Losing a voice

 

The labor movement and the people of West Virginia lost a powerful voice (literally) yesterday with the death of Elaine Purkey from COVID. Among other things, she was a singer/songwriter whose music has reached many around the US and beyond. And she was my dear friend. 

We met during the Pittston coal strike of 1989-90, my first big fight after joining AFSC. Her husband Bethel was a grassroots union leader and Elaine was just finding her voice writing labor songs. It was wild and uncut class struggle: there were shootings, at least one fatal, burning buildings, vehicles smashed by nonunion coal trucks, evictions from company property, private gun thugs, state police and federal marshals, arrests, and a bit of the wooden shoe and black cat. Also music, laughter, humor, mischief and love. 

(I’m not necessarily proud of this, but some of us were having the time of our lives.)

We did a lot together over the years, not just labor stuff, but also things like fighting racist police brutality and even doing mountain stories and songs with kids. It never took much to get her to whip out her guitar. She was very intuitive, like someone who could solve complex math problems without showing her work. 

Sometimes I’d pitch her a bare song idea, which she’d weave into gold in short order. Her best song is One Day More (here’s the Smithsonian version), which was written in 1992 when 1,700 Steelworkers were locked out of the Ravenswood Aluminum Corporation for nearly two years. 

A lot of people thought the fight was hopeless. I asked her to write something to boost morale and she came up with one for the ages in less than 24 hours. The first time I heard it, I knew people would be singing it after we were gone.

The Oscar winning filmmaker Barbara Kopple filmed the first performance at the union hall while doing a documentary for PBS on the lockout (I think you can see the neck of my 12 string on it too). I knew music was powerful in the struggle but never saw anything like that, with people crying, clapping, and singing along the first time they heard it. The song became their anthem and the good guys actually wound up winning. 

The idea behind the song was just to hang on one day longer than the company. It had legs, even showing up in a songbook of the 2011 Wisconsin protests against union busting. If you decide to listen but aren’t used to Appalachian twang, you may want to stand back and play it low. 

I think her message to us in these evil days would come straight from the song: hold out one day more.

Another one to watch

I've kind of been obsessed with health care policy for pretty much my whole career with the American Friends Service Committee, which began in 1989.

The first big fight I ever had, the Pittston coal strike (1989-90), was largely about health benefits for coal miners and their families, especially for retirees. Health care was a major issue in other good labor struggles from the Ravenswood Aluminum lockout (1990-92) to the recent WV work stoppages by teachers and school service workers.

In terms of public policy, lots of fights in the era of welfare reform (1996-early 2000s) had to do with health care. These included enacting the Children's Health Insurance Program at the federal level, followed by several pushes here to get the state to implement and expand the program. That culminated in 2011, when then Governor Tomblin expanded eligibility to 300 percent of the federal poverty level.

There were also efforts in that period to make sure people got "transitional Medicaid" when they left public assistance, along with supportive services related to minimal dental and vision care.

Then came the epic struggle to enact the Affordable Care Act. Misnamed Obamacare, it's really more like the Senate version of a reform bill. The House version was better, but with the death of Senator Edward Kennedy in August 2009, the senate version was the only game in town. It passed in March 2010.

I remember all hell breaking loose at town meetings in WV and around the country in 2009. At one in Huntington, a conspiracy theorist argued that reform meant something like a military takeover by the World Health Organization. You know, black helicopters and microchips in the butt. Apparently, they haven't made it out my holler yet.

At another event in southern WV, a  Catholic priest got heckled by someone during the opening prayer, with a shout of "How much are you getting paid?"

Efforts to repeal it began as soon as efforts to defeat it in Congress failed. In 2012, the US Supreme Court weighed, affirming the constitutionality of the law but making a key piece of it, Medicaid expansion, a state option.

People here worked hard to persuade Tomblin in 2013 to make the expansion, which he did with characteristic caution, seeking an actuarial opinion that fortunately underestimated the benefits of the expansion to WV. The effects were and are huge.

While quite a few states jumped on right away, others, particularly in the south and west, held out. A series of state by state fights ensued. I think each time a state decides to expand it, the harder it will be to undo the whole thing.

(I'm going  to skip over the epic fights since the 2016 election to block Trump, WV attorney general Patrick Morrisey and others of that ilk to take it all away from millions of Americans, not to mention the next US Supreme Court ruling, which is expected to come early next year. I get tired just thinking about it.)

