In Salon in which he talks about the South's strategy to reduce the country to its primitive, neo-feudal level of doing things:
I can hear the objections already: "We agree that the South's beggar-thy-neighbor and race-to-the-bottom strategies should be thwarted — but the methods that you suggest, a high national minimum wage, greater equalization of state and local public spending by increased federal revenue-sharing, and a national economic development framework built to align the existing state economic development systems are politically too difficult to achieve." That may be true. But if it is true, then the neo-Confederates and their strategy of turning first the South and then the entire U.S. into a low-wage export platform for the outsourced industries of advanced industrial societies in Asia and Europe will prevail. If a non-Southern majority, controlling the White House and Congress, with the support of at least some moderate Republicans in other regions, along with the support of Southern populists and progressives, is too timid to take on a Southern oligarchy that is willing to wreck the national economy to promote their local economic empires, then the neo-Confederates have already prevailed.
The choice is simple — the reconstruction of the South, or the deconstruction of the U.S. economy.
Or as I wrote in May:
But what happened during the Nixon administration was the beginning of
the southernization of the GOP, which reached its culmination in the
Bush administration. As the viciousness of converted southern
Democrats joined forces with the viciousness of corporate interests, a
new GOP was created for which crony capitalism is its animating
principle. If the GOP is allowed to stay in power, it would turn the
country into a kind of corporate plantation society, for which Wal-Mart
is the pioneer. Everything the GOP does can be understood according to
the logic of promoting its crony capitalist agenda. The cultural wedge
issues are simply a tactic to keep low-information Main Streeters on
the GOP bus in a 50% +1 electoral strategy.
the southernization of the GOP, which reached its culmination in the
Bush administration. As the viciousness of converted southern
Democrats joined forces with the viciousness of corporate interests, a
new GOP was created for which crony capitalism is its animating
principle. If the GOP is allowed to stay in power, it would turn the
country into a kind of corporate plantation society, for which Wal-Mart
is the pioneer. Everything the GOP does can be understood according to
the logic of promoting its crony capitalist agenda. The cultural wedge
issues are simply a tactic to keep low-information Main Streeters on
the GOP bus in a 50% +1 electoral strategy.
And for these southerners, it doesn't even matter if the corporations are American. That they are serving the interests of the Japanese auto industry to the detriment of the American industry doesn't seem to bother them in the least. They know where their loyalties lie, and they are all dutifully wearing they're American flag lapel pins, I'm sure.
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