A Flag Is What We Make It

In the 21st century controversy over the legitimacy of the 19th century Confederate battle flag, one question remains unanswered:  What does it mean to those who want to fly it?

The answer:  Anything they want it to mean.

When we run our American flag up the flagpole at our house, it means we love the idea behind it, we love the look of the stars and stripes; we love how it waves in the breeze, telling us the wind direction, giving us an indication of the velocity.  (A perk, I know.)

We believe the stories about Betsy Ross and the Star Spangled Banner.  We love the image of the flag-raising over Iwo Jima.  We pledge allegiance to our flag whenever the occasion arises. (Without endorsing the wholly unnecessary Red Scare defense "under God", it should be said.)

My husband the Marine will not allow the flag to touch the ground and replaces it with a new one when it begins to look tattered.

But there are other Americans who use that same flag to make some pretty awful points.  Hate groups bent on destroying the present government use it as a backdrop for photo ops.

George Lincoln Rockwell - American Nazi Party

  

Cliven Bundy uses it to try and save his ranch after refusing to pay his government lease for more than 20 years,

enlisting militiamen hostile to the government to protect him from eviction.

The American flag is a symbol for every American, but, as symbols go, the symbolism is in the eye of the beholder.

So it goes with the Confederate flag.  The KKK uses it interchangeably with the American flag.  Militia groups and White Supremacist groups use it interchangeably with the American flag.  Many Southerners fly it from their homes and stick it on their cars.  It flies on public buildings, much to the displeasure of certain groups who see it as an affront.

Is it offensive?  Is it racist?  It can be, and to some it ever will be.  Vile racism is, at the very least, inappropriate, and if a historic flag is co-opted to endorse hate, it wouldn't be the first time.

For many years we've spent our winters in South Carolina.  The confederate flag is everywhere and, as a Northerner indoctrinated in the offensive nature of what we called the Rebel flag, I found each instance shocking.  But their heritage, I came to realize, is not my history, and nowhere am I more aware of it than when I wander through an old Southern cemetery.

These are their ancestors.  Hundreds of thousands of their countrymen died fighting for a cause they may or may not have even understood.  Were those young men--often just boys--fighting to ensure that wealthy plantation owners could keep their slave labor?  Doubtful.  More likely they saw themselves as freedom fighters making sacrifices in order to save their homes and form their own union.  They fought in a terrible civil war and their side lost.  Because real people in real families were affected forever, this is not a part of their history the modern South is willing to forget.  And we as a nation have no right to ask it of them.

It's not our place to decide what the Confederate flag means and who should be able to fly it.  We've allowed our own American flag to be used and abused in such a way that by rights it should be nothing more than a meaningless piece of cloth.  It's much more than that because it means much more than that to each of us.

At different times in our history, parts of our country belonged to the English, the Spanish, the French.  We fought them and won, and we still fly their flags in remembrance.  It's a part of our history.

The South once fought to belong to the Confederacy.  They had their own flag.  How can we recognize that part of our history without recognizing their flag?   The answer is, we can't.  And the truth is, we shouldn't.


(Cross-posted at Dagblog and Alan Colmes' Liberaland)

Georgetown

Boston-based Bain Capital LLC more than doubled its money on GS Industries Inc. – the former parent company of Georgetown Steel – under Mitt Romney’s leadership in the 1990s, even as the steel manufacturer went on to cut more than 1,750 jobs, shuttered a division that had been around for 100 years and eventually sank into bankruptcy.
Bain Capital spent $24.5 million to acquire GS Industries in 1993, according to an investment prospectus for the company that was obtained by the Los Angeles Times and reviewed by The Sun News. By the end of that decade, Bain Capital estimated its partners had made $58.4 million off its investment in GS Industries, according to the prospectus.
Bain Capital’s partners also earned multi-million dollar dividends from GS Industries and annual management fees of about $900,000. But by the time GS Industries filed for bankruptcy protection in 2001, it owed $553.9 million in debts against assets valued at $395.2 million. 
(David Wren, Myrtle Beach Sun News, 1/14/12)

Read more here: http://www.myrtlebeachonline.com/2012/01/13/2599863/romneys-bain-capital-made-millions.html#storylink=cpy

Georgetown, South Carolina is a mill town; one of the few left in the United States where goods are actually produced and not just assembled.  It is the home of International Paper and ArcelorMittal Steel, and the sounds and smells generating from the sites are an actual comfort, not just to the townspeople but to anyone who detests the thought of factory shutdowns and an idle workforce.