The last time a state expanded Medicaid was in Oklahoma in June, where voters narrowly approved the expansion despite a flood of dark money..

Which brings us to tomorrow, when voters will take up the measure in Missouri. The following alert went out from Joshua Saleem, director of AFSC's St. Louis program to Friends and contacts in that state:

On August 4, Missouri voters will have the chance to make history and save lives by voting “Yes!” on Amendment 2, which would expand Medicaid to cover around 200,000 currently uninsured state residents. The expansion would particularly benefit adults in working families earning up to 138% of the federal poverty level.

This step makes sense in “ordinary” times by extending health care, opening the path to recovery from addiction, easing the path to reentry for formerly incarcerated people, supporting hospitals and health care providers, creating jobs and generating economic activity—but these aren’t ordinary times. In these times of a global pandemic that has yet to slow down, a yes vote is absolutely imperative.

Medicaid expansion is a provision of the 2010 Affordable Care Act. It was intended by Congress to apply across the nation, but a U.S. Supreme Court decision made it a state option.  As of now, 38 states, including the District of Columbia, have expanded Medicaid. Missouri should join their ranks.

The vote could be close. In Oklahoma, voters approved the expansion in June—but by a bare margin of one percent. Millions of dollars in dark money will be spent to defeat the measure.

This is why we’re asking you do three things: vote yes, share this email with friends, and do all you can to get out the vote.

Since its founding over 100 years ago, the American Friends Service Committee, following the Quaker belief in the value of all persons, has worked to promote economic rights as human rights. It has supported access to health care internationally as well as at the national and state level in the United States.

It doesn’t often happen that ordinary people have the opportunity to make such a huge difference with such simple steps, but this is one of those times. Please help us make the most of it.

It will be the latest round in a series of struggles that probably began in the USA in 1912 when former president and presidential candidate Theodore Roosevelt first proposed something like universal health care as the candidate of the Progressive Republican Party.

I plan on staying up as long as it takes for the vote to be counted.











 

Resilience and tragedy

Ravenswood WV was once a booming factory town. It was the home of a major Kaiser Aluminum plant, with employment in the thousands.

It wouldn't be accurate, however, to say it was a company town. Or only that. It was also a union town and a stronghold of the United Steelworkers of America.

If you're at all aware of economic trends in American since 1980, you can probably guess the trajectory of the story. The plant faced massive layoffs early in the decade and was sold in the late 1980s, morphing into the Ravenswood Aluminum Corporation (RAC).

In 1990, the company ordered union members, who were working despite the expiration of their old contract, out of the factory, which had taken on the appearance of a factory, and declared them to be permanently replaced.

Thus began "the battle of Fort RAC," which lasted from the fall of 1990 to the summer of 1992. It wasn't a strike; it was a lockout.

I must admit to having fond memories of that struggle, as I've written elsewhere. Despite all odds, the members of USWA Local 5668 won their jobs back.

In 1995, the factory became Century Aluminum, which eventually closed in the Great Recession, laying off 651 workers. Century union retirees had to fight long and hard to secure promised benefits, but eventually succeeded in 2017.

Today, aluminum is still produced there by Constellium, which employs around 1,100 people, most of whom are union members.It's the largest employer in Jackson County.

It's been a tough ride, and there have been plenty of casualties, but union workers have fought hard, won some victories and showed remarkable resilience.

Today another kind of struggle is going on there, as it is all over West Virginia and much of the country. That would be the struggle of responding to the pharmaceutical crime of the opioid epidemic.

This article from The Nation tells some of that story. The title--"These kids are watching their parents die"--is stark, but it's a quote from a local nurse practitioner. It makes the good point that public school teachers are in the front lines of this fight, just as they were in the wave of teachers' strikes that have challenged failed austerity policies in several states.

 Their situation is pretty grim, but, like the Steelworkers before them, sometimes they win.

We know what we are, but know not what we may be

Ophelia, but John William Waterhouse, 1894, by way of wikipedia.

(Goat Rope is still winding through Hamlet, but you can scroll down for links and comments about current events.)

I don't know about you, Gentle Reader, but for me the most disturbing part of Hamlet is the madness of Ophelia, especially when I watch a performance. It's always upsetting when someone loses it, but by this point in the play, the viewer or reader should have some sympathy for her character.

In the 1990s, if memory serves, Ophelia became an emblem for the problems many young women were said to experience in adolescence and early adulthood and her name was featured on the title of at least a couple of books.

