Please vote no on WV 2 and 4 Nov. 8 to protect education

 Public education was a major concern of West Virginia’s founders. Article 12 Section 1 of the state constitution states that “The Legislature shall provide, by general law, for a thorough and efficient system of free schools.”

Article 12 Section 6 of the state constitution that specifies that “the school board of any district shall be elected by the voters of the respective district without reference to political party affiliation.”

Two constitutional amendments on the ballot in November could threaten the intent of those provisions.

Amendment 2 would essentially give the legislature to power to eliminate business taxes on equipment and property that now provide over a quarter of funding for counties, cities, and schools. As a sweetener, it would also give them power to eliminate taxes on personal vehicles, although the lion’s share of more than 70 percent would go to businesses, many of which are out of state corporations.

If voters approve this amendment, the legislature could cut property taxes by over $500 million dollars. As things now stand, 66 percent of this revenue funds county school districts. Another 33.5 percent goes to county and municipal governments to provide funding for things like emergency medical services, fire protection, public safety, public libraries and senior citizen centers and other services.

This would end a long tradition of constitutional protections for local services, take authority for property taxes away from local voters and communities, and could impact bonds and levies supported by supermajorities of 60 percent or more of local voters. Currently 44 of West Virginia’s 55 counties fund services through voter-approved levies.

Supporters of Amendment 2 say that local governments will be “made whole” by state funding, but there’s no guarantee of that—and doing so would simply require cuts to state funding for other programs. The budget surpluses the state now enjoys are mostly the result of one-time federal COVID relief funding. Making long term plans based on temporary gains is a bit like counting on lottery winnings in making a family’s budget.

The likely long-term results will be either cuts in public services or regressive tax increases that fall on working class families…or a combination thereof.

As Governor Jim Justice put it, “We’re taking away an income stream and betting on good times forever and putting at risk our schools, our EMS, our firemen, our police and whatever it may be. We have to step back and think about what we are doing.”

And while eliminating those taxes might do significant damage to funding local services, it’s not likely to result in more jobs for West Virginians. State and local taxes make up less than two percent of the cost of doing business, so we’re talking about a fraction of a fraction. Some evidence even suggests that cuts in equipment taxes can result in automation and loss of manufacturing jobs.

Amendment 4 would threaten the constitutional intent of school governance without regard to party affiliation by giving partisan politicians control over classrooms and taking authority away from educators, school boards, parents, and voters. This could turn schools into political battlegrounds, stifle learning, create a climate of intimidation, impose a narrow range of ideological and religious perspectives, and lead to censorship and book banning.

What both proposed amendments have in common is the centralization of power by a partisan legislature at the expense of local voters, governments, and school boards.

 For those reasons, we are compelled to express our opposition to Amendments 2 and 4.

(Sorry if this sounds familiar but it's kinda important.)

Too good to be true?

 A month or so back, I spoke with New York Times reporter Jason DeParle, who was working on a story about child poverty in West Virginia. That article came out yesterday (or was it the day before?) and it had some surprising conclusions, the biggest one being that child poverty declined dramatically in the US over the last few decades and that this change was even more dramatic in West Virginia:

 Child poverty has plunged over the last generation, and few places have experienced larger declines than West Virginia, a state that once epitomized childhood deprivation. Poverty among the state’s children fell nearly three-quarters from 1993 to 2019, according to a comprehensive analysis by Child Trends, a nonpartisan research group, conducted in partnership with The New York Times. That compares to a 59 percent drop nationwide.

If West Virginia’s child poverty rate was as high now as in 1993, nearly 80,000 additional children would be poor, a population larger than the state capital, Charleston.

That was news to me, especially considering that these changes didn't include the vast influx of COVID related federal aid from the CARES Act and the American Rescue Plan. It kinda sounds too good to be true, although my WV comrades have worked on that issue for years and years.

Just when I was beginning to think my life wasn't a total waste, a friend--we can call him Mr. Buzzkill--sent me this response to the national poverty numbers in the Times article. Short version: different poverty measures show vastly different results.

However that data fights wind up, I did find some encouragement in the story itself, which profiles some West Virginia families living in or near poverty. It showed how years of undramatic grunt work on policy at the state and even county level can eventually show some real positive changes for real people. 

I'm talking about things people worked on here, offensively and defensively, like EITC (Earned Income Tax Credit) outreach, defending SNAP, advocating for access to education for people in the "welfare" system and challenging its more draconian aspects, supporting state adoption and expansion of the Children's Health Insurance Program to 300 percent of the federal poverty level over13 years, Medicaid expansion, free school breakfast and lunch, defending child care, support services for people on or leaving TANF, raising the state minimum wage and such can really make a difference in the lives of real people.

I think at least those programs and policies that so many West Virginias have fought for made things less bad than they would otherwise have been. I'll take that.

 

The Supreme Cult strikes again

 As a native and lifelong resident of West Virginia, I find it particularly galling that the disastrous Extreme Court Supreme Cult Supreme Court EPA decision bears the name of a state suffering from the impacts of climate change and urgently in need of a transition to just and sustainable economy.

 West Virginians are intimately familiar with the human and natural consequences of not adequately regulating industries that harm our people, land and rivers.

 The history of this state is punctuated by industrial disasters and the slower but potentially more devastating impacts of pollution and environmental degradation. This SCOTUS decision will only make things worse. The struggle continues...

Along those lines, here's a link to a response to the decision from the national AFSC and here's the accompanying call to action.  

I wish I was surprised

 The United Health Foundation recently released it's 2021 report on American Health Rankings. And, well, it's kind of what you'd expect. West Virginia ranks at or near the bottom on several indicators, including:

*49th in occupation fatalities (the legislature tried and failed to gut the state mine safety agency this year, which may knock us out of 50);

*47th in economic hardship (who could have guessed that years of anti-labor legislation, automation and corporate driven-globalization might not have brought prosperity?);

*48th in per capita income (see above);

*47th in poverty (see above); 

*49th in unemployment (the legislature also tried to cut unemployment insurance eligibility from 26 to 12 weeks this session);

*49th in food insecurity (in 2018, the legislature passed a bill that made it harder for low income adults without children to access SNAP benefits);

*49th in social support and engagement;

*50th in drinking water violations (lowering water standards to benefit extractive industries being an annual legislative ritual);

*49th in nutrition and physical activity;

*50th in depression;

*50th in drug deaths (not surprising given how WV was bombed with opioids by pharmaceutical companies in recent years);

*48th in frequent mental distress;

*50th in premature deaths; and

*50th in asthma, arthritis, cardiovascular disease, chronic kidney disease, COPD, diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol. I'm guessing that being a mineral extraction sacrifice zone didn't help here. Thank God and former governor Earl Ray Tomblin for expanding Medicaid--otherwise we'd be dropping like flies. No doubt the social determinants of health have a lot to do with this.

This is just a partial list. The rest is here. Meanwhile, instead of dealing with these issues, the legislature spent a lot of time this year going after what's left of public education; failing to pass caps on diabetes-related expenses; the bogey man of "critical race theory;" trying to make it harder for workers and their survivors injured or killed on the job to get compensation; trying to repeal the state income tax; and such.

It's nice to have good priorities. That's what I hear anyway

Regrowing West Virginia

 It’s no secret that West Virginia is facing some pretty serious demographic problems, even aside from our spiking COVID-19 spread.

For starters, we have one of the oldest populations, a trend to which I am contributing. We have long been at or very near the bottom in terms of workforce participation.

Not only do we have more deaths than births, but we’re rapidly losing population. Between 2010 and 2020, state population has dropped by about 3.2%, or almost 59,000 people. For comparison, the population of Charleston is about 48,000.

The population loss is more than the combined populations of Pocahontas, Webster, Gilmer, Pleasants, Pendleton, Calhoun, Tucker and Wirt counties. We’ve also been at or near the top in terms of overdose death rates.

According to the West Virginia Center for Excellence in Disabilities, the state has the highest rate of people with disabilities, at 1 in 5, although I’ve seen much higher estimates. We’ve also long been at or near the bottom in terms of median income and the top in terms of poverty rates.

Taken together, these are some pretty serious challenges.

If we’re going to survive, let alone thrive economically and culturally, one obvious solution is to be a welcoming place for new arrivals from around the world.

Welcoming immigrants isn’t exactly a new thing for West Virginia. One of the first acts of the newly formed government of West Virginia was the appointment in 1864 of Joseph Diss Debar, himself an immigrant from France, as commissioner of immigration, with the goal of encouraging people to settle here. Something of an artist, he is perhaps best known for designing the state seal.

In 1870, he published the West Virginia Hand Book and Immigrant’s Guide. Diss Debar’s efforts would eventually be far surpassed by agents from coal and timber companies who scoured Europe, often painting a rosy picture of life in the Mountain State that didn’t meet the reality.

Along with immigrants from overseas, the state’s population and workforce was increased by the internal migration of many Black Americans from the deep South.

According to local historian and longtime journalist James Casto, “Over the decades, countless Italians, Poles, Serbs, and Turks were put to work building railroads, cutting timber, and running sawmills. Other industries, too, benefited from immigrant labor. Even before the Civil War, German and Swiss immigrants traveling up the Mississippi and Ohio rivers found jobs in the iron works located in the Wheeling/Weirton area. English and Belgian craftsmen were recruited to work in the state’s glass factories. Germans came to brew beer. Talented Italian stonemasons crafted fine homes, buildings, and walls, many of which can still be seen.”

Ken Fones-Wolf and Ronald L. Lewis wrote, in probably the most complete single source on this issue, “Transnational West Virginia: Ethnic Communities and Economic Change, 1840-1940,” “In sum, it was the skills and the labor of these migrants that made modern West Virginia.”

It didn’t always go well for the newcomers. Some agents were deceitful and greedy. Some new arrivals were kept in virtual peonage or wound up working and living in appalling conditions. Of course, it was the coal mines that would be the biggest consumer of immigrant labor — and sometimes lives.

A 1911 report to Congress breaks down mine employment by ethnicity in detail for the Fairmont and Elk Garden, New River and Kanawha, and Pocahontas coalfields. Aside from native-born Americans of European and African origin, among the “races” of immigrants identified as working in the mines in the early years of the new century are, in no particular order and using the original terms and spelling:

Russian Hebrew; Hebrew other than Russian; Italians; Poles; Slovakians; Russians; Magyars (Hungarians); Slavish; Lithuanian; English; German; Litvich; Greek; Welsh; Irish; Scotch; Swedish; Belgian; Danish; Syrian; Bohemian; Bulgarian; Austrian; Slovenian; Ruthenian; Montenegrin; Herzegovinian; Dutch; Macedonian; other Slav races; and other southern or eastern European races.

(It’s interesting to note how slippery the socially constructed notion of “race” is and has always been.)

Under tough and sometimes brutal conditions, this mixed multitude managed to bridge differences and forge bonds of solidarity in ways that enriched our culture and contributed to the nation at large.

Given the recent 100th anniversary of the Battle of Blair Mountain, it’s good to remember that many of those who marched for the rights of workers to organize were immigrants from overseas.

And in modern times, immigrants punch above their weight class when it comes to contributing to West Virginia’s economy. According to the American Immigration Council, while they make up only 2% of the population and labor force, their households accounted for $628.7 million in after-tax spending power in 2018. The 1,200 or so immigrant-owned businesses in West Virginia generated $36.2 million in business income. Plus, adult immigrants are about twice as likely to have college degrees as native residents.

West Virginia’s immigrant population also paid over a quarter-of-a-billion dollars in taxes, to the tune of $185 million federal and $72.8 million state and local. While there weren’t many more than 100 people eligible for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals status in 2018, they paid an estimated $270,000 in state and local taxes.

These are the kinds of economic and cultural contributions that could slow — and eventually reverse — our steady decline. Various immigrant groups have added much to West Virginia’s history, and they could add much more in the future, but only if we put out the welcome mat.

(This appeared as an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail.)

Good Friday in West Virginia

 It's Good Friday in West Virginia. On the day that the suffering and death of Jesus are commemorated, the state legislature is planning cutting taxes on the richest residents and/or raising them to the poorer or slashing the programs and services they need. And proposing a budget that cuts higher education, recovery programs, public broadcasting and all kinds of stuff.

This would be the day after a house of delegates committee voted to support drug testing for TANF residents--because apparently it's fun to impose rituals of degradation on poor people--and gutted harm reduction programs in a state devastated by the opioid epidemic.

All this is after taking millions away from public schools to support the privatization of education, increasing penalties and punishment, slamming transgender youth, supporting resolutions to rewrite the US constitution (what could possibly go wrong?) and other ill stuff I can't even remember at this point.

Tomorrow, Holy Saturday, commemorates the story of Jesus' descent into hell to free captive spirits. In WV, the hell part applies, but I don't see a lot of liberation going on here. Sunday celebrates Easter, but I don't see a resurrection for this state coming any time soon.

On the other hand, it seems that miraculous resurrections, if and when they happen, aren't predictable. I guess I'll hold onto that.

