Maine Militias: Fascist?

[Louis N Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Louis:

Clanging on a trash-can lid to kick off a Maine corn chowder potluck
meeting this month, the featured speaker and organizer plunged into a
fast-paced condemnation of corporate down-sizing and free trade.

"Corporations aren't there for the public good," she told the crowd of
about 70 loggers, farmers, environmentalists and self-described
anarchists at a schoolhouse in this town near the New Hampshire
border. "They're there to produce more profits for the stockholders in
the next quarter."

Patrick J. Buchanan is not the only one bringing in a message of
economic populism to working-class New Englanders worried about
layoffs and weakening wages.

The potluck speaker, Carolyn Chute, Maine's native-daughter novelist,
has been organizing a grass-roots political movement on making
corporations and government more responsive to workers. Calling her
group the 2nd Maine Militias, Ms. Chute has attracted some of
Maine's conservatives with her support for gun-ownership rights and
by bashing the North American Free Trade Agreement.

But the group, which Ms. Chute began last year and which is more
gun club than militia, is appealing to conservative and liberal Mainers
alike by opposing proposals for a flat income tax and demanding an
end to corporation campaign contributions and tax subsidies for big
business.

Regarding such issues as abortion and gay rights, she and her
followers consider them distractions from the more important issues of
jobs and government accountability to the working class.

Growing up in a blue-collar family, and experiencing poverty as a
single parent, Ms. Chute, who is in her 40's, has long complained
about the lack of attention given to have-nots in this country.

"Many other militias and many individuals blame gays, blacks, Jews,
Spanish-speaking folks, welfare mums, illegal drugs, seat belts,
schools without prayers, women with shoes, abortions,
environmentalists, unseen Communist forces and so-called liberals,"
Ms. Chute wrote in a Dec. 24, 1995, opinion article in The Maine
Sunday Telegram, a Portland newspaper.

"The whole of America is squabbling over these details while huge
corporations smilingly take more than 50% off the top of the Federal
budget for subsidies including outright handouts for researching new
business opportunities in other countries where they can exploit
foreign workers like the exploit us, all in the name of free enterprise
and individual rights."

Ms Chute has gained a fierce loyalty from many rural Maine readers
with her 1985 best-selling first novel, "The Beans of Egypt, Maine,"
and other gritty books about working-class poverty and powerlessness.

But despite Ms. Chutes popularity, her group has an uncertain future.
No definitive plans have been made on how to achieve the group's
goals, and no donations have been solicited. She acknowledges her
ignorance of the political process but pushes aside suggestions that the
group will simply fade away for lack of money and sophistication.

"We realize that our goals may take many lifetimes," she said in an
interview at the potluck lunch. "We have to be patient. We're trying to
educate and we're also trying to educate how powerful we can be."

(From 2/19/96 New York Times article "Hark! A Mainer Stirs
Economic Populism")



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