ALMOST A "SUCCESS"

Debs with attorney and socialist William A. Cunnea. Credit: Chicago Daily News negatives collection, DN-0003451. Courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society, by way of the Library of Congress.

Welcome to Eugene Debs week at Goat Rope. A few years back I had the chance to portray the union and Socialist leader for a WV Humanities Council program and found him to be a fascinating person.

One challenge of portraying a historical character is just getting the outline of their life in mind. Then comes familiarizing yourself with the person’s speeches or writings and trying to use as many of them as possible in the presentations.

Then comes the challenge of trying to get inside their head.

In the case of Eugene, it wasn’t that hard. He was no Hamlet—what you saw was what you got: sentimental, gregarious, idealistic. Pretty much the polar opposite of El Cabrero.

The son of immigrant parents who established a small grocery, Debs grew up in a close knit, loving family. Reading was a central activity. The works of Rousseau, Voltaire, and Goethe were favorites. Debs was named for two of his father’s favorite authors, Eugene Sue and Victor Hugo.

Hugo’s Les Miserables was probably Debs’ favorite book. He read it over and over—whereas I’d bet serious money he never made it all the way through volume I of Marx’s Das Kapital. He probably cried like a baby at each Les Mis re-reading. One can only imagine him at the musical. (He WOULD hear the people sing.)

Debs dropped out of school at age 14 to work for the railroads. His first job consisted of scraping rust and grease of rail cars, for which he was paid around $.50 per day. After a while, he worked his way up to painting. His “big break” came when he got a chance to work as a locomotive fireman, a dangerous and exhausting job that he enjoyed.

Trains have always been pretty cool, but they were the bomb in the late 1800s, an equivalent of fast cars, jets, rockets and the internet today. It was his first contact with the life of the working class and it made a huge impression.

When depression hit in the early 1870s, he returned to Terra Haute and worked as a clerk for a grocery firm, which was quite a step down. But like many Americans of that century, and like the young Lincoln, he set upon the task of self improvement. He took night classes and joined the Occidental Literary Society, where he made his first efforts at public speaking.

In the mid-1870s, Debs became a charter member and recording secretary of the Terra Haute local of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, which at the time was more of a fraternal and insurance society than a union. Its motto was Benevolence, Sobriety, Industry.

A key belief seemed to be that if working people conducted themselves with dignity and diligence, their employers would recognize this and reward them accordingly--a theory that would prove naive in the age of trusts and robber barons.

Still, Debs would stay with the BLF for nearly 20 years, eventually rising to prominence within its ranks.

There was nothing in his early life that would indicate the making of a radical. If anything, here was another prairie success story in the making. But life had other plans, about which more tomorrow.

HEALTH CARE MESS. Yesterday's USA Today had an interesting item on the decline of employer-provided health insurance.

OUCH. Here's an item from the UK Guardian about the pain of globalization (they spelled it with an s).

HEADING SOUTH. More than one third of Americans are downwardly mobile these days.

HEADING NORTH. On the other hand, AP estimates the costs of current wars at $1.6 trillion.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

DAY OF THE DEAD

Welcome to Goat Rope's official Haint Week. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

"Haint" is Appalachian for that which haunts, which is a pretty good theme for Halloween week.

A Mexican custom of which El Cabrero is a big fan of is the Day of the Dead, which corresponds with All Saints Day in the Church calendar. Halloween, you recall, is All-Hallows-Eve or the day before. Similar customs are observed elsewhere, but it is the official Goat Rope verdict that this is the coolest.

The celebration likely has pre-Christian roots. During the Aztec month of Miccailhuitonli (say that 10 times while spinning around), there was a festival presided over by the "Lady of the Dead" which was dedicated both to children and the dead. Originally, this was celebrated in the summer, but there was an understandable post-colonial shift.

Now the festivities usually continue for the first two days of November and include acts that symbolically welcome the dead back into their homes and visiting family graves. There's special food including "pan de muerto" or bread of the dead. Family altars and gravesides are decorated with religious objects and symbolic offerings of food flowers and even alcohol and cigarettes.

I think the basic idea is right on, i.e. that the living and the dead are connected. That idea is enshrined in the ancient creeds of Christianity, which speak of "the communion of saints."

Maybe that's because the dead aren't quite as dead as we tend to think or the living aren't as alive as we tend to think. I'll leave that to the reader's discretion...

YOU DON'T NEED A WEATHERMAN... Here's a sobering item on climate change and global warming.

NO FEAR? Consider reconsidering.

A FAIR DAY'S WORK FOR--WHAT? Here's a call for decent wages and conditions for all.

BOOK BATTLES. The recent efforts by some Kanawha County parents to ban Pat Conroy's novels from AP English classes reminds some folks of an epic book battle that took place more than 30 years ago.