Harbor - Georgetown, SC

  At first glance, Georgetown looks like almost any other town across the country--a main drag dotted with fast foods and box stores and gas stations, neighborhoods rich and poor and somewhere in between (The happy surprise in Georgetown, if you venture off the highway, is its carefully preserved historic district  and beautiful harbor)--but since Mitt Romney's run for the presidency and the revelations of the destructive, worker-eating practices of Bain Capital, the company he once headed, you might see Georgetown in a different light.  You might see it as yet another poster child showing the effects of bullying outside influences with voracious appetites fed largely by avarice and greed.

ArcelorMittal Steel Mill, Georgetown, SC

 The Georgetown steel mill, it turns out, was one of Bain Capital's many victims.  Who knew?  Not middle managers. Not the union leaders. Not the laid-off workers.  Not even, apparently, anyone who reported the stories of bankruptcies and shutdowns throughout the years, essentially blaming the problems on the Chinese and the tumult of the times.

During the upheaval of American labor over the past few decades, Georgetown's mill took several direct hits.  China was, in fact, producing cheaper (albeit lower quality) steel.  Jobs were, in fact, being sent by ruthless Americans to cheaper markets overseas.  Domestic car sales had declined and so had the need for the particular steel products coming out of Georgetown. No one saw the need to dig further to find a deeper, underlying reason for the failures.  On the surface, there were plenty.

This isn't the first time the press has descended on Georgetown.  I went to the union headquarters yesterday and met with the Steelworkers local president, James Sanderson.
Sanderson said when the Democrats came to nearby Myrtle Beach for a debate in 2008, the candidates got wind of a shutdown at the mill. They all rushed to Georgetown so they could each stand in front of the forlorn, shuttered factory and make promises to the hundreds of unemployed potential voters there was never a chance in hell they would be able to keep.

Nobody knew then what role Bain Capital had played in the inevitable failure of Georgetown Steel.  They bought it and gutted it and profited from their own piracy and nobody knew it had even happened that way until Mitt Romney decided to run for president and the digging began.

As David Wren reports in the Sun-News article:

Less than a year after taking a controlling interest in the Georgetown plant, Bain Capital cut the employees’ profit-sharing plan twice – lowering the plan’s hourly rate from $5.60 an hour to $1.25 per hour. Most of the workers didn’t learn about the cuts until they received their paychecks. The profit-sharing checks eventually disappeared altogether.

Sanderson, in a September 2000 report in The Sun News, called Bain Capital anti-labor and said “they’ve forced a labor dispute at every location” during contract negotiations.  Sanderson agrees that China’s cheap steel imports on the American marketplace hurt the Georgetown mill’s production and profitability.

“But if they [Bain Capital] had only invested in the mill instead of taking everything from it, we would have been able to sustain that [dumping] like we had in the past,” he said.

John Ethridge, a retired Georgetown Steel worker, said Bain Capital “treated us like dirt.”

“They brought a bunch of people in here who thought they knew how to do our job, but they had no idea what they were doing,” Ethridge said, adding that needed equipment and plant upgrades were often delayed or ignored.

Ethridge, who worked at the Georgetown mill for 35 years, said Bain Capital was more interested in how much money it could take from the plant rather than investing anything into it.

By the time GS Industries filed for bankruptcy protection, the number of employees worldwide had been cut by more than half.

Read more here: http://www.myrtlebeachonline.com/2012/01/13/2599863/romneys-bain-capital-made-millions.html#storylink=cpy

After decades of  uncertainty, of lay-offs and down-sizing, of bankruptcies and shut-downs, of revolving-door ownerships, the American company formerly known as Georgetown Steel is now foreign owned and called ArcelorMittal.  It's up and running again, on a much smaller scale, but running nonetheless.

ArcelorMittal scrapyard - Georgetown

 The union is still in place and James Sanderson is still union president.  Their four-year contract, equitable by any labor standards, is up in September.  It's anybody's guess about where they'll be heading, in light of the stepped-up efforts by South Carolina's Governor Nikki Haley to make sure South Carolina remains a Right-to-Work state. (Precipitated by the actions of the National Labor Relations Board when it went after Washington state-based Boeing for moving one of their units to South Carolina, allegedly to get out from under unions. The action was dropped in December, but I'm guessing Gov. Haley isn't going to forget it.)

In South Carolina the sun shines bright on Romney and Bain Capital these days and I know at least a few people who are basking in it, trying to make the most of it (James Sanderson, for one; his boss Leo Gerard for another,  his activist son Jamie for another; and me).  But from afar comes Robert Reich, talking not about Georgetown but about the troubles at Steel Dynamics, an Indiana steel mill taken over and victimized by Bain Capital.

He explains in pure Reich-style what Bain Capitalism really is:

Bain Capitalism is not product capitalism, it's financial capitalism.  It's moving money.  It's getting as much money from the public sector as possible.

Financial capitalism is not real capitalism.  It doesn't create new jobs, it doesn't put people to work, it actually ends up reducing the number of jobs.  it displaces people, it puts risks on average working people, it lowers wages.  Financial capitalism is what we've had in this country for the last two or three decades and it's all centered on Wall Street.  It's not about making good jobs with good wages and making things.

Last night during the Republican debate in Myrtle Beach, Gov. Nikki Haley was seen smiling and nodding vigorously when Rick Perry jawed on about "South Carolina's war with the federal government", as if it was 1865 all over again.  How does Rick the Wretched think we got to this place?  Wasn't he the one who coined the term, "vulture capitalism"?  Can you run for president or governor without understanding the necessary symbiosis between the Fed and the states in order to combat and destroy the Bains of the world and save your cities, your states, your country?

Well, yes, you can run but should you win?  In a sane world, you shouldn't.  In a sane world you couldn't.  (Quick reminder: Mitt Romney, the founder of Bain Capital, is about to be anointed top nominee for president by the Republicans.)  That's our national nightmare these days, that total disregard by our leaders of a pervasive evil forced on us via the private sector despite absolute, indisputable proof that Bain Capital is just one among hundreds of companies whose only reason for existing is to destroy the fabric of America for profit .  That malignant neglect is the reason the fight goes on and the bad guys keep getting away.

In a free market economy as defined by this new bunch of "patriots", the only bad guys are the good guys.  Apparently that's us and we're toast.

Shack and water tower in the shadow of the mill - Georgetown, SC

From Carolina to Michigan: Not so far apart

In an odd juxtaposition that would mean nothing to anybody but me, I’m packing up to leave South Carolina, the state with the second worst unemployment, to go back to Michigan, the only state in the land that has it worse.

The difference between the two states is really and truly the difference between night and day. Here in South Carolina, for example, I’m looking out at palm trees and camellias and feeling a soft, warm breeze coming through the doorwall.

When I get back home to upper Michigan, where we live for the other nine months of the year, I’ll find three-foot snow banks and not a hint of green grass anywhere. It’ll be weeks before we’ll even see crocuses.

Unemployment is a huge problem in both states, for very different reasons, but the biggest difference is in how these two states are governed. In Michigan, we have Democratic governor Jennifer Granholm, an untiring, unwavering advocate for the workers in her state. Michigan’s economy is based on industry first, tourism second. So when manufacturing goes by the wayside, as it has in the past decade or more, our economy slides downward, with no end in sight.

As I noted in an earlier post, Governor Granholm has been out there beating the bushes, looking for funding to help the people of our state. She’s not above begging if she has to, because she feels Michigan’s future is worth whatever it takes.

In South Carolina--a beautiful state with pockets of grinding poverty--tourism is the top game. The mountains, the beaches and the golf courses are a huge draw. When times are good, business people down here are in Hog Heaven, what with all the high living going on. But when times are bad--really bad, as they are now--the fun comes to a screeching halt and the purveyors are left high and dry.

The only way out, odious as it is to some, is to let the Feds come to the rescue. They're the only ones with a cavalry big enough to take on this mess. But Mark Sanford, governor of South Carolina, is barricading himself inside his plantation, yelling for those Damn Yankees to keep away.

He is one of a handful of governors--all Republican--who took a stand against the only rescue in sight, the stimulus plan. All of a sudden those same Republicans who were happy revelers during the Bush years, when rampant, raging capitalism came into full bloom, have now seen the light (Yea, verily, have seen the LIGHT). Now, when times are about as bad as they can get, they're ready to cut the cord, to tighten the belts, to put the troops on a diet of bread and water.

If Sanford is concerned with the condition of his state and the numbers of unemployed workers, he has a funny way of showing it. So where are the workers on this? How do they feel? Will they ever gain their voices and speak up?

Your pride, South Carolinians, is not in turning down what Sanford says is a government handout with strings. Your pride is in recognizing a chance to rise up from poverty and become an asset to America, where we're all working together to make this country strong again.

Ramona