Posted on 10/27/2002 5:30:59 PM PST by stainlessbanner
Georgia's governor is doing a lot of crowing about why his state was selected over South Carolina for a DaimlerChrysler plant.
In the middle of a political campaign, Gov. Roy Barnes is now saying that DaimlerChrysler officials raised the issue of the Confederate flag. The company denies it, but there is definitely some fire from which the verbal smoke is coming.
The story broke last weekend with Barnes telling The Atlanta newspapers that the automaker was aware of controversy in South Carolina. He revealed that the NAACP sent a letter to DaimlerChrysler urging the company to reject the state as a location because the NAACP continues to support a boycott of South Carolina over the flag issue.
Barnes is quick to proclaim there is no flag controversy in Georgia, where lawmakers decided to remove the Confederate banner from the state flag and avoid an NAACP lawsuit. The issue may be officially resolved with the decision to put small images of the state's six previous flags -- including the Confederate flag -- on the new banner, but it's certainly not a dead issue in Georgia. It's not hard to find flags, license tags, stickers and more displaying the former state flag.
But our concern is not Georgia's flag politics. It is South Carolina.
The NAACP now says such letters are a new phase in the battle over the Confederate flag, which was moved in 2000 from the Statehouse dome to a separate flag pole behind the Confederate monument on the capitol grounds. The group rejected the compromise approved by the Legislature and governor.
The flag battle should be over as much in South Carolina as it is in Georgia. But it's not.
Officially, DaimlerChrysler says the flag issue was not a factor in its decision. And it probably wasn't. Post announcement publicity will connect the two, however, as the NAACP seeks to promote its efforts to chase industrial prospects from South Carolina.
That's the sad result of an ongoing effort that is going nowhere. Neither the governor, Legislature, business leaders nor citizens is ready to raise the flag issue again.
The NAACP working against attracting a DaimlerChrysler is ironic in that the plant was to locate in the Summerville area, where industrial and political leaders from Charleston to Orangeburg, some of them longtime members of the NAACP itself, were working hard to get the plant. NAACP anti-development efforts certainly won't be popular with many of these people.
The bottom line on DaimlerChrysler is not the flag. It is unionism and a contract with Canadian autoworkers. It is about the company wanting lots of money up front without promising to hire South Carolinians for the thousands of jobs that will come with the plant. If the automaker puts union members out of work in Canada, it may look to bring Canadians here to work.
South Carolina has only to remember the 1980s Mack Trucks deal in Fairfield County, where the union presence led to comparatively few jobs created for South Carolinians who were here before the plant. And now the plant is gone.
If DaimlerChrysler was not prepared to guarantee jobs while holding out for massive state incentives, then South Carolina could not afford to win the bidding war for the new plant. If Georgia ultimately gets the plant, it may face the same issue with job creation. Gov. Barnes is certainly hoping not.
And when DaimlerChrysler gets to Georgia, it will have a reminder on the Georgia state flag that it wouldn't have in South Carolina -- a small image of the Confederate flag that is emblematic of how minor that image should be in this entire matter.
Neil Gregor traces the early history of the Daimler-Benz company and examines how opportunities offered by Nazi rearmament in the 1930s led to its rapid expansion and a surge in profits. Focusing mainly on the war years, Gregor demonstrates how the company suc-ceeded in exploiting the demands of the war economy while situating its operations most advantageously for resumption of commercial activity in peacetime. Despite Allied bombing, says Gregor, Daimler-Benz AG emerged from the war in good shape--with a clear operating strategy, a largely intact inventory, and core production lines geared for the peacetime market. With its own interests and preservation as prime motives, the company acquiesced in the exploitation of forced labor, thereby actively intensifying the suffering of civilians, prisoners of war, and Jews and other victims of concentration camps. He concludes that the ability of Daimler-Benz to protect its interests during the war and to manage the transition to peace was predicated upon collusion in the racial barbarism of the Nazi regime.
Pot meet kettle.
And they get hot and bothered about the flag of the Confederacy. I guess that's what you get from government schools.
But the -cornerstone- of the so-called CSA was slavery. The cornerstone of the United States is that all men are created equal.
One of the reasons Abraham Lincoln was so hated in the south is because he pointed out that a clear majority of the framers of the Constitution favored an end to slavery, including George Washington. To this end, they wrote the northwest ordinance that outlawed slavery in U.S. territories (at that time) and ended the international slave trade in 1808.
The so-called CSA was fighting against the spirit of the age in clinging so fiercely to slavery, and if, as President Lincoln said in his second inagural, that every drop of blood drawn with the lash had to be matched by one drawn with the sword, no man could say that the judgments of the Lord were not true and altogether righteous.
Walt
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