-------- Original Message --------
Subject: The South Carolina You Won't See on CNN
Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2008 06:12:06 -0500
From: Greg Palast <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
*The South Carolina You Won't See on CNN
South Carolina Primary Colors: Black and White?*
/by Greg Palast/
South Carolina 2000: Six hundred police in riot gear facing a few dozen
angry-as-hell workers on the docks of Charleston. In the darkness,
rocks, clubs and blood fly. The cops beat the crap out of the
protesters. Of course, it's the union men who are arrested for
conspiracy to riot. And of course, of the five men handcuffed, four are
Black. The prosecutor: a White, Bible-thumping Attorney General running
for Governor. The result: a state ripped in half - White versus Black.
South Carolina 2008: On Saturday, the Palmetto State may well choose our
President, or at least the Democrat's idea of a President. According to
CNN and the pundit-ocracy, the only question is, Will the large Black
population vote their pride (for Obama) or for "experience" (Hillary)?
In other words, the election comes down to a matter of racial vanity.
The story of the dockworkers charged with rioting in 2000 suggest
there's an awfully good reason for Black folk to vote for one of their
own. This is the chance to even the historic score in this land of
lingering Jim Crow where the Confederate Flag flew over the capital
while the longshoreman faced Southern justice.
But maybe there's more to South Carolina's story than Black and White.
Let's re-wind the tape of the 2000 battle between cops and Black men. It
was early that morning on the 19th of January when members of
International Longshoremen's Association Local 1422 "shaped up" to
unload a container ship which had just pulled into port. It was hard
work for good pay. An experienced union man could earn above $60,000 a year.
In this last hold-out of the Confederacy, it was one of the few places a
Black man could get decent pay. Or any man.
That day, the stevedoring contractor handling the unloading decided it
would hire the beggars down the dock, without experience or skills - and
without union cards - willing to work for just one-third of union scale.
That night, union workers - Black, White, Whatever - fought for their
lives and livelihoods.
At the heart of the turmoil in South Carolina in 2000 then, was not so
much Black versus White, but union versus non-union. It was a battle
between those looking for a good day's pay versus those looking for a
way not to pay it. The issue was - and is - class war, the conflict
between the movers and the shakers and the moved and shaken.
The dockworkers of Charleston could see the future of America right down
the road. Literally. Because right down the highway, they could see
their cousins and brothers who worked in the Carolina textile mills kiss
their jobs goodbye as they loaded the mill looms onto trains for Mexico.
The President, Bill Clinton, had signed NAFTA, made China a "most
favored nation" in trade and urged us, with a flirtatious grin, to "make
change our friend."
But "change," apparently, wasn't in a friendly mood. In 2000, Guilford
Mills shuttered its Greensboro, Carolina, fabric plant and reopened it
in Tampico, Mexico. Four-hundred jobs went south. Springs Mills of Rock
Hill, SC, closed down and abandoned 480 workers. Fieldcrest-Cannon
pulled out of York, SC, and Great America Mills simply went bust.
South Carolina, then, is the story of globalization left out of Thomas
Friedman's wonders-of-the-free-market fantasies.
This week, while US media broadcasts cute-sy photo-ops from Black
churches and replay the forgettable spats between candidates, the real
issues of South Carolina are, thankfully, laid out in a book released
today: /On the Global Waterfront/, by Suzan Erem and E. Paul Durrenberger.
Erem and Durrenberger portray the case of the Charleston Five
dockworkers as an exemplary, desperate act of economic resistance.
Thomas Friedman's bestseller, /The World is Flat/, begins with his
uplifting game of golf with a tycoon in India. Erem and Durrenberger
never put on golf shoes: their book is globalization stripped down to
its dirty underpants.
While Friedman made the point that he flew business class to Bangalore
on his way to the greens to meet his millionaire, Global Waterfront's
authors go steerage class. And the people they write about don't go
anywhere at all. These are the stevedores who move the containers of
Wal-Mart T-shirts from Guatemala to sell to customers in Virginia who
can't afford health insurance because they lost their job in the textile
mill.
And the book talks about (cover the children's ears!) - labor unions.
South Carolina is union country. And union-busting country. But who
gives a flying fart about labor unions today? Only 7%, one in fourteen
US workers belongs to one. That's less than the number of Americans who
believe that Elvis killed John Kennedy.
Think "longshoremen" and what comes to mind is /On the Waterfront/ with
Marlon Brando, the good guy, beating up the evil union boss. The union
bosses were the thugs, mobbed-up bullies, the dockworkers' enemies. The
movie's director, Stanley Kramer, perfectly picked up the anti-union
red-baiting Joe McCarthy zeitgeist of that era of - which could go down
well today.
Elected labor leaders are, in our media, always "union bosses." But the
real bosses, the CEOs, the guys who shutter factories and ship them to
China … they're never "bosses," they're "entrepreneurs."
Indeed, the late and lionized King of Union Busters, Sam Walton, would
be proud today, were he alive, to learn that the woman he called, "my
little lady," Hillary Clinton, whom he placed on Wal-Mart's Board of
Directors, is front-runner for the presidency. She could well become
America's "Greeter," posted at our nation's door, to welcome the Saudis
and Chinese who are buying America at a guaranteed low price.
So what happened those five union men charged felonious reioting in
2000? Through an international union campaign, they won back their
freedom - and their union jobs - after the dockworkers of Spain, the
true heroes of globalization, refused to unload the South Carolina scab
cargoes.
Erem and Durrenberger ask themselves why they were so drawn to a story
of five Carolina cargo-handlers put in prison a decade ago. Maybe it's
because the Charleston Five show how courage and heart and solidarity
can lead to victory in the midst of a mad march into globalization that
threatens to turn us all into the Wal-Mart Five Billion.
**************
See video of the dockworkers' uprising and read more from the book, On
the Global Waterfront, by Suzan Erem and E. Paul Durrenberger
(introduction by Greg Palast) at http://www.ontheglobalwaterfront.org/
<http://mailings.gregpalast.com//lt/t_go.php?i=66&e=Mjk4ODM=&l=-http--www.ontheglobalwaterfront.org/>.
Note: Palast will be speaking this Saturday at UCLA on "White Sheets and
Black Votes: Race, Politics and Disenfranchisement." Free but RSVP
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Greg Palast is the author of the NY Times best-sellers, Armed Madhouse
and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. View Palast's investigative
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