Golly, who could have seen this coming?

Remember all the hype about President Obama's "war on coal" and how Prince Joffrey President Trump would make coal great again?

This is from an AP report:

U.S. demand for coal to generate electricity will continue its slide in coming months despite efforts by the Trump administration to prop up the struggling industry, federal officials said Thursday.

Renewable energy sources are expected to fill much of the gap left by coal's decline, according to the Energy Information Administration...

Under President Donald Trump, officials have sought to ease coal plant regulations and mining restrictions. But after production briefly bumped up in the year after Trump took office, almost all coal mining states are now experiencing production declines.

This summer, coal's share of energy production is expected to be 25 percent, down by around half over the last 10 years. And it's market driven.

Maybe we should sacrifice another generation or two of West Virginians to the industry just to make sure?

A big question

It's become a bit of an annual ritual for AFSC in WV to collaborate with the WV Center on Budget and Policy on a "State of Working West Virginia" report. Each one usually has a theme. This year, it's a perennial question about the Mountain State: why is West Virginia so poor?

The report has four parts, including a historical overview (written by yours truly); a look at contemporary data, a statistical regression analysis of factors affecting policy, and policy recommendations to reduce poverty.

In the first section, I tried to explore the two leading explanations for that poverty: culture vs colonialism. You can guess which side I lean towards. If you're really bored, check it out.

Another passing

West Virginia lost another good guy this week in the person of journalist Tom Miller, who died at the age of 78. Miller spent much of his career at the Huntington newspapers (there used to be two) and after his "retirement" he wrote a statehouse column called "Under the Dome" which was widely carried around the state.

Among his many accomplishments, aside from being a genuinely nice person, was the groundbreaking reporting series "Who Owns West Virginia?" in 1974. The short answer, by the way, is not West Virginians.

Millers findings were later echoed by the Appalachian Land Study in the 1980s. A few years back, my organization, the American Friends Service Committee, partnered with the WV Center on Budget and Policy to revisit the question in a report inspired by Miller's research and titled "Who Owns West Virginia in the 21st Century?"

Some things have changed since Miller's groundbreaking work, but the big things haven't. And the short answer to his question remains the same.

Thanks, Tom, for pointing the way. And for being a light shining in darkness all these years.

The road not taken

The follow op-ed of mine ran in yesterday's Charleston Gazette-Mail. (An early draft ran here a while back.)

Lately I’ve been working on a research project about a perennial West Virginia topic: why our state is so poor. There’s been a lot of discussion about that lately in this political year.

But even though times are hard now, this region of the country has been known for poverty for a century or more. And many explanations have been given, some better, some worse.

I’ve been surprised to find that the most insightful — and prophetic — words on the subject are 132 years old. And they came from an official state Tax Commission, of all places.

The commission was charged with the mission to “collect and report whatever information will enable the Legislature to legislate intelligently and with safety upon the subjects calculated to advance the development of the State.”

And, amazingly, they actually did just that. Apparently, the practice of telling the powerful what they want to hear wasn’t yet in fashion.

The year 1884 was fairly early in West Virginia’s industrialization, but there was a great deal of economic activity and a feverish grab for land, minerals and other natural resources. The Commission had the foresight to recognize the difference between growth and real development. It warned of the dangers to the state if the ownership and control of wealth would pass to out-of-state interests:

“It is a mistake to suppose that this State is prospering as much as she ought to do. A State is prospering when, and only when, those who permanently reside within her limits are increasing in wealth; a state is prospering only when her citizens are accumulating property. A state is unprosperous when the wealth is being absorbed by a few individuals; a state is doubly unprosperous when the property is rapidly passing from her present population of home people into the hands of non-residents.”

(Golly, that would be terrible.)

The Commission cautioned that appearances could be deceptive. New economic activity could provide the illusion of progress, but economic growth isn’t necessarily the same as real development that benefits people who live here.

They put it this way: “If the entire enterprise is owned by non-residents, if all the profits belong to persons who reside abroad, if those who are permanently identified with the locality do not participate in the harvest, the State is going backwards.”

It even provided an example that could have come from today’s newspaper:

“… Some years ago a non-resident corporation opened a mine in the county of ***; all the coal in several hundred acres was taken out and when the treasure was exhausted the property was abandoned, and that locality is today poorer and worse off than it would have been if that coal had never been touched; that foreign corporation carried away the entire harvest and all the profit; the permanent or home wealth was diminished, not increased ...”

They went on to predict more:

“The history of this locality will be repeated in many places in this State, which are now pointed out, by thoughtless persons, as illustrations of our prosperity, and those who reflect see today what those who do not reflect will surely witness in the near future — Our State despoiled of her wealth and her resident population poor, helpless, and despondent.”

They even laid out exactly how the despoiling of the state happened then and still happens today:

“When Private Interest conflicts with Patriotism, Private Interest will prevail, and these agents have a private interest far greater than their concern for the public welfare. Besides this, the people have been educated to believe that our immediate development must be obtained at any cost and regardless of sacrifice …”

Once citizens could be induced to swallow that line of thinking, anyone who “would dare to raise a warning voice against this worse than reckless and worse than foolish sacrifice of our local wealth is not only ostracized from all participation in public affairs, but is actually excluded from all the accustomed avenues to the public ear.”

They warned that then, as now, schemes to enrich private interests at public expense would gain an easy hearing, while critical voices would be marginalized:

“Whatever information or argument will cajole the people into advancing the money making schemes of individuals is published in the papers, proclaimed on the hustings and advocated by men employed to manufacture public opinion. On the other hand every fact calculated to acquaint the people with the true condition of affairs is frequently carefully suppressed by influential journals and by those who are recognized as successful politicians.”

The final paragraphs are powerful predictions of the future and sad reminders of the road not taken.

“The wealth of this State is immense; the development of this wealth will earn vast private fortunes far beyond the dreams even of a modem Croesus; the question is, whether this vast wealth shall belong to persons who live here and who are permanently identified with the future of West Virginia, or whether it shall pass into the hands of persons who do not live here and who care nothing for our State except to pocket the treasures which lie buried in our hills?”

“If the people of West Virginia can be roused to an appreciation of the situation we ourselves will gather this harvest now ripe on the lands inherited from our ancestors; on the other hand, if the people are not roused to an understanding of the situation in less than ten years this vast wealth will have passed from our present population into the hands of non-residents, and West Virginia will be almost like Ireland and her history will be like that of Poland.”

It’s too bad this warning wasn’t heeded. We’re paying dearly for it now. Incredibly, some politicians are prescribing more of the same as a remedy for our current woes.

Vampires got nothing on coal companies

If you doubt that, just take a look at McDowell County, WV, which is one of the state's top coal producing counties for the last 100 years. The wealth has been sucked out and the poverty  and misery have been left behind. Folks there and around WV are working to change things, including a friend of mine mentioned in this article. But it's hard to undo a century of exploitation.

A TAINT OF DEATH

Caption: The truth behind the lie. Native workers during King Leopold of Belgium's reign of terror in the Congo who failed to meet production quotas were punished by mutilation. Photo courtesy of wikipedia.

Reading Joseph Conrad is always challenging for me. (If this is your first visit, please click on this week's earlier posts for background on the writer and his short novel Heart of Darkness.)

Part of the reason for that may be that Polish rather than English was his first language. On the other hand, I'm not sure he'd be a cakewalk in the original either. But part of the difficulty comes from the truths he related through his fiction.

Heart of Darkness has an odd narrative device. It is told by an unnamed narrator who presumably recounts the story verbatim as told by the well-travelled and world weary Marlow, who is like an Odysseus without a home to strive for.