In the play, however, she isn't just suffering from general malaise. Apparently motherless, she was the daughter of the twit Polonius, who could be cruel with her. Her brother Laertes seems pretty self absorbed. An obedient daughter, she breaks off her relationship with Hamlet at her father's command and is further wounded by Hamlet's later actions and attitudes. That was bad enough, but then her father is killed and her only known relative is off studying or partying in France.

She has taken to wandering the palace and its surrounds, singing and speaking in ways that seem both meaningful and nonsensical. A gentleman at court describes her symptoms thus:

She speaks much of her father; says she hears
There's tricks i' the world; and hems, and beats her heart;
Spurns enviously at straws; speaks things in doubt,
That carry but half sense: her speech is nothing,
Yet the unshaped use of it doth move
The hearers to collection; they aim at it,
And botch the words up fit to their own thoughts;
Which, as her winks, and nods, and gestures
yield them,
Indeed would make one think there might be thought,
Though nothing sure, yet much unhappily.

When not speaking of her father, she often sings sexually suggestive songs, like this one:

To-morrow is Saint Valentine's day,
All in the morning betime,
And I a maid at your window,
To be your Valentine.
Then up he rose, and donn'd his clothes,
And dupp'd the chamber-door;
Let in the maid, that out a maid
Never departed more.

(I have an idiosyncratic theory about Ophelia's madness bugs me so much. It's a guy thing and goes like this: most guys at some level may be aware that they often push the women in their life close to the edge of insanity. Ophelia is troubling as an example of one who actually goes over the edge.)

UNEMPLOYMENT. WV's unemployment insurance fund is in trouble and so far efforts to modernize and improve it have been blocked.

AN ALTERNATIVE TO LAYOFFS. Here's an article about an interesting policy option some companies and state governments are using to avoid layoffs.

A SAD SIGN OF THE TIMES. Here's an article from USA Today about how a plant closing has hit Ravenswood, WV hard. Back in the proverbial day, El Cabrero and friends tried to support union workers during a lockout. It was a great fight, and the workers won their jobs back after nearly two years of struggle back in 1992. Then came the Great Recession...

WORKING WV. Here's an op-ed by my friend the Rev. Matthew Watts on West Virginia's workforce woes.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

How I read my way through the last economic depression

The theme at Goat Rope lately is hard times and how to get through them. The series began a week ago Monday. If you feel so inclined, please click on earlier posts. You'll also find links and comments about current events.

As I mentioned before, the 1980s hit West Virginia really hard, with massive layoffs and high unemployment. And the cavalry was not on the way. I remember it as a time of poverty as I scrambled to provide for two young children.

When hard times hit, of course you have to try to get yourself out of them. I looked for more and better work and scrambled to finish a degree. But you also have to stay alive in the meantime, physically and otherwise.

For me, reading was a kind of salvation. For some reason, I stumbled upon The Story of Civilization, a massive 11 volume popularized version of world history by Will and Ariel Durant. It was far from academic history and contained any number of howlers that would drive sticklers up the wall. But it was engagingly written and was a constant companion for many months during work breaks, sleepless nights and stolen moments.

The Durants would include discussions of literary classics in their rambles through history and I made a list and went back and read as many as I could.

All of which is to say that I made it through the Reagan era with the help of Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, Plato, Herodotus, Thucydides, Shakespeare, and the like.

As poor as I was and as hopeless as the times seemed, I still remember the awe I felt on finishing Plato's Republic, the Oresteia of Aeschylus, and several of Shakespeare's tragedies and histories that I'd missed. That experience took me out, however briefly, from the grind and gave me a chance to think and reflect--and not to feel like a hunted animal.

There are some things you do that seem to take the life force out of you and leave you less than you were before, like zoning out in front of a television or playing video games during all your free time. But there are other kinds of things that seem to build you up. It could be a course of study, some physical discipline or learning an art or skill. These take effort and discipline but they can richly reward the time and trouble.

In my case, it helped me both to endure and eventually escape dire poverty--and left me with the will to do something about it when I had the chance.

R.I.P. the Bush administration's "ownership society."

WHAT A DIFFERENCE UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE MAKES. In another op-ed, economist Dean Baker points out that if General Motors was a Canadian company, it wouldn't be in need of a bailout.

HERE WE GO AGAIN. Welfare rolls are increasing for the first time since it was "reformed" in 1996.

MORE BAD WV NEWS. Century Aluminum in Ravenswood may close.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED