It's at the epicenter of a sad class divide between a desperate, poorly educated workforce and a demagogic oligarchy, and it has been a demarcation line stronger than the Mason-Dixon in separating the region from the rest of the nation. Full Story »
Posted by Gregory Kruse
I like this article because it puts the arrow right into the heart of its subject, and because it came through several portholes before it got to me, Progressive Populist, The Institute for Southern Studies, and Buzzflash. It's like hearing a name for your disease. You don't like it, but at least you know what it is. It's not JUST racism, it's oligarchy. Bob Corker knows how to get to the top and stay there. You put on your spikes and climb up there on the backs of your fellow man, and then you walk on them some more if they try to grab your leg.
This is what many Southerners of means (and some of no means) would never admit to Chris Matthews, but carry around in their heads every day. They think it's right, and they are gleeful about it.
as achieving economic fairness is at the heart of pres. obama's goals, the issues in this piece are very important. i wish more recent facts/figures, more sources to discuss the issues would have been included here, not only historical context and a few intransigent political figures which create the emotional appeal..
The article reflects what some of us have believed for years about the south. (Remember Tom Lehrer, anyone? Remember the unemployed in the New England mill towns while jobs were hijacked by southern states promising cheap docile labor and no unions?)
But union membership has been declining everywhere in the U.S. - which would seem to indicate that other areas of the country are catching the southern disease. And the income disparity between workers and executives is constantly widening, stimulus package notwithstanding.
This is an important article, one that I forwarded to the editor of our daily city newspaper, The Greensboro News & Record (in Greensboro, NC). I am an Episcopal priest who once upon a time worked as an anti-poverty worker in a two-county, rural Community Action Agency in southeastern North Carolina. It was clear to me then and there that the area's blacks and low-income whites, some of whom made up the local Ku Klux Klan, had far more in common socially than they didn't, that their ... More »
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