Michael Lind, “Southern Poverty Pimps.”
Also: Greg Sargent, “GOP “makeover†hits a snag: Unwillingness to change”
The Mahablog
Politics. Society. Group Therapy.
Michael Lind, “Southern Poverty Pimps.”
Also: Greg Sargent, “GOP “makeover†hits a snag: Unwillingness to change”
Thanks, great article, maha.
It’s kind of what I was writing about a few months ago – only he’s betterer and smarterer!
And I never looked at the EITC in that way before.
Please, please, FSM, let them secede.
This time, we swear we won’t life a finger to stop them. We’ll just wish them a “Sei Gesund!” and a “Don’t let the door hitcha, where the Mason-Dixon line splitcha!”
And then, we’ll work on the exhange of hostages, and after that, we’ll build a nice, big, border wall.
And then, when we need to keep the kiddies in line when they’re mis-behaving, we’ll threaten to send them to DixieJesusStan to work in the cotton fields, or the Soylent Green factories.
Not only do they steal our jobs it also gives union shops up here more power to negotiate better deals from their union workforce. Mercury Marine and Harley extracted concessions from their workforce with a threat to move the operations down south. Both were making record profits. Tell me again how these people are such great American patriots.
I’m not sure how it can be done, but the counter to Southern Economics has to be to relocate union factories or expand new ones in the South – but preserve the union labor structure. Higher wages – better medical – paid holidays – paid sick leave. Put a good profitable company in the ghetto of low wages. Attitudes about organized labor will change among voters in those Southern states.
Both of those articles are so true.
My wife and I were married in Florida back in ’74, we left the very same day for Los Angeles, where I attended a trade school.
Sandy left her union job as a grocery store checker at A&P (one of only 2 union shops).
When we arrived in L.A., she went looking for a similar job through her union, and was hired at OVER TWICE the hourly rate she earned in Florida, PLUS a generous benefits package.
Fifteen years later, we returned to Florida to find that wages and benefits were still marinading in the heat and humidity.
The “prosperity theology” idea that God will bless you with money if you are a true Christian is such a distortion of what Christianity is supposed to be all about that when anyone starts talking this way I know what is inside them. I do not profess Christianity at all, but I sure do recognize worshippers of Mammon when I see them. The sharecropper and tenant farmer systems are the same. I ticked off a farmer when I pointed out that he used the welfare system to support his seasonal labor force when he wasn’t using them. I don’t think the lower level ones necessarily even realize how this is working.
Here in NC, Republicans always say we have an awful business environment, but the numbers from business groups always contradict that. We rank high EXCEPT for in studies done by “conservative” groups. Right now Governor Pope-McCrory is all glad about our bio-tech goodies, but he never mentioned that when he ran. In fact, the state’s universities that drive the research engine are Democrat-supported. So is the Research Triangle Park, which is famous for generating progress in the state. The Republicans bring nothing I can see but self-righteousness.