Light reading

If you are curious about the 43 page indictment of former Massey CEO Don Blankenship, you can read the whole thing here. There are 108 numbered sections, although I may not be using the right term.

THIS SHOULD BE EASY TO FIX. There's a lot of talk here and elsewhere about the need for economic transition in West Virginia. One thing that could easily help is more state investment in promoting WV tourism. Oh yeah, and it might help if we stop trashing and poisoning the place.

BIG DOGS TAKE AIM AT A GOOD POLICY. One policy idea long advocated here is the creation of a system of Voluntary Employee Retirement Accounts for workers without pensions. The financial industry, which so far hasn't stepped up to do squat for these people, is gunning to kill the idea.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Fishing for a compliment

I was all about to blog on some serious topic today, but first things first. It turns out that a young man from El Cabrero's small WV home town recently caught a state record-size blue catfish in the Ohio River. The leviathan in question measured 47.75 inches in length and weighed 52.95 pounds.

(When I was a kid, the old guys would have said that it took the water five minutes to fill in the hole that the fish came out of.)

((Also when I was a kid, the old guys would tell us stories about giant catfish lurking in the bottom of the Ohio and Kanawha. Who would have thought they were right? I mean, these are the same guys who told us stories about bottomless rivers, snipe hunting and haints...))

(((Come to think of it, I kind of miss the old guys.)))

The angler in question reveals a secret of fishing that I've long suspected: the key is not to try. He told the press he was only trying out some new gear on his boat and had no intention of catching anything.

I'm pleased to say that after being duly measured, the leviathan was released live. Click here to see the beast.

REPEAL RITUALISM. According to this NPR report, the energy behind repealing the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) seems to be fading.

ONE TO WATCH. More and more states, including WV, are trying to pass legislation that would create voluntary retirement accounts for workers without pensions. WV's bill passed the state House and one Senate committee before dying. We'll be back to push for it.

NO CLIMATE CHANGE HAPPENING HERE, BOSS. West Virginia's ruling class officially denies this.

CINCO DE MAYO. Here's some stereotype busting.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A good kind of zombie

The WV legislature has a week to go, and it promises to be quite a week. One pleasant surprise this time around is the emergence of what I thought was a long-dead bill back into the game.

For several years, I worked with friends at the WV Center on Budget and Policy et al to generate interest in  voluntary employee retirement accounts (VERA) for workers who don't have employer provided pensions. These would involve payroll deductions into an account managed by the WV Treasurer's Office, which already does something similar with college savings. Workers could then build assets for retirement and would keep the account if they moved from job to job.

After a while, we started calling it Dear Old Aunt Vera. We seemed to generate a little bit of traction several years back, but then it seemed to fizzle out.

This year, however, Aunt Vera came back from the dead. The state AARP and their allies managed to move a VERA bill through the WV House of Delegates. Yesterday, it cleared the Pensions Committee in the state Senate. Next stop is Finance, which is often where good bills go to die.

Although such a program would be a win all the way around, several business groups oppose the measure, claiming it would put the government in competition with private business. You could smell the money in the committee meeting. Their claims, however, are bogus. If financial businesses were really filling that niche, half our workers wouldn't be without any kind of retirement savings.

Secondly, and snarkily, if government is as inefficient and incapable of doing anything, what are these guys so scared of?

Who knows?

With a little bit less than two weeks to go at the WV legislature, things could break either way. This could be a good year for kids and working families...or not. At this point, several things are still in play but could be lost in the fog and confusion of the last chaotic days.

The minimum wage passed the house and needs to be reconciled with the senate version. Fast food types, McDonald's' in particular, are trying to gut the bill. I hope the senate holds the line. Worst case would be changing definitions so that the increase would be meaningless.

The Future Fund passed the senate unanimously. It faces an uncertain future in the house due to rivalry and budget concerns, even though the FF wouldn't kick in for a couple of years, when the state's budget woes will have leveled off.

Speaking of the budget, it's not clear at this point whether proposed cuts to domestic violence and early childhood programs will be reversed.

The physical activity bill, Move to Improve, is headed to the house and the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act is awaiting action in the senate.

Two old bills that I've supported in the past but just about gave up on showed unexpected life. One is a reform to unemployment insurance which allows companies to reduce hours instead of jobs and lets workers draw benefits for the lost wages. Another is a voluntary retirement account bill which would allow workers who don't have pensions to build assets towards retirement. Both of these miraculously rose from the grave and made it through the house.

One thing's for sure. The next 13 days are gonna be crazy.

A little more than kin, and less than kind

Russian actor Nikolai Massalitinov as Claudius with Olga Knipper as Gertrude in the Moscow Art Theatre's production of Hamlet (1911), by way of wikipedia.

For first time visitors, the theme lately is Hamlet, but you'll also find links and comments about current events. If you like this kind of thing, please click on earlier posts.

We first get to meet what's left of Hamlet's family in scene II of Act I, which opens with the usurper Claudius justifying the hasty marriage to Gertrude that followed Old Hamlet's mysterious death:

Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother's death
The memory be green, and that it us befitted
To bear our hearts in grief and our whole kingdom
To be contracted in one brow of woe,
Yet so far hath discretion fought with nature
That we with wisest sorrow think on him,
Together with remembrance of ourselves.
Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen,
The imperial jointress to this warlike state,
Have we, as 'twere with a defeated joy,--
With an auspicious and a dropping eye,
With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage,
In equal scale weighing delight and dole,--
Taken to wife: nor have we herein barr'd
Your better wisdoms, which have freely gone
With this affair along.

Young Hamlet isn't exactly wearing a party hat and is chided for his excessive grief. In what would turn out to be a big mistake, he is asked by Claudius and Gertrude to stay in Elsinore rather than resume his studies in Wittenberg. Note to Claudius: dude, you screwed up there big time.

Along with family hassles and political intrigue, the scene also contains Hamlet's first soliloquy in favor of death. Here's a taste:

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely...

I've had days like that...

FROM THERE TO HERE. Here's Jared Bernstein on how bad the Great Recession is (was?) and how far we've moved back from the brink.

FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH, over 60 percent of Americans opposed the US Supreme Court's Americans United ruling, which opens the floodgates for corporate contributions in political campaigns.

UNLIKELY ALLIES. For the last few years, some of the usual suspects have been trying to get a bill passed in the WV legislature that would set up voluntary employee retirement accounts for workers without pensions. It would be handled by the State Treasurer's office through payroll deductions and workers could continue to build savings as they moved from job to job. Recently, the WV Center on Budget and Policy teamed up with the Heritage Foundation to build support for this measure, something that doesn't happen every day.

NICE KITTY. Here's video of a wild Sumatran tiger and her cubs.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED