Even More than Race, the South Is About Exploiting Workers

By Joseph B. Atkins, Progressive Populist
Posted on March 13, 2009, Printed on March 14, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/131359/

Cheap labor. Even more than race, it’s the thread that connects all of Southern history—from the ante-bellum South of John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis to Tennessee’s Bob Corker, Alabama’s Richard Shelby and the other anti-union Southerners in today’s U.S. Senate.

It’s at the epicenter of a sad class divide between a desperate, poorly educated workforce and a demagogic oligarchy, and it has been a demarcation line stronger than the Mason-Dixon in separating the region from the rest of the nation.