MINE SAFETY LEGISLATION MOVES IN US HOUSE. A House panel approved stronger mine safety measures, a step that the industry and Bush administration will oppose.

MEGAN WILLIAMS MARCH UPDATE. Here's the Daily Mail interviewing the Rev. Matthew Watts, a member of the Charleston Ministerial Alliance, about a march planned for this Sunday by out of state groups. Several WV groups have declined to support the event.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

PRESSED INTO SERVICE

Photo credit: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

This is Pirate Week at Goat Rope. If this is your first visit, please click on the earlier entries.

As mentioned yesterday, pirates of the Golden Age (1715-1725) were folk heroes to many members of the lower classes--including sailors in the Royal Navy and in merchant vessels, many of whom would voluntarily join them given the chance. According to Colin Woodard, author of The Republic of Pirates,

They were sailors, indentured servants, and runaway slaves rebelling against their oppressors: captains, ship owners, and the autocrats of the great slave plantations of America and the West Indies.

Consider the lot of a sailor on a merchant vessel. In Woodard's words,

Merchants were compelled to adopt aggressive tactics to fill their crews. Some hired "spirits," or men who, in the words of sailor Edward Barlow, went about inns and taverns looking to "entice any who they think are country people or strangers...or any who they think are out of place and cannot get work and are walking idly about the streets."

The spirits promised good wages and cash in advance but wound up keeping several months of the sailor's wages as a commission. Some captains relied on "crimps" who took advantage of drunkards or indebted people or resorted to outright kidnapping. Once on board, the sailors were legally obliged to serve until the end of a voyage that could last for months or years.

The Royal Navy offered worse pay and harsher punishments and often resorted to press gangs that would round up any seaman or unfortunate soul they could find to meet the quote of men.

As we'll see tomorrow, the conditions aboard ship were pretty terrible.

I don't know about y'all, but I'm about ready to take the pirate oath...

MEGAN WILLIAMS SPEAKS. Here's an interview by AP with Megan Williams.

KANT WOULD CALL THIS "HETERONOMY." It appears some folks at the (WV) State Journal, a business paper sometimes more ideological than commercial, have adopted the position that because the coal industry might be inconvenienced if the human contribution to global warming was acknowledged it therefore isn't happening. Meanwhile, check this out.

IT'S NOT EASY BEING GREEN according to this Business Week article.

BAD MEDICINE. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, the decline in family incomes will have serious health impacts in this country.

ALONG THOSE LINES, here's a briefing paper by the Economic Policy Institute on the impact of globalization in its current form on wages for US workers.

MORE ON BOOK BANNING. According to this Gazette piece, author Pat Conroy has responded to efforts to ban his books from AP classes in Kanawha County. Here's his letter to the editor.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

PARTHIAN SHOTS

Caption: Seamus McGoogle is a Nietzschean Uber-Cat.

This week's Goat Rope has featured nuggets from Nietzsche along with link and comments about current events. Even though he was way out there sometimes, he had his moments.

If memory serves, the English phrase "parting shots" is derived from the term "Parthian shots." This refers to the tactic of ancient Persian cavalry to turn and shoot unexpectedly when appearing to flee.

El Cabrero had trouble coming up with a single parting shot from Beyond Good and Evil to close out the week, so here are a few to ponder:

One is punished most for one's virtues.

The belly is the reason man does not so easily take himself for a god.

Who has not for the sake of his reputation- sacrificed himself?

Under conditions of peace the warlike man attacks himself.

Mature manhood: that means to have rediscovered the seriousness one had as a child at play.

One ought to depart from life as Odysseus departed from Nausicaa--blessing rather than in love with it.

CHIP GAINS VOTES BUT NOT ENOUGH to override Bush's veto. Here's how they voted. I guess the president wanted to save the money for a worthier cause such as his unnecessary war in...

IRAQ. This neat video against the war was reportedly produced by a 16 year old.

MAKING SENSE. This op-ed on the global economy by WV delegate Nancy Guthrie is worth a look.

HEARTBREAKING...NOT. From AP's Lawrence Messina's recent story about Massey CEO Don Blankenship:

Don Blankenship believes he cannot remain chairman, CEO and president of Massey Energy Co. and stay involved in West Virginia politics ---- unless he prevails in his federal lawsuit against Gov. Joe Manchin, his lawyers contend in the pending case.

The mere contemplation of such a loss causes El Cabrero to grow faint. Excuse me whilst I revive myself with smelling salts...

OK, I'm back.

IT'S EASY BEING NOT GREEN. El Cabrero is not usually a big fan of state rankings by business magazines like Forbes. But I believe this one...

EVERYBODY CAN RELAX:

The Internal Revenue Service recently released its fun-filled report on 2005 individual income taxes. The headline is that the super-rich were even more super than in any year since 1986 when the IRS first had comparable data. The news pages of The Wall Street Journal duly took note, but not many others did.

The top 1 percent of all taxpayers earned 21.2 percent of all the money that individuals in the country earned in 2005. So one-hundredth of the taxpayers earned one-fifth of all income. (The data are available here.)

That's a relief, huh? The rest of the story is here.

MORE ON CENSORSHIP from John Milton:

As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's Image: but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the Image of God, as it were, in the eye.

That one goes out to WV's domestic Taliban for its latest book banning stunt (see yesterday's post).

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ALTISSIMA

A CHALLENGE

Welcome to Albert Camus Week at Goat Rope. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

El Cabrero just noticed by accident that 2007 is the 50th anniversary of Camus' Nobel Prize for literature.

Here's what he had to say about the challenges of his generation (which kinda sounds like the challenges of ours):

Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world. Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself. Heir to a corrupt history, in which are mingled fallen revolutions, technology gone mad, dead gods, and worn-out ideologies, where mediocre powers can destroy all yet no longer know how to convince, where intelligence has debased itself to become the servant of hatred and oppression, this generation starting from its own negations has had to re-establish, both within and without, a little of that which constitutes the dignity of life and death.

Sound familiar? There's more:

In a world threatened by disintegration, in which our grand inquisitors run the risk of establishing forever the kingdom of death, it knows that it should, in an insane race against the clock, restore among the nations a peace that is not servitude, reconcile anew labour and culture, and remake with all men the Ark of the Covenant.

He believed, rightly or wrongly, that some people from his generation were up for the challenge:

It is not certain that this generation will ever be able to accomplish this immense task, but already it is rising everywhere in the world to the double challenge of truth and liberty and, if necessary, knows how to die for it without hate. Wherever it is found, it deserves to be saluted and encouraged, particularly where it is sacrificing itself. In any event, certain of your complete approval, it is to this generation that I should like to pass on the honour that you have just given me.

More to the point, are we?

SPEAKING OF (NOT) PREVENTING THE WORLD FROM DESTROYING ITSELF, click here.

CHIP UPDATE. The House passed a stopgap spending measure to keep funding for the Children's Health Insurance Program at its current rate through Nov.

DOES GLOBALIZATION MAKE FOR WAR OR PEACE? According to this analysis, it depends...

BANG FOR THEIR BUCK. It looks like the folks at Blackwater are a little trigger happy even by military contractor standards.

MEGAN WILLIAMS CASE. This is the latest legal news as of now. There have been rumors of outside groups coming to Logan County to protest but these have not materialized so far. Meanwhile, local residents have been discussing organizing some kind of positive community event in response to these crimes. More on that as plans develop.

TALKING SENSE. The Chicken Littles of El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia are always talking about how we rank at or near the bottom in this or that (often spurious) business ranking list. This post a while back from abetterWestVirginia.com is a good response.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

SCIENCE WARS

Caption: Goats study the science of irritating humans. Actually, they've perfected it.

Let's start with an unsolicited product endorsement. El Cabrero is a big fan of The Teaching Company and Recorded Books' Modern Scholar series, both of which provide audio courses on all kinds of topics by recognized scholars.

Many public libraries carry these items. With them, you can "read" and learn while, driving, jogging, mowing the lawn, chasing the goats, etc.

One that I'm enjoying at the moment is Science Wars: What Scientists Know and How they Know it by Steven L. Goodman.

Goldman points out early on that just as the natural sciences reached their highest level of prestige in the mid-20th century, they came under attack from a number of different directions. Here are some:

*In the wake of the Vietnam War and concerns about nuclear devastation, many people criticized the sciences for their collaboration with governments and corporations engaged in making and using destructive weapons and products such as napalm and Agent Orange. This was not a criticism of science as such but rather of the uses to which it was put;

*Within the sciences and the field of the philosophy of science, there was a growing movement which questioned the objectivity of science and the claim that it was value free and neutral. Some authors, such as Thomas Kuhn, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, suggested that science was more a matter of developing paradigms or models of the world that accounted for observations than of "reflecting" objective processes;

*In the field of literary and social theory, some people argued that the sciences were social constructions and that knowledge claims were often based on the interests of powerful groups who inflicted their power/knowledge on others. Later, post-modernists claimed that science was just one of many possible narratives for describing the world and had no special claim to validity;

*From a completely different direction, there was a rising fundamentalist backlash against the findings of the natural sciences on areas such as evolution, the origin and age of the universe, etc.

All of these tendencies have left their mark on the current state of the public view of science and contemporary confusion about its nature and role.

AT LEAST NOW WE KNOW about that UFO/Air Force dogfight over Braxton County in the 1950s.

THIS JUST IN. If you are looking for scientific data on how to deal with a drunk person you are shocking with electricity, click here. The take home message seems to be that people who are drunk are less belligerent when distracted.

