"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. Chute's 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")
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)