Told ya

 Some of the hardest fights and most painful losses of the last few years were the passage of state anti-labor laws in a state with a long and proud union history. Specifically, these include passage of union busting right-to-work-for-less (RTWFL)  and the repeal of prevailing wage for public construction projects. Union members and supporters of working families fought those tooth and nail.

Supporters of these anti-worker bills promised the moon. Employers and workers were supposed to flock to West Virginia with the passage of RTWFL. The repeal of prevailing wage was supposed to save taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. None of those things happened. In fact, the state has lost around 60,000 people since 2015.

WV Governor Jim Justice admitted that these were epic fails yesterday. Here's a snip from MetroNews:

“Really and truly, let’s just be brutally honest,” the governor said about a half-hour into Wednesday night’s town hall. “We passed the right-to-work law in West Virginia. And we ran to the windows looking to see all the people that were going to come — and they didn’t come. We got rid of prevailing wage. We changed our corporate taxes and we’ve done a lot of different things. And we’ve run to the windows and they haven’t come.

“We’ve absolutely built the field in a lot of different places thinking build the field and they’ll come, and they didn’t come.”

 Lots of us were saying "No ****" when we heard that. Unfortunately, the governor was saying that while all those things failed, this time around repeal of the state income tax will REALLY work.

It reminds me of the cartoon Peanuts when Lucy repeatedly held the football for Charlie Brown only to yank it away at the last minute. Will we fall for that again?

Remembering a great West Virginia writer

 It's no secret that my favorite West Virginia writer is Breece Pancake from my hometown of Milton. If you know anything about him, you probably know that he took his own life in Charlottesville, Virginia on Palm Sunday in  1979.

By the time of his death, he had published some stories in The Atlantic and literary magazines. His book of short stories, appropriately titled The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake was put together posthumously and published in 1983 after massive efforts by his mother Helen Pancake, my friend and co-worker at the time, and author/teacher John Casey.

Although the last few decades hardly qualify as the Golden Age of short stories, Breece's book has never been out of print and has been translated into several languages. I was pleasantly surprised when a friend sent me this link to a recent post about him from The Paris Review by fellow West Virginia writer, by way of Buckhannon, Jayne Ann Phillips.

Here's a sample, but there's way more:

Breece D’J Pancake’s dozen stories, completed in the last four or five years of his life, include some of the best short stories written anywhere, at any time. Forty years of the author’s absence cast no shadow. The shadings, the broad arcs of interior, antediluvian time, are inside the sentences. The ancient hills and valleys of southern West Virginia remain Breece Pancake’s home place; the specificity and nuance of his words embody the vanished farms, the dams and filled valleys, the strip-mined or exploded mountains. His stories are startling and immediate: these lives informed by loss and wrenching cruelty retain the luminous dignity that marks the endurance of all that is most human.

They'll stone you when you're trying to be so good...

WV Governor Jim Justice's COVID-19 press conferences can be pretty unpredictable, but it was truly weird yesterday to see him basically lose his temper when asked by a reporter about a sign-on letter that several groups (including AFSC) sent about unemployment insurance for vulnerable workers and/or family members. You can view his rant here. And here's the news article written by the reporter.

(Short version: he pretty much says the groups want everyone to be on unemployment forever--not true--and that the same people wanted to let dangerous murderers and such out of prison--also not true.)

Here's the response of those who sent the letter:

As Governor Justice often reminds us, West Virginia has the largest share of its population in the country who is at risk of serious illness if they contract COVID-19. The governor has been a leader in protecting vulnerable populations throughout this crisis, and it’s disappointing to hear him dismiss the concerns around continuing to protect these populations as the state begins to reopen. Among the groups that signed onto this letter are frontline service and health workers, communities of color, and disability rights groups, all of whom represent populations that are themselves at elevated risk or who have family members at risk of serious illness due to underlying medical conditions. 

The governor has the authority and the obligation to protect at-risk workers from being forced into work situations which put them at significant risk of coming into contact with COVID-19. West Virginia code states that a person is not disqualified for unemployment insurance benefits if they leave their employment for health reasons, including a condition that could be worsened or aggravated by work. We’re also asking for more transparency out of WorkForce WV, including that the agency publicly release the conditions their office is using to determine suitable work during the COVID-19 crisis.

Our intention is to work with the Justice Administration and WorkForce WV to ensure that at-risk workers are not forced to choose between their health and their finances. Public health is not a political issue.  

 A weird thing about all this is that nobody was looking to pick a fight with the Justice administration. In fact, most of those who signed on have been generally supportive of his approach..