BACKLASH AGAINST GLOBALIZATION. From the UK Financial Times:

A popular backlash against globalization and the leaders of the world’s largest companies is sweeping all rich countries, an FT/Harris poll shows.

Large majorities of people in the US and in Europe want higher taxation for the rich and even pay caps for corporate executives to counter what they believe are unjustified rewards and the negative effects of globalization...

The issue of rising inequality is now high on the political agenda of every country and will feature prominently in the 2008 US presidential election.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

WHAT THEY SAID...

Caption: Backward priorities aren't going to get us where we want to go.

More than a year ago, writer Holly Sklar wrote a strong op-ed with the title "Wanted: A High Road Economy." The immediate context of the piece was the now successful campaign to raise the long stagnant minimum wage.

But she also raises some serious issues about the choices that continue to confront us as we try to meet the economic challenges of the 21st century, both in the U.S. as a whole and in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia.

Again, it comes down to the low road or the high road:

Waving the banner of "global competitiveness," corporate and government policymakers are running the U.S. economy into the ground. We are becoming a nation of Scrooge-Marts and outsourcers—with an increasingly low-wage workforce instead of a growing middle class.

She cites an all too familiar list of current trends: record numbers of Americans without health care; stunning trade deficits and debt to other countries; declining public investments in infrastructure and R&D; growing inequality and personal debt; etc.

She notes:

We will not prosper in the 21st century global economy by relying on 1920s corporate greed, 1950s tax revenues, downwardly mobile wages and global-warming energy policies. We will not prosper relying on disinvestment in place of reinvestment. We can't succeed that way any more than farmers can "compete" by eating their seed corn.

The low road doesn't even make good business sense. One of the sources cited by Sklar is the book How We Compete: What Companies Around the World Are Doing To Make It In Today's Global Economy by Suzanne Berger. In discussing the results of a study by the MIT Industrial Performance Center of more than 500 international companies, Berger says:

Contrary to the widely held belief of many managers, we conclude that solutions that depend on driving down costs by reducing wages and social benefits—in advanced countries or in emerging economies—are always dead ends. . .

Strategies based on exploiting low-wage labor end up in competitive jungles, where victories are vanishingly thin and each day brings a new competitor. . . As low-end firms that compete on price move from one overcrowded segment of the market to the next, there is virtually no chance of gaining any durable advantage. The activities that succeed over time are, in contrast, those that build on continuous learning and innovation.

In an interview from MIT's openDOOR in 2006, Berger makes it plain:

Globalization can continue to produce great benefits for our society--on the condition that we strengthen the infrastructure of education and research. We also need to recognize that openness has costs, and that the costs and benefits are not evenly distributed. Many who lose jobs because of the relocation of production or trade will not get new ones that pay as well. So if we are going to maintain broad public support for an economy open to international flows of goods and services and capital, we need to be sure that losing a job does not mean losing a family's access to basic necessities, like health care, provision in old age, and education.

That is talking sense.

EFCA HELD HOSTAGE IN SENATE. The U.S. Senate voted 51-48 for cloture on the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) yesterday. Sixty votes were needed to move the measure to a floor vote. Supporters are planning on keeping up the campaign as long as it takes. Even yesterday's vote represents a victory of sorts--it's the first time in ages that a majority of senators voted to reform labor laws.

YOUNG AMERICANS in a new New York Times/CBS/MTV poll seem to be moving to the left of their elders on some issues. Details here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

DOGS, CATS...WHY NOT PEOPLE?

Caption: These guys are protected. Why not workers?

William Greider, writing in the Jan. 29th Nation, asks an interesting question. Here's the background.

Several years ago, American consumers were mortified to discover that some of the collars on their imported coats were made with the fur of cats and dogs. Congress responded by passing the Dog and Cat Protection Act of 2000, which banned imported garments made with cat or dog fur and "included fines of up to $10,000 for each illegal item and barred repeat violators from importing fur products."

(El Cabrero devoutly hopes that the bill does not apply to those who wear or are worn by live domestic animals or clothing made from other materials and incidentally decorated with cat or dog hair. But I digress...)

Here's the question:

If Congress can protect the rights of dogs and cats in foreign trade, will it do the same for the young girls--some as young as 11--who work in sweatshops? They stitch garments for as little as 6 cents an hour and typically work twelve- to sixteen-hour days, sometimes longer and often in brutal conditions?

Greider reports that anti-sweatshop legislation is in the works. One is modelled on a bill introduced last year by Senator Byron Dorgan and Representative (now Senator) Sherrod Brown.

It bars imports produced under internationally defined "sweatshop" conditions and holds companies accountable for using forced labor or denying basic human rights to workers, including the right to organize.

Even if the proposed legislation doesn't go anywhere soon, this could raise public awareness and force politicians to take a stand on the issues.

ON A TOTALLY DIFFERENT NOTE, this is encouraging.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED