As Alice is always saying, "it's about work"

[David Morris]

Here's a review of that Salon article:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2013_02/the_original_sin_of_southernom043090.php

Lind quite properly notes that a recurrent theme in southern politics and
economics has been the desire to pursue “low-road” economic development
strategies based on cheap labor (and generally poor public services)
attractive to footloose capitalists who want little else beyond the lowest
possible business costs. He calls this “southernomics,” and appears to
attribute it to an inherent regional and perhaps ethnic defect—an “original
sin.” Lind appears, however, to be entirely unaware there was a fairly
powerful revolt against this model of economic development in the South
during the 1980s and 1990s—indeed, it’s one of the things that helped make
Bill Clinton famous—based on the observation that better and more stable
jobs paying better and more stable wages tended to be produced by companies
that valued things beyond low labor and regulatory costs—you know, things
like an educated work-force and a good quality of living. The revolt died
out during the last decade, in no small part because Democrats lost their
competitive status in the region, yielding the field back to atavistic pols
like Rick Perry and Nikki Haley, to cite the most egregious examples. But
the recent rapid
adoption<http://www.newrepublic.com/article/politics/84170/republicans-wisconsin-labor-unions-south>of
the low road to development by Yankee pols like Scott Walker is
another
indicator that it is not some inherent or exclusive product of the evil
Southern Character.


On Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 3:02 PM, Markekohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Michael Lind in Salon: " the 'original sin' of the South is not racism, it
> is " cheap labor".
>
> Sent from my iPad
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20130219/0bde1546/attachment.html>