The setting for the storytelling is liminal. It takes place among a group of old acquaintances on a boat at twilight on the Thames near enough to the sea to feel the tides. Many of the listeners are now landsmen, though all had been to sea in the past. As the silence settles in, Marlow, who is sitting "in the pose of a meditating Buddha," begins the tale of his journey to the "Belgian" Congo which was the site of almost unimaginable colonial brutality 100 years ago (see Monday's post).

There's way too much to the story to do more than indicate here, but here are some choice nuggets from Marlow about imperialism and the ideology that tries to justify it:

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves,is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but and idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea--something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to...."

At the bottom, though, the idea/idol is a lie:

You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies--which is exactly what I hate and detest of the world--what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do. Temperament, I suppose...

The lie and the taint of death that accompanies it are still with us.

EXPORTING JOBS. The US has lost nearly 3 million manufacturing jobs since 2001, with no end in sight, according to EPI's latest snapshot.

CALL UP THE RESERVES. Cognitive reserves, that is. They may be the key to maintaining mental abilities as we age.

ANOTHER VETO on CHIP yesterday.

MEGAN WILLIAMS CASE. Here's the latest, from yesterday's Gazette. It seems that publicity is more important for some people than the outcome of the trial.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

CAPITALISM UNLEASHED

Caption: King Leopold II of Belgium, who claimed the Congo as his personal property, courtesy of Wikipedia.

A recent Business Week cover story asks the question, "Can Greed Save Africa?"

Far be it from me to deny that investments and enterprise have a role in development, but the snarky response that occurred to me was, didn't they try that before?

I'm thinking about the horrible atrocities perpetuated upon Africans by more economically developed countries over several centuries, and particularly about the Belgian plundering of the Congo in the 19th and 20th centuries. This vast area was the personal property of King Leopold II (1835-1909).

As the BBC put it awhile back,

While the Great Powers competed for territory elsewhere, the king of one of Europe's smallest countries carved his own private colony out of 100km2 of Central African rainforest.

He claimed he was doing it to protect the "natives" from Arab slavers, and to open the heart of Africa to Christian missionaries, and Western capitalists.

The result was a massive forced labor system for the extraction of things like ivory and rubber. The BBC estimates the death toll at 10 million, although some estimates are higher. Torture and mutilation were common. It was a human, epidemiological, and ecological disaster.

The atrocities committed there were so over the top that they were condemned by other imperialist powers, much as was the case with Spanish cruelties in the heyday of its empire centuries before.

One missionary was so horrified that he wrote the following to Leopold's agent:

I have just returned from a journey inland to the village of Insongo Mboyo. The abject misery and utter abandon is positively indescribable. I was so moved, Your Excellency, by the people's stories that I took the liberty of promising them that in future you will only kill them for crimes they commit.

The murder and mutilation in there revved up the ire of Mark Twain, who wrote the scathing King Leopold's Soliloquy in 1905.

This was also the setting for Joseph Conrad's short novel, Heart of Darkness, about which more tomorrow.

HEALTH CARE. Here's a good item from a medical journal about universal health care.

MEGAN WILLIAMS UPDATE. It looks like out of state groups plan another event related to this case. The Logan County prosecutor has expressed concerns about the impact of such events in the case against those police say kidnapped and abused the young African-American Woman.

WORKER FREEDOM BILL. If we're ever going to try to expand the ranks of the middle class in this country, restoring the right to organize is an obvious step. Here's an op-ed by one of El Cabrero's buddies, WV AFLCIO secretary-treasurer Larry Matheney about a bill that will be introduced in the 2008 legislative session. Dubbed the Worker Freedom Bill, it would prohibit employers from requiring workers to attend mandatory meetings in which their bosses rant on politics, religion, or the evils of a free labor movement.

CHAMBER OF YOU-FILL-IN-THE-BLANK-CAUSE-MINE'S-UNPRINTABLE. Here's a link from Wired Science about the US Chamber of Commerce's commercial about the evils of doing something about global warming. Tell us another story!

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED