now solidly Republican. Fundamental Christians, anti-vaccers, union busters, and Trumpsters rule the land. “Donald Trump … appeals to something deep in the Southern psyche,” O’Leary writes, and the South “threatens to drag down the rest of the country in the process of acting out its bizarre conception of `freedom.’” Freedom, for these Southerners, means no COVID-19 vaccine mandate and free-range to Republican legislators who want to suppress voting by minorities and others who might threaten their rule.

 

Legislators in some non-Southern states like Wisconsin and Ohio are pushing bills that would re-open the doors to child labor to offset the current pandemic-spawned labor shortage, an idea bound to resonate in the South where children once slaved at textile mills across the region.

 

Still, Mississippi AFL-CIO President Robert Shaffer “dreams of another Operation Dixie to produce a new generation of believers” in labor unions and progressive legislation, according to a recent article on Southern labor by Hamilton Nolan in In  These Times.  Operation Dixie was a massive labor organizing campaign in the South in the late 1940s and early 1950s that largely failed.

 

 Only problem is, Shaffer said, “I don’t got the power to do that shit.” Major union losses at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama, site and at the Nissan plant in Canton, Mississippi, brought home that fact.

 

Yet Southern workers clearly want a better South than the one they have now. The best way to achieve that end is through an organized workforce. Miners have gone on strike in Brookwood, Alabama. Other workers have struck in Memphis and Paris, Tennessee, Louisville and Dry Ridge, Kentucky. Nolan writes that “not a single person I met in Mississippi thought workers there could not be organized. Again and again, those on the front lines said with absolute certainty that labor organizing in their state—where workers are intimately familiar with racism, poverty and political hostility—is an opportunity just waiting to happen.”

 

Hope springs eternal. Even in the Deep, Dark South.

 

 

Labor South Roundup: Loss of good friend and writer/teacher Jere Hoar; plus a look at how the state of Mississippi enriches its famous friends with federal welfare dollars

 

Labor South Roundup: Loss of a good friend and fine writer/teacher; plus a look at how Mississippi spends federal welfare money.

 

(Yours truly to the left, famed journalist Curtis Wilkie in the center, and Jere Hoar to the right)
 

I lost my good friend Jere Hoar recently, a legendary professor here at the University of Mississippi, a fine writer whose 2002 novel The Hit should be a hardboiled noir classic, and wonderful raconteur.

 

He was 91, a long life, and he was one of the last here in Oxford, Mississippi, who personally knew the novelist William Faulkner and his family. To go to Jere’s rambling farm home just off what is now called “Faulkner Highway” was a trip to that fabled past with his horses, his dogs, his hunting grounds, and his stacks of books and magazines everywhere, and his arsenal of guns! The walls of his living room were filled with original paintings of prized horses and bulls and dogs, signs of a love of the outdoors that endeared him to good friends like the noted writer Jim Harrison.

 

"I think I was happiest in the classroom teaching, in meadows and tamed woods hunting quail, and taking care (with my herding dog) of our flock of sheep," Jere once wrote in a Christmas card to my wife Suzanne and me. He taught journalism at the University of Mississippi for many years. On the card was a flock of sheep in the snow. 

 

Here in the photos you see him with me and his Nawlins-born-and-bred scientist/writer buddy Ron Borne on an Oxford street, and another with the legendary journalist Curtis Wilkie, who lives in Oxford, for a joint writers outing at a restaurant in the tiny town of Taylor near Oxford.

(To the right, yours truly, Ron Borne, and Jere Hoar on an Oxford, Mississippi, street)

 

Our good buddy and New York Times bestselling novelist Ace Atkins should be here among these photos but I couldn’t find one. The three of us were too busy in our regular gatherings at Jere’s house talking books, movies, and writing over glasses of Jack Daniels and plates of fried chicken to take photos!

 

Jere wrote an unforgettable blurb for my 2015 novel Casey’s Last Chance that might have served one of his own books well, whether The Hit or his 1997 collection of short stories Body Parts. “The sense of place … is palpable. The author knows the long dark stretches of blacktop between dim lights on Mississippi secondary roads, the dangerous sections abruptly encountered in our few cities, the little towns with photographs in filling station windows of mere boys and handwritten signs that say STOP THE KILLING.”

 

I feel sure that blurb alone sold more than a few books.

 

Jere once told me, “When you get old, you don’t regret what you did, you regret what you didn’t do.” One of Jere’s regrets came in the late ‘50s or early ‘60s when the Faulkner family asked then-young Jere to drive to Chicago (I believe that was the city) to pick up the Nobel Prize-winning author at the airport and drive him back to Mississippi. Jere’s uncertainty about navigating that long trip made him decline the request. He told me that story so many times I’m sure it was a decision he never quite forgave himself for.

 

Regrets are a part of life, and they’re mixed in with a myriad of other memories that bring us comfort, pride, happiness, a smile to our faces. Jere gave me a lot of those kinds of memories that I’ll never forget.

 

How Mississippi spends its federal welfare dollars

 

The state of Mississippi, perennially among the poorest in the station with an entrenched poverty that generations of conservative political leaders have done little or nothing to alleviate, has demanded that native son and football great Brett Favre refund some $828,000 in federal welfare funds that the state awarded him to make speeches and participate in a family-stabilizing” initiative. Favre says he already returned $500,000 of the $1.1 million that was granted him.

 

Problem was, as reported in Mississippi Today, Favre never even attended speaking engagements where he was scheduled to speak. For months, officials knew of the discrepancy but did nothing until State Auditor Shad White recently stepped up to the plate and made the demand.

 

Favre is one of 15 individuals and organizations to get letters from White’s office insisting on repayment of some $77 million in federal welfare funds doled out to them during the administration of former Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant, a conservative Republican. Bryant was probably more than happy to award federal welfare grants to a Hall of Famer like Favre or retired WWE wrestler Ted DiBiase Jr., who owes $3.9 million. DiBiase’s dad, also a former WWE wrestler, owns $722,299.

 

Family member Brett DiBiase has already pleaded guilty to an alleged welfare scam and owes $225,950, according to Mississippi Today.

 

The Marcus Dupree Foundation, named after another football great and Mississippi native, owes $789,534.

 

Former Mississippi Department of Human Services Director John Davis authorized the $77 million handout and himself owes a whopping $96 million-plus! He faces embezzlement charges. Appointed to his post in 2016, Davis took his orders from Governor Bryant, but nobody is pointing a finger at Bryant—yet.

 

Most of these funds came through the so-called Mississippi Community Education Center, the owners of which also face huge multi-million-dollar refund payments.

 

Workers in the South and beyond striking against the intransigence of their bosses, hedge fund owners, and even their own union leaders

 

(Memorial to the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers strike at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis)
 

 

Whether it’s the ongoing pandemic, rising frustrations within the rank-and-file of unions against not only corporate bosses but their own labor leaders, or both, workers are taking to the streets and going on strike across the country for better pay and working conditions.

 

Alabama miners strike as the company’s hedge fund owners reward execs

 

Mine workers have waged a six-month-long strike at two Warrior Met Coal mines in Brookwood, Alabama, near Tuscaloosa, as the mines’ hedge fund owners refused to restore the pay and health care cuts that were made several years ago in an effort to get the company back on sound financial ground.

 

A consortium of as many as 30 hedge funds took over the company in 2016 after its previous owner filed for bankruptcy. In classic hedge fund tradition, the new owners are insisting on up to 16-hour days and seven-days-a-week work schedules as the company enjoys new prosperity to the tune of $4 billion in revenues since the takeover. Company executives are lapping up as much as  $35,000 in bonuses as a result.

 

The company’s latest contract offer would only restore $1-an-hour of the $6 pay cut miners had accepted after the takeover.

 

“This company has prospered,” miner Dedrick Gardner told Steve Wishnia of Labor Notes. “We worked a whole year during the pandemic. The mine didn’t shut.”

 

Dana workers on one side, union and company bosses on the other

 

Wildcat strikes are taking place at the Dana Inc. auto parts company after workers in Paris, Tennessee, Louisville and Dry Ridge, Kentucky, Columbia, Missouri, and other plants across the country soundly rejected a contract offer that was negotiated by the United Auto Workers and United Steelworkers.

 

Despite low pay and 12-hour-per-day, 7-days-per-week, poor COVID-protection working conditions at Dana, union officials have thus far ignored workers’ rejection of the contract, instructing them to keep working.  The unions have okayed a number of pay-cutting concessions ever since Dana came out of bankruptcy 13 years ago.

 

Auto mechanics in Chicago defy their own strike-breaking union

 

In the spirit of the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike in 1968, one of the most famous of wildcat strikes in the country’s history, auto mechanics in the Chicago area are also on strike in defiance of their own union, the International Association of Machinists (IAM). They’re demanding higher pay for their low-tier members and better health care provisions.

 

The response from IAM leadership has been to encourage strikebreaking and isolation of the strikers. Union leaders want the workers to accept lower pay than what the strikers demand as necessary just to keep up with inflation.

 

In the 1968 strike in Memphis, Mayor Henry Loeb refused to even recognize the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) as a valid union representing the sanitation workers. The workers struck anyway, winning their work action ultimately but strike supporter Martin Luther King Jr. lost his life in the process.

 

A strike in Bourbon country

 

Over in Bourbon country, some 400 workers at Heaven Hill in Bardsdown, Kentucky, are also on strike after rejecting a contract offer by a wide margin. “During the pandemic and all that, the company has told us, we’ll remember you all during contract time,” local union leader Jerry Newton told Mike Elk of the Payday Report. “Well, contract planning is here. They have showed us no respect.”

 

Workers say their wages are significantly lower than those at other whiskey-making companies and that they’re now being asked to work weekends as well as during the week.

 

Heaven Hill makes Evan Williams and other well-known whiskeys. Whiskey sales have risen since the onset of the pandemic even as restaurants and bars have experienced declining revenues.