The fact remains that reopening will expose vulnerable people to infection and possible death. Then there's this: as Sean O'Leary with the WV Center on Budget and Policy points out, federal guidelines explicitly allow for these factors to be taken into consideration as state's consider reopening and unemployment insurance options. None of which involves what Justice referred to as "playing politics."

At least we know now that someone reads these things...

Back to work?

Like most people I know, I'd like things to get back to normal...preferably a better normal than the one we had before the outbreak. However, the rush to reopen could mean a spike in infections and even fatalities.

AFSC in WV was proud to sign on to this letter to Governor Jim Justice and key members of his administration. There's a lot to it, but the main point is that when businesses reopen, many people with compromised immune systems--or who live with those who do--will have to choose between losing unemployment insurance or risking life and health. Those workers most at risk of this are disproportionately low wage earners, women and African Americans.

The letter makes several recommendations, the most important of which are that the administration:

*Confirm that individuals with health conditions that put them at risk for complications due to COVID-19 are entitled to unemployment benefits if they leave or turn down work that risks exposure.

*Allow individuals who live with at-risk individuals to continue to collect unemployment if they turn down or leave work that risks exposure.

It's a pretty radical idea: just this once, let's pretend that human life is more important than squeezing every drop of profit out of the labor of low wage workers.

Organizing in place?

In an ordinary year, a lot of AFSC’s work in West Virginia revolves around the state’s legislative session, when we advocate with partners and community members on issues affecting low-income and working families. The session lasts 60 days from early January to early March. After that, we usually catch our breath a bit before gearing up for the next round.

This isn’t an ordinary year.

It now seems like an eon since the legislative session ended at midnight on March 7. And, while we made a lot of progress in working for economic justice, those wins have since been eclipsed in our memories as we face the COVID-19 pandemic. And there hasn’t been a lot of breath catching.

So how do you respond to a pandemic in a poor and rural state when you’re sheltering in place? We’re still trying to figure that out, but here’s what we’ve come up with so far. In the past few weeks, AFSC has worked with partners and community members to:

Call for immediate action to strengthen safety net programs. Along with allies, we reached out to government officials to streamline and remove barriers to accessing benefits such as SNAP food assistance, Medicaid, and unemployment insurance. Several of the recommendations have already been implemented, including ending waiting periods, work requirements, time limits, and eligibility redeterminations for these critical assistance programs during the outbreak. Earlier on, AFSC joined several other groups in a joint letter to Gov. Jim Justice making several immediate and longer term policy recommendations.

Reduce crowding in correctional institutions as a humanitarian and public health measure. In the legislative session, we joined with community members and partners in winning passage of several bills to reduce mass incarceration in our state. We built on this success to advocate for the early release of incarcerated people who did not pose a serious threat to public safety (see this press release and joint letter from a wide range of organizations, including some unusual allies, such as Americans for Prosperity).

As of a week ago at least 616 people have been released from jails, in addition to 70 held on technical violations and around 70 furloughed to their homes from work release centers. Those numbers have doubtless gone up in the meantime. The West Virginia Supreme Court has also issued guidelines to judges and magistrates to release people in jail who are awaiting trial.

Feed people—especially kids! Child nutrition has been an AFSC priority in West Virginia as far back as 1922. Our programs have worked to expand free school breakfasts and lunches statewide, but what happens when school is cancelled indefinitely? Ironically, a bill we supported to address this issue didn’t pass during the session.

With schools closed and stay-at-home orders in place, many children and seniors were at risk of going hungry. When the crisis hit, Liz Brunello of AFSC’s Appalachian Center for Equality (ACE) program teamed up with ally Jenny Anderson of Our Future WV to create a Facebook group called WV Food ER to provide information and identify needs, volunteers, and resources. The group now has over 3,100 members.

This quickly led to the creation of Rapid Response WV, made of several organizations and individuals around the state. The website allows people to donate, request assistance, or learn about volunteer opportunities and is organizing both the purchase and delivery of food products and hygienic necessities.

Thanks to the generosity of donors, this effort had helped more than 200 families and had over 260 volunteers by the end of last week. Demand for this kind of assistance is only going to increase. The One Foundation, a key funder of AFSC's WV programs, has recently dedicated $20,000 to this effort.

Call for accountability. Along with direct food assistance, AFSC and allies in the WV Food for All coalition have called on the governor to issue another executive order requiring county boards of education to come up with comprehensive food delivery systems for the duration of the crisis.

Unfortunately, it seems that we’re still in the early phase of this crisis. While we don’t know what the future will require of us, we know it will involve a combination of direct assistance and advocacy, organizing, and agitation at multiple levels.

In any unjust system, there will always be a need for direct assistance and acts of compassion. However, these are no substitutes for justice, for the right of all people to a decent standard of living.

Why WV needs immigrants

For pretty much every year since 2008, I've worked with the WV Center on Budget and Policy on a report called The State of Working West Virginia. Each year, there's a different focus. This time around the spotlight was on the state of West Virginia's immigrant population, which is tiny in comparison to most states but contributes greatly to our economy and culture.

We released the report last week as part of an event launching Many Roads Home, a new social media effort that highlights the stories and contributions of the state's immigrants.

We have a working agreement on the division of labor for these projects: the folks from the policy center, such as this year's co-author Sean O'Leary, do the hard parts with numbers and graphs. I do the easy parts.

It was pretty easy to point out why WV needs immigrants. Here's an excerpt with the punch line:

In 1950, the US population was over 1,50 million. West Virginia’s population that year reached its all-time high of slightly over 2 million.

Fast forward to 2019. The US population has more than doubled from the 1950 level to over 329 million. West Virginia’s population has declined by around 200,000 over the same period. A 2002 analysis by the West Virginia Health Statistics Center found that, if nobody had either moved into, nor out of, West Virginia for the 50 years between 1950 and 2000, the normal rate of population increase would have resulted in a state with 2,605,345 residents. That number would have been much higher today. 

The state and its communities are facing some serious demographic problems:

*West Virginia is among the oldest states in terms of median age.

*It has the lowest workforce participation rate, which hovers around 50 percent of its eligible population. The national average is around 63 percent.

*As of Dec. 2017, 73,879 West Virginians of all ages received Supplemental Security Insurance (SSI) for a disability.

*By 2018, 26.3 percent of West Virginians, or 475,744 individuals, received Social Security or Social Security Disability Insurance.

*Between 2010 and 2018, there were 19,000 more deaths than births.

*According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, West Virginia has the highest age adjusted death rate from opioid overdoses.

*Between July 1, 2017 and July 1, 2018, the state lost 11,216 people, a rate of over 30 people per day.

*Public school enrollment declined by 4,122 students in the last year.

These trends indicate a serious downward spiral. If not reversed, they could spell a more or less slow death to West Virginia’s communities. To thrive—or even to survive—West Virginia needs to be, and be seen as, a welcoming place for new arrivals from around the world. West Virginians have done this before under tough conditions in the days of industrialization, bridging differences and forging bonds of solidarity in ways that enriched our culture and contributed to the world at large. We need to build on that tradition.

Here we go again...

It's been nearly 10 years since I made a pilgrimage to Okinawa. When I was there, I made friends with a freelance writer who likes to ping me on days when some weird news story breaks from West Virginia...

...which is to say, we've been in touch a lot.

The best such days are when it's just something weird, like maybe a real X Files-type story. The worst are those days when WV makes the national news over some acts of bigotry and/or craven groveling to exploitative corporations.

The last year or so has been an X Files bust and a bigotry/groveling boom.

Where are Mothman, Bat Boy, and the Braxton County monster when you need them?

Let's start with groveling. Top of my list in that department was the time when a representative of a business group told legislators that we didn't need to update safe water standards since West Virginians are heavier, drink less water and eat less fish.And won the day.

For real.

That moment was another example of why I want to update the state motto from "Mountaineers Are Always Free" to "You Can't Make This **** Up."

But it's been a real banner year for bigotry. We had the state delegate who made a joke about drowning his children if they turned out to be LGBTQ. We had the Islamophobic outburst at the state capitol. We now have a public library board about to consider banning a non-sexually explicit LGBTQ-friendly children's book.

You can probably guess where I'm going with this.

I agree with what WV Senator Joe Manchin said in the wake of the publication of a photo of corrections trainees raising their hands in an apparent Nazi salute: "This is not the West Virginia I know or grew up in."

But things have changed here over the last few years. Dramatically. And, while the outbreaks are by no means confined to West Virginia,they seem to be occurring more frequently here.

It makes me think of the early phases of an epidemic. In Albert Camus' novel The Plague, a parable about the rise of fascism and Nazism that I've often quoted, the first signs begin when dead rats start showing up in the Algerian city of Oran.

Nobody noticed that much at first. Then it was just a nuisance. But pretty soon, it wasn't just rats any more.

I keep going back to something one of the heroes of that novel said about the epidemic:

"All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences."

The book ends with a warning against being too complacent about such metaphorical outbreaks. The narrator cautions that:

"...the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city."

Poll shows strong support for WV teachers

I don't know if WV legislators are paying attention (or if some of them listen to anything but out of state dark money), but a new poll shows solid support for public schools and teachers, up to and including another strike.

Sixty two percent support higher salaries for teachers. That includes 75 percent of self-described liberals, 60 percent of moderates and 57 percent of conservatives.

The most pleasant surprise for me was that 69 percent of those surveyed would support teachers if they went on another strike. And, despite the an aggressive anti-labor drive, teachers and school support workers unions enjoy the support of 55 percent.

This is no surprise, but the poll reveals little support for charter schools, with 40 percent opposing, 25 percent with no opinion, and only 35 percent supporting them.

It's nice to know that even in this toxic political climate, there's still support for workers, their organizations and their right to strike.

Four things to know about Medicaid expansion in West Virginia

Not sure how clear this infograph from the WV Center on Budget and Policy will show up on your screen, but here are four takeaways:

*As of now, over 155,000 West Virginians are covered by the expansion.These are overwhelmingly adults from working families.

*38,00 to 71,000 of these could lose coverage if the state enacts medicaid reporting requirements.

*The state experienced a 56 percent drop in the uninsured rate between 2013 and 2017. The expansion went into effect in 2014.

*Most interesting is a study of mortality rates in states that expanded Medicaid versus those that didn't. It suggests that 435 non-elderly lives were saved in the state as a result of the expansion.

This was a huge win for human rights and social justice, the biggest in my lifetime. We need to be ready to fight to keep it.

Two roads diverged

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood. ...” So begins Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken.”

Ever since ancient times, people have been fascinated by the power of crossroads. They have been the subject of poetry, song, myth and folklore.

Examples range from Robert Johnson’s classic blues song of the same name back to the days of ancient Greece, where they were sacred to Hermes, god of boundaries, borders and exchanges, and to Hecate, a witchy goddess associated both with magic and the home.

The image shows up in both the Hebrew Bible (Christian Old Testament) and the gospels. In Jeremiah 6:16, the prophet says, “Thus says the Lord: Stand at the crossroads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way lies; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls.”

In Matthew 7:13-14, Jesus says “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the way that leads to life, and only a few find it.”

Metaphorically, I think most of us have come upon crossroads where a choice must be made that can have lifelong consequences.

I think West Virginia is at a major crossroads now, one that will have a lasting impact on its future. It has to do with the face we present to the world: will it be one of narrow-mindedness, fear, hatred and bigotry or one of openness, hospitality, solidarity and basic fairness?

Let’s just say that if the West Virginia Legislature is any indication, the jury is still out. We’ve had one delegate embarrass the state by comparing people who identify as LGBTQ to terrorists ... and worse.

The leadership of the majority Republican Party has condemned these remarks, yet they refuse to move legislation ending discrimination — and some have even attempted to pass legislation that would undo local anti-discrimination ordinances.

Still other lawmakers have sought bills that would keep out refugees and immigrants in a state largely composed of the descendants of refugees and immigrants that is also rapidly aging and losing population.


That kind of thing sends a message loud and clear both to young West Virginians who feel they have no place here and to other bright and energetic people who will think two or three times before moving here.

It discourages the kind of employers and investments that would provide good jobs while promoting a good quality of life.

That degree of closed-mindedness says that education isn’t valued here and that we are proud of what — and who — we don’t know.

That kind of thing sends a message that we should continue to be nothing but a sacrifice zone for extractive industries, whether they are those that take away our natural resources or those that strip-mine our public schools.

It doesn’t have to be that way. To paraphrase the last lines of Frost’s poem, we could take the road less traveled by, and that could make all the difference.

(This appeared as an op-ed in today's Charleston Gazette-Mail.)

Stating the obvious

It's been five and a half years since then Governor Tomblin (where are you when we need you?) decided to expand Medicaid coverage for low income working West Virginians under the Affordable Care Act. A recent study by the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families found what you might expect: it was a good idea, one that literally changed and saved lives.

As I mentioned in the last post, the recent election not only strengthens the position of those states that have expanded the program--it opens the way for Medicaid expansion in several holdout states. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities,

"If all remaining non-expansion states (including Idaho, Nebraska, and Utah) adopted the expansion in 2019, more than 4.5 million uninsured people would gain coverage and uninsurance rates in these states would fall by a quarter, according to Urban Institute projections."

