Another day, another hurdle or three

This is night two of being snowed into the capitol of El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia to attend the waning days of the legislative session. It is quite a contrast from Goat Rope Farm. For more than 24 hours, I haven't seen or heard any goats, guineas, roosters, cats, dogs or turkeys.

Well, maybe turkeys...

Seriously, though, the home team won a innings today, although the game is still uncertain. Nearest and dearest to my heart is the Future Fund, which would create a permanent source of wealth for WV. It cleared the House Judiciary today. Next stop, finance, then the House floor. If it makes it all the way through, I have taken a sacred oath to get plowed under.

Next, two good bills that already passed the House cleared Senate Judiciary. One, which heads to the floor next, is the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which is pretty much what it sounds like. It would require employers to make reasonable accommodations to women who are of the pre-partum persuasion.

Another bill was one that I gave up for dead a year or so ago. It is now called the Valued Employee Retention Act, but we called it work sharing back in the day. Basically, it's a reform of unemployment insurance that would let employers cut hours instead of jobs while allowing workers to collect benefits for lost wages. It has one more hurdle before hitting the Senate floor.

Here's an interesting development on another front. One item on the Our Children Our Future platform is a bill that would make the kinds of Sudafed (I've never figured out how to spell that) that can be used to make meth into a prescription drug. Big PHARMA has cried havoc and let slip the dogs of war on this, to coin a phrase. But their claims are bogus. Tamper-proof forms of the drug would remain available above the counter.

Anyway, folks wanting to cut down on WV's meth problems got a boost from an unexpected quarter. Haley Barbour, former governor of Mississippi and head of the Republican National Committee wrote to House members supporting this step. He noted that when his state made it a prescription drug,  meth labs declined by 98 percent. According to Barbour, "This bi-partisan bill may be the most significant drug enforcement legislation in the history of Mississippi."

In the spirit of fair play, ippon (Japanese for full point) for Barbour for this good deed. 

In West Virginia, according to the Eric Eyre of the Charleston Gazette, "Meth lab seizures have more than tripled in West Virginia -- from 154 labs in 2010 to 533 labs last year." That is way uncool. And any kid found in a meth house gets a fast ticket to foster care. Shame on the meth lobby, however they style themselves.

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.

Ashamed before the blade of grass

The theme at Goat Rope these days continues to be the life and thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson, with a focus at the moment on his famous essay Self Reliance, which is a call for and declaration of spiritual independence.

There is a pretty good bit of irony in today's selection, which involves quoting from a bit of his essay that opposes quoting other people. I beg to disagree with Waldo here. I love finding examples of people who say things better than I ever could. It happens all the time. But the paragraph also contains some good insights into the difficulty we have of living in the present.This is another example of how Emerson's ideas both reflected his interest in Buddhist thought and anticipated elements of it as yet unknown in America. And you can quote me on that.

Here's goes:

Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say 'I think,' 'I am,' but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.

A GOOD IDEA. Here's economist Dean Baker with a column on how the US could improve its employment picture with a more extensive use of work sharing, which involves reducing hours rather than cutting jobs and letting affected workers draw partial benefits for the lost wages. El Cabrero and friends have tried to push this idea in WV. It actually made it through one legislative committee this session despite the irrational hostility of the state Chamber of Commerce for a business friendly measure and an equally bizarre attempt at sabotage at the state workforce agency.

ONE MORE LINK JUST FOR FUN. Here's a look at some of the whackiest things televangelist Pat Robertson has said. I'll bet it was hard to whittle it down to 10.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

This n that

I am so not ready for the end of the Thanksgiving weekend, but I have a lot of work things in the hopper. One such item is an idea that  the WV legislature is considering, to wit work sharing, a way of dealing with cyclical downturns in the economy by reducing hours rather than jobs and allowing affected workers to collect partial unemployment insurance for lost wages. Here's an op-ed by yours truly on the subject.

GO TEAMSTERS. Lincoln County WV native Ken Hall has climbed to the height of influence in the 1.4 million member Teamsters union. Here's his take on the shameful firing of WV school superintendent Jorea Marple.

LIKE THE SAYING SAYS, you only get one chance to make a first impression.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Quote of the week (or century)

Here's one of the best quotes about literature I've ever found. It is attributed to Southern author Pat Conroy's mother:

“All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: ‘On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.’” 

I tend to distinguish between Appalachian and Southern culture and literature, but I do recall a short story by my favorite WV author Breece Pancake which involved a bit of hoggish anthropophagy.

(And, by the way, how is anthropophagy for a cool word? It sounds way classier than man-eating.)

MUST READING. Here is yet more rationality from Coal Tattoo. Some of the links are really worth checking out.

WORK SHARING. Here's an op-ed by yours truly on a new way to deal with cyclical unemployment.

BABOONS AND PEOPLE. For both animals, those with higher social status are healthier.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Target practice

I admit it. There are few things in the world that I love whacking more than the bull****... I mean ideology of Ayn Rand. By chance last week, I stumbled upon this article from the Parthenon, campus paper at my alma mater Marshall University, about the controversy still surrounding its acceptance a few years ago of a million or so dollars from the big bank BB&T to teach an economics class in Randian garbage.

I couldn't help but respond in the following letter to the editor:

 I read with interest the Parthenon article discussing the controversy of Marshall’s acceptance of BB&T money to indoctrinate students in Ayn Rand’s “philosophy.”

