In These Times: Dixie Media Versus Unions

[marmar]

Dixie Media Versus Unions
A new book reveals how Southern media have strengthened the region’s corporatocracy.

By Roger Bybee


The slavocracy-rooted Southern model of low wages and harshly anti-union labor relations has successfully undermined and defeated many social-welfare protections throughout the nation. Indeed, the South increasingly sets the terms of America’s social contract between labor and capital, as was apparent during last December’s debate over federal aid to General Motors and Chrysler.

Southern senators—all from states home to non-union auto factories run by international firms—claimed that excessive United Auto Worker (UAW) wages were responsible for Detroit’s crisis, insisting that only massive wage cuts imposed immediately by the federal government would address the problem. As a result, the UAW has been forced to accept a starting wage of $14.50 per hour for new autoworkers—a bit more than half the typical $26 to $28 union wage.

More broadly, the Southern model of all-powerful management, docile low-wage labor and public subsidy-fueled operations has become the dominant form of U.S. capitalism exported around the globe, argues Joseph Atkins in his compelling book Covering for the Bosses: Labor and the Southern Press (University Press of Mississippi, 2008). The media of the former Confederacy has played a crucial role in promoting the low-wage Southern model, and Atkins traces its development alongside the still-strong oligarchic pillars of the South.

Throughout the Southern system’s history, the region’s media have almost invariably been part of what Atkins labels the “solid phalanx” of powerful interests: a unified business community, elected officials, the clergy and other opinion shapers. Southern newspapers and radio stations joined the forces relentlessly battling unions, the New Deal and advancements in civil rights for African-Americans. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/4748/dixie_media_ve...

[PM Martin]

1. "Lincoln's folly"

[WCGreen]

2. And it's different anywhere else How?

Well duh, the melding of corporate interests with the Media has driven the standard of living for all American's not just those in the south...

I guess the South did win the war after all...