Let's hope we get there.

Thoughts on WV's supreme court mess

If you live in West Virginia and are in regular contact with people from out of state, there's a pretty good chance someone may have asked you "what the (fill in the blank) is going on with the whole state supreme court goat rope?"

(In case you've been frying other fish, the Republican majority in the WV House of Delegates voted to impeach all remaining members of the court, in effect blowing up an entire branch of state government. This could potentially let Republican Governor Jim Justice stack the deck until 2020.)

If you don't want to recap the whole thing blow by blow, there's a pretty good summary in Slate that doesn't get in the weeds. Of course, there is a lot of great local journalism going on by reporters like the Gazette-Mail's Jack Zuckerman and Lacie Peterson and MetroNews' Brad McIlhenny if you want the whole rundown.

My short take is that while all the remaining justices (one resigned and another retired during the mess) have been lavish in spending, only one really calls out for impeachment, to wit Allen Loughry of $32,000 couchgate fame, who is facing federal charges. The one who resigned, Menis Ketchum, has pleaded guilty to wire fraud.

Here's the lead from the Slate piece:

What the hell is going on in West Virginia? On Monday, the House of Delegates impeached the entire state Supreme Court on charges focusing on the justices’ lavish spending on office refurbishments. Republicans, who led the drive to oust the whole bench, insisted the court was irredeemably corrupt. Many Democrats countered that GOP legislators were staging a coup to seize control of the judiciary. One justice, Robin Davis, resigned rather than allow herself to be removed, proclaiming that the impeachment push was a “disaster for the rule of law” and an attempt by the legislature “to dismantle a separate branch of government.”

While Davis isn’t wrong, the court isn’t wholly blameless either. Republicans are attempting to stack it—but the justices made that task easy by engaging in conduct ranging from questionable to certainly illegal. Republicans are citing the serious allegations against two justices to justify removing all four, and they have timed their attacks to ensure that Republican Gov. Jim Justice, rather than West Virginia voters, will be able to select their replacements, thereby dragging the court far to the right.

At last count, nine people have applied for interim seats on the court. The next stop for impeachment proceedings is the state senate, where the games will presumably begin next month.

All of which is yet another reason to change the state motto from "Mountaineers are always free" to "You can't make this **** up."

Income inequality at a glance

The Economic Policy Institute recently released a study that measures income inequality in the US and in each state. Specifically, it measures the difference between the income of the wealthiest 1 percent versus the bottom 99.

 If you have a minute, check out this chart about US numbers (spoiler: the wealthiest 1 percent makes 26.3 times more than the bottom 90 percent).

In West Virginia, the top 1 percent brings home 15.3 times more than the rest. Our lower numbers reflect a shortage of wealthy people here. Or, if you want to look at the bright side, we rank 47th among states, i.e. we're one of the more equal.

The only states with lower numbers are Iowa (48), Hawaii (49), and Alaska (50). For what it's worth, New York state has the highest level of inequality using this measure. You can check out the full report here and look up other states here.

Wherever you look, though, the gap is too big.

Bad news this morning

I woke up this morning to the news of Anthony Bourdain's apparent death by suicide. It really came as quite a shock. He seemed like someone on top of the world, but this just goes to show we never really know what's going on inside a person.

I was slow to get on the bandwagon. We don't have cable on the farm, nor do we have the state flower (satellite dish). I first became a fan after my trip to Palestine in 2015, when a friend mentioned he did a show on that. I watched and it seemed like he got it right.

He really had a knack for combing cuisine with cultural observation, political insights, and empathy. (I also have to mention that he was a fellow martial artist who was pretty advanced in Brazilian jiu jitsu.)

When I heard he was doing a segment on McDowell County, WV, I was curious but had a feeling he'd do it right. In my opinion, he did. Here's what I wrote about it in an earlier post:

For natives of the state, it's almost never a good thing when WV gets national media attention. Stereotypes, over-simplifications and poverty porn about. But I'd have to say that aside from a few minor criticisms about certain outliers, he and his crew got it right. The school featured, Mount View High School, is one of the schools my domestic partner teaches at and she knew kids well. I saw some friends as well. And I love McDowell County, which was where most of it was filmed.

I know some people had issues with it, but I think it could have been SOOOOO much worse.

I think the world will be a good bit worse without him. I know West Virginia lost a friend and advocate.

I wish him a good journey to parts unknown.