Jim DeMint, Mark Sanford and many of the other Republicans ruling South Carolina are pursuing a very clear agenda, level government, destroy the public education, pillage the environment, flatten communities and establish a clear field of fire for self consumptive capitalism. Help is needed from across the nation to prevent South Carolina from becoming the right wing staging area for a corporatist takeover of the entire country, red states first, blue states later.
Image, Right, Democrats meeting at Gallivant's Stump meeting on May 3rd.
Liberals and Progressives across the US need to understand that South Caroliana is not stuck in the past. What is being prepared here may be your future.
This is not the conservatism of Gov. James B. Edwards in the 1970s or Strom Thurmond. It is materially different. Men like Sanford and DeMint are happy to make their state a tiny component of a predatory, globalized system which operates in the social, economic and political realm to create a concentration of power and wealth unlike anything the world has ever seen before.
The slaveowners of a century and a half ago in South Carolina exploited the labor of others and held unlimited power over their land and what happened upon it. However they confronted real limits. It was difficult to reliably control things beyond their periodic observation and supervision. They had to rely on other human beings to exercise their power and they had to actually talk to them. They were subject to local conditions. The survival of their wealth was tied to the people and environment around them.
Abuse your slaves, poison your land and enrage your neighbors and you got little or no cotton. You couldn’t personally lash a thousand acre cotton plantation to your will. There were limits and consequences to the abuse of man, animal and land. Plenty of plantation owners made the mistake of exceeding those limits and lost everything.
That Plantation system remains the basis of culture in South Carolina, but we err when we assume the plans of DeMint, Sanford and the entities like the Club for Growth who fund them here wish to perpetuate the localized plantation system of two hundred years ago. What they want is materially different and they’re pushing now to make South Carolina one of the first states to transition to a new system that’s brutality, waste and destructiveness would terrify the most brutal plantation overseer.
Communication, electronic banking systems, high speed transportation and fungible investment markets enable creation of a system where being tied to any one location or anyone for anything is unnecessary. Instead of crudely applying the lash to an unruly field hand, entire industries can be ripped from regional economies and moved around the planet to a more desperate and compliant source of labor. If global warming ruins your farmland, simply buy some in Africa or South America where the rain still falls. Dump oil sludge in Nigeria and leave treating the cancer it causes to a national health system which can’t possibly meet that need because the wealth which produced the sickness has left the country and its end product, numbers attached to a bank account somewhere, are beyond the reach of the sick and dying, even if they have guns.
South Carolina is the perfect starting place for subjecting the once proud citizens of the United States to such a global system. Communities here are fragmented by class, race and geography. There is a rigid opposition to collective action within large parts of the population. Large parts of the electorate are so poorly educated; they have absolutely no grasp of economics or history. The once vital textile industry has disappeared.
Agriculture is fading in many areas with Farmland which has known the plow for two and a half centuries being abandoned to trees. Much of the state believes a degenerated form of Christianity utterly divorced from the actual meaning of the Gospel by two hundred years of political distortion. In South Carolina "Blessed are the peacemakers" and "The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth" are utterly meaningless. Most people get their theology from television and the Left Behind series.
Structural unemployment in rural South Carolina can be higher than 30% and the reported unemployment rates reach the 20% level in many rural areas. Wages have sagged in the last decade and real income is lower than it was ten years ago. Many gifted and thoughtful people, including most of the younger ones, pack up and leave. To replace them, legions of retirees from elsewhere arrive, absolutely determined not to pay any taxes and uninterested in the quality of education or employment available to younger people.
In such a place the goal of the Governor, Senator Demint and others is to drive the people of the state to the most extreme desperation possible. Ignorance, poverty, sickness and environmental degradation are goals. When Lt. Governor Andre Bauer (one of the front runners in the race for Governor this year) talks about starving school children so their parents won’t breed, he really means it. He can count on an explosion of public and financial support by the people who agree with him.
Huge amounts of out of state right wing money are pouring into this state for this election cycle. It has even alarmed long time Republicans, many of which are merely social and fiscal conservatives with a strong bias in favor of local control over civic life. The state’s own economy is so emaciated it can’t compete as a fundraising force. It is nothing for AT&T to send Jim DeMint Fifty Thousand Dollars as they have done. Not even DeMint’s well developed right wing machine could hope to wring that out of South Carolina’s withered donor base.
So what do the people who supported Sanford until lust got the better of him and who are supporting DeMint want?
South Carolina serves as a lever for pressuring wages and working conditions around the nation downward. The state has actively undermined the standing of better paid union and non union workers around the country. We’re happy to accept the toxic waste and pollution other state’s resist. Our rivers are going to be lined with coal powered and nuclear power plants which will export electricity to other states. Mercury from such plants already poisons the fish of the Pee Dee river on which my ancestor’s plantation stood for 200 years.
Sanford, DeMint and the other Republicans are happy to slash taxes and budgets for schools, over and over again. After all, the less educated the working age population and parents of the state are, the less resistance the corporate takeover will have. The retirees who form the right wing political base here don’t care if the children of the people who live outside their gated communities can read or not. They come here for low taxes. They bitch endlessly about the low quality of their domestic help.
