Do go read it all -- he is clearly right: this past week was / is concrete evidence of MAGA / GOP party wags cum governors. . . largely seeking the "good ol' days", in Dixie (which never were such, for any non-whyte, non-landed gentry, non-male. . . classes):
. . .The mere potential for union success was so threatening that the day before the vote began, several of the Southern Republican governors announced their opposition to the U.A.W. campaign. “We the governors of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas are highly concerned about the unionization campaign driven by misinformation and scare tactics that the U.A.W. has brought into our states,” their joint statement reads. “As governors, we have a responsibility to our constituents to speak up when we see special interests looking to come into our state and threaten our jobs and the values we live by.”
It is no shock to see conservative Republicans opposing organized labor. But it is difficult to observe this particular struggle, taking place as it is in the South, without being reminded of the region’s entrenched hostility to unions — or any other institution or effort that might weaken the political and economic dominance of capital over the whole of Southern society. . . .
“In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life,” Senator James Henry Hammond of South Carolina declared in an 1858 speech. “It constitutes the very mudsill of society and of political government, and you might as well attempt to build a house in the air, as to build either the one or the other, except on this mudsill.”
A decade later and the slave system was dead, crushed underfoot by the armies of emancipation. The landowning Southern elites had lost their greatest asset — a seemingly inexhaustible supply of free labor. They would never regain it, but they would fight as hard as they could to approximate it. . . .
Neither the vote in Chattanooga nor the coming vote of auto workers at the Mercedes-Benz factory near Tuscaloosa, Ala., will be dispositive for the ultimate success of the U.A.W. campaign in the South. Win or lose, this will be a long march for organized labor.
But like a gardener taking stock of her plot for the season ahead, we will have to be patient. Victory might bring the chance to refresh the soil in preparation for a new kind of New South. . . .
We will, of course, cover the upcoming Mercedes-Benz election, as well. Do breath easy, as we have our weather- eye keenly fixed on the horizon, here. And we see. . . change. . . is coming. Onward.
नमस्ते
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