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The South Carolina You Won't See on CNN
South Carolina Primary Colors: Black and
White?
By Greg Palast
27/01/08 "ICH"
-- - 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/.
Greg Palast is the author of the NY Times best-sellers, Armed
Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. View Palast's
investigative reports for BBC Television on our
YouTube Channel (Link).
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