After all, if the people of South Carolina become too sick, too poorly educated or so anti social that they can no longer reliably provide low cost labor, everything can be relocated to Mexico, India or China.
If this is a plantation, it is a global one. The big house is located on an island somewhere and Blackwater guards the beach. Scarlett O’Hara’s horse drawn carriage is a Gulfstream corporate jet. The once feared lash of the overseer is now administered by invisible accountants and managers. This plantation is so enormous that the slaves are exploited by people they never see with the hands on work of oppression is being done by low level employees as powerless as they are.
Every day here is a new installment in the mounting proof that they loyalities of the Republicans my South Carolina neighbors continue to reelect are to the sources of the massive political donations they receive. After months of struggle, a bill to raise the cigarette tax to 50 cents a pack has passed. The Governor has threatened to Veto it unless corresponding tax cuts are made elsewhere. The purpose of this new tax is to fund the state match to Medicare and Medicaid, which brings several times the amount contributed in Federal funds into the state. In many parts of rural South Carolina, where nearly everyone left is old or poor, the liberal dream of single payer healthcare has already been achieved. The Government is the only thing which can still pay a doctor. Funds to care for the severely disabled are on the chopping block. So is the state’s version of the Schip program.
The Governor and Legislature have already cut the corporate tax rate to zero this year, sacrificing 150 million in revenue this year. They’re happily preparing to slash education by 35%. The retired people in the beachfront condos are happy to remind us via postings on the comment boards of our surviving newspapers that children in third world countries do fine in classes of 50 or more. Not their children, or grandchildren mind you, who are in some well funded school system in another state for now. Changing that comes later.
This year South Carolina will elect a new Governor, Lt. Governor and Secretary of Education. Jim "Waterloo" DeMint will be challenged by a respected former Legislator, Military Office and Judge, Vic Rawl. Andre Bauer who wants to starve poor school children is being challenged for Governor by a respected State Senator, Vincent Sheheen and the Secretary of Education, Jim Rex. The entire state House of Representatives is up for reelection.
Large scale right wing activists like Howard Rich are pouring money into the state. It is their experimental test bed for their version of the future. In the 2008 election Rich coordinated putting over 400k into state legislative elections to promote his school voucher agenda. In many races that was over half the support the candidate received.
Image, Right, Vic Rawl launches Campaign for US Senate
The state’s Democrats are better resourced and prepared to challenge this takeover than they have been in a generation. They’ve set up real offices across the state. They have scaled up their information resources and worked long and hard to train people on how to use them. The internet has broken down the sense of isolation here. We watch Rachael Maddow too. We're not helpless victims here, just determined activists working against very long odds.
People here know they’re being treated unjustly. The massive embarrassments like the Governor’s Argentinean love affair don’t get covered up any longer because the politician with a mistress knows who the newspaper publisher is sleeping with. The Republicans are still on top, but it’s costing more and becoming ever harder to keep the lid on. The strain shows. It’s costing more to purchase the loyalty of their friends. When your supporters can’t find a job and know you’re sitting on millions in corporate money, they don’t phone bank for free. They want to be paid.
Liberals around the country neglect taking action to fight a complete right wing takeover in South Carolina at their peril. The State will become a virulent staging ground for preventing progress elsewhere. The internal resistance is preparing to expend every available resource. If the Democrats in South Carolina lose it all and then get knocked down by reapportionment to holding a handful of rural districts, the rest of the United State may learn just how dangerous a state government with reactionary delusions of sovereignty can be.
The last time something like this happened, the blood of 630 thousand Americans was poured into the nation’s soil at battlegrounds from Bull Run to Appomattox Courthouse in the American Civil War. That started in South Carolina.
It would be error to assume what happens here can be safely ignored. Jim DeMint is a national menace, loaded with corporate money, operating from a state where he believes he can’t lose. He’s wrong. 30% of the voters in his state don’t even know who he is. Strom Thurmond was conservative, but he spent a lot of time at home. South Carolinians don’t award points to DeMint for helping elect Senators in Florida, even if the Club for Growth and corporate donors do. Sandlappers are suspicions of people who secretly tinker with the Christian religion as the Family does at the C street house where DeMint bunks and Sanford got his marriage counseling. They prefer the men who sit in the Senate and send our troops into battle to have worn the uniform themselves. DeMint never did.
In the past four years South Carolina has had a Governor who has a mistress in Argentina, a Lt. Governor who compares our school children to stray animals, a comptroller who thumb types 400 word love letters to the would be future Republican secretary of Education while waiting on his Divorce decree, a state Treasurer driven from office by a cocaine conviction, a Secretary of Agriculture who went to prison for bribery and a man who made national news (twice) for making love to a horse, the same horse. It sad and sickening. If there weren't children here, one would give up.
In its confused and dysfunctional way, South Carolina still demands loyalty from its politicians. If it is possible to reach voters here with the reality that their elected officials have become the happy bag men for multinational banks, energy companies and foreign owned economic interests things could change.
However nothing like that can be done with the support available solely within the state.
Here are some of the races that matter on Act Blue.
SC Political Races on Act Blue
I know progressives across the United States have problems at home, but ignoring what is happening in South Carolina, is like ignoring an outbreak of Ebola. You can’t count on the sickness never reaching you.