There are any number of ironies here. First, Rand didn’t believe that places like Marshall should exist at all. In a 1964 Playboy interview, she stated that “My position is fully consistent. Not only the post office, but streets, roads, and above all, schools, should all be privately owned and privately run.” She also would have opposed the several kinds of publicly provided financial aid that Marshall students receive.

It also establishes a disturbing precedent. Suppose some other billionaire or corporation wants to plop down another million or two to establish a chair to advocate for, say, white supremacy or female circumcision or any other loopy ideology. Is money the only thing that matters? Should Marshall cave every time somebody waves some cash? If so, there’s a word for that and it isn’t education.

I wish I could have been a little nastier in the letter, but 20+ years of working for a Quaker organization kind of ruined me.

AUSTERITY is overrated.

UNEMPLOYMENT, its costs and possible remedies are discussed here.

SITTING  is bad for your health.

WAY TO GO, BOB. Dylan is a winner of the presidential medal of freedom.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Fountain of what?

Earlier this summer, as an exercise is spiritual self-mortification, I waded through Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. Regular readers might recall earlier disrespectful posts in the subject.

It so happened about the time I was done with the book that a friend, who happens to be a Jesuit priest, told me I should check out the film version. I figured, why not? After on, once one has wallowed in a manure pit there is no reason to go out of one's way to avoid stepping in some.

Then I got downright curious about the movie version. The novel, such as it is, stretches on for hundreds and hundreds of pages. How could someone get it into a movie?

It turned out that the 1949 film version was written by Rand herself. And, to give the devil her due, I must say she really did it. For all the inevitable differences between a book and a movie, she got the feel of it...which is to say the film is every bit as comically wretched as the novel.

Gary Cooper stars as the architect Roark. He was a lot cooler in Sargent York. He just looks kind of silly over two hours of posturing and swaggering. And poor Patricia Neal, who played Dominique Fancon. She just kind of darts around the screen like some odd tropical fish in an aquarium.

Roark's buildings are apparently intended to strike the viewer with their originality, although in retrospect they are kind of comic versions of the kinds of architectural monstrosities we've gotten used to over the last half century.

One final thought: Rand in both the book and film continually slams ancient, medieval and Renaissance architecture in favor of modern boxes. After tooling around Italy for a week this summer and viewing all kinds of the old stuff, I'll take it any day of the week.

SOMETHING THAT WORKED. Nutritional assistance programs kept hunger in check during recent hard times.

A BLOG OF NOTE. Here's a link to the Economic Policy Institute's new blog.

WORK SHARING. Dean Baker argues that it should be part of President Obama's jobs program.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A little rare unity

"How good and how pleasant it is when the brethren dwell together in unity" reads the opening line of Psalm 133. There's not a whole lot of unity these days in the US, especially when it comes to the nation's economic and political mess.

Still, every once in a while, groups from different sides of the political divide can come together around some ideas for dealing with current problems. One such idea has been mentioned here before as recently as this week, to wit work sharing, also known as job sharing.

As NPR puts it in a piece about this area of agreement, this policy, now a major part of the safety net in Germany and several other places, including some states,

allows companies to reduce worker hours in lieu of layoffs. The workers could then receive unemployment insurance for the hours they are no longer working.

Say a company, instead of laying off workers, reduced overall worker hours by 25 percent. Under the so-called job-sharing program, the workers would be eligible for one day a week of unemployment benefits.

There's more on the idea here.

It's not silver bullet for a country a long way away from the right track. But it could be a step in the right direction.

What he said, revisited

Hats off to billionaire investor Warren Buffett for his recent op-ed in the New York Times titled "Stop Coddling the Super-Rich." Here's a sample:

While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as “carried interest,” thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate. Others own stock index futures for 10 minutes and have 60 percent of their gain taxed at 15 percent, as if they’d been long-term investors.

These and other blessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species. It’s nice to have friends in high places.

And here's the conclusion:

My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice.

Does that make him a socialist?

MIRACLES, MATTER AND MORE. Here is the latest version of the Rev. Jim Lewis' Notes from Under the Fig Tree.

WORK SHARING makes sense as an alternative to mass unemployment.

MOTHER NATURE has her moments when it comes to engineering.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

There is a willow grows aslant a brook

Ophelia by John Everett Millais (1852), by way of wikipedia.

Goat Rope's long jag on Hamlet continues, although you can skip the Shakespeare if that isn't your thing and scroll on down to the links and comments section.

I have referred to the character of Polonius as a twit several times. I must now add that twitness of one kind or another seems to run in the male line of that family. After Polonius is killed by Hamlet, his son Laertes returns from France eager for revenge. Once there, he finds that his sister Ophelia has gone mad.

One would have hoped that he would have taken a little time to take care of her and covered some basic bases--like maybe keeping her from drowning herself, for example. But he couldn't be bothered over this small detail.

Here's how Gertrude, the queen of Denmark and mother of Hamlet describes her end:

There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them:
There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element: but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.

All the men in her life were useless at best, and deadly cruel at worst.

TO BE OR NOT TO BE? That is the question for health care reform and it may be answered fairly soon.

SHARE THE WORK. One of the links in yesterday's post was about the policy of work sharing, which could be a very effective way of helping people get through the Great Recession. Economist Dean Baker has written an op-ed on the subject that is worth a look. Here it is

A RISING TIDE, it is said, lifts all boats. But to benefit from that, first you need a boat. Here's an item from the Washington Post about how the recession and the Recovery Act are affecting minority communities.

YOU'VE HEARD OF THE TEA PARTY. Here's the Coffee Party. I've always preferred that beverage.

THE WAR ON SCIENCE continues.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED