Today in coal

How's this for randomness: a court decides that Alpha Natural Resources needs to pay for former Massey CEO Don Blankenship's legal fees. I'm not sure about the legal niceties but I think I'm with Alpha on this. I'm guessing the court ruled this was part of the deal for assuming Massey's liabilities.

Then there's this: WV coal production has been projected to drop by nearly 40 percent over the next 20 years from its 2008 high point. Most of that drop is expected to occur in southern WV, while production in the northern part of the state is comparatively stable.

I'm not sure how WV's ruling class will be able to blame all this on you-know-who but I'm guessing they'll find a way.

On possibly detecting a member of the order Rodentia by olfactory means, metaphorically speaking

Maybe El Cabrero is just uncommonly cynical, but does anyone else find anything fishy about the post-election miraculous recovery of Alpha Natural Resources? Back in July, they filed a WARN notice warning 1,100 workers of imminent job loss, a move industry supporters and some politicians attributed to President Obama's "war on coal." Now, a month after the elections, it looks like 750 will keep their jobs.

That's funny. I thought Obama was still president.

If memory serves something different but similarly fishy happened with Murray Energy after the 2012.

Things that make you go hmmmm.

How soon is very soon? Not soon enough

El Cabrero has been a terribly inconsistent blogger these days. I'm out of state at a staff retreat, and staff retreats in my organization are kind of like endurance events...minus the health benefits.

However, this tantalizing bit of news can't go by uncelebrated. Ken Ward reports in the Charleston Gazette that additional federal indictments related to Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch mine disaster, which killed 29 coal miners in West Virginia in April 2010, will be forthcoming "very soon."

Previously, the federal prosecutor said that indictments were coming "soon." That was a few weeks back if memory serves.

I'm hoping the "very soon" is much sooner than "soon." It can't come soon enough for me. I feel like a little kid on a long car trip. Are we there yet?

ON THAT NOTE, here's a related story.

JUST DO IT. Here you can learn nearly 130,000 good reasons why expanding Medicaid would be good for WV

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Leveling out

El Cabrero has been a bit of a blogging slacker lately, a trend that may continue over the next several days due to road trips and such. I'm not sure whether it was a question of being tired or uninspired, but I guess the two might be related.

Anyhow, here's an interesting tidbit I came across lately from the book The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett:

A dramatic example of how reductions in inequality can lead to rapid improvements in health is the experience of Britain during the two world wars. Increases in life expectancy for civilians during the war decades were twice those seen throughout the rest of the twentieth century. In the decades which contain the world wars, life expectancy increased between 6 and 7 years for men and women, whereas in the decades before, between and after, life expectancy increased by between 1 and 4 years. Although the nation's nutritional status improved with rationing in the Second World War, this was not true for the First World War, and material living standards declined during both wars. However, both wartimes were characterized by full employment and considerably narrower income differences--the result of deliberate government policies to promote co-operation with the war effort. During the Second World War, for example, working-class incomes rose by 9 per cent, while incomes of the middle class fell by 7 per cent; rates of relative poverty were halved. The resulting sense of camaraderie and social cohesion not only led to better health--crime rates also fell. 

Three thoughts occur to me. One, it would be nice to get the same result minus the world war thing. Two, these days wars don't do much to reduce inequality. Instead, they only make it great in lots of areas.  Three, the Whackadoodle element would call the authors freedom haters.

NOT SO BAD. Here's economist Dean Baker on the latest jobs numbers, which are giving Whackadoodles hissy fits.

THERE IS A DIFFERENCE. Lots of people have wondered whether things have really changed since Massey Energy was bought out by Alpha Natural Resources. I've always said that whatever its flaws, Alpha is significantly less evil than Massey was back in the day. In fact, in the extremely unlikely event that I was in charge of Alpha, I'd make the company slogan be: "Alpha...we're less evil." Can you imagine former Massey CEO Don Blankenship talking like this?

A CROCODILE TEAR FOR PLUTOCRATS here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

More gear

El Cabrero is about to hit the road for a week or so, but I would not leave you unprepared, Gentle Reader. As a parting offering, I'm pleased to share the following two links sent by a friend, which may prove useful in dealing with or preparing for a zombie apocalypse.

The first is a "splattering target" for marksmen preparing for the walking dead and the second is a selection of Kabar Zombie Killer blades, of which the advertisement says:

 These toxic green gripped blades aim to put your mind at ease should you ever be face to face with an undead enemy without a firearm. Of course they look cool! Of course they will clear brush and work hard tackling your day-to-day. But hey, you just never know when their true intentions may need to be put to use. Do you want to take that chance? Will you be prepared?

Scoff if you want--but if, God forbid, you ever do get eaten by zombies, it won't be this blog's fault.

HOW WE GOT HERE. This Gazette op-ed on the great recession caught my eye.

MINE SAFETY. Alpha Natural Resources, the company that bought out Massey Energy, plans to begin construction on a "state of the art" mine safety and training facility by June. This was part of a settlement with the US Department of Justice in the wake of Massey's Upper Big Branch disaster.

HEALTH CARE JU JITSU? Robert Reich thinks so.

NOTE: Posts will be a bit irregular over the next week or so.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

To strip or not to strip

One of the bombs dropped on miners by planes friendly to coal operators at the Battle of Blair Mountain. Fortunately, this one didn't go off. Image by way of wikipedia.

If you've been following events in West Virginia lately, you will be aware that environmentalists protesting mountaintop removal mining recently retraced the historic 1921 miner's march to Blair Mountain, which was the largest workers' insurrection in American history (so far, he added wistfully).

Labor groups for the most part didn't take part in this march but plan activities of their own to preserve this historic site.

I've made several trips to Blair myself, mostly before the surrounding area was heavily stripped. I was particularly fond of an old abandoned fire tower up on top. It was rickety and scary as hell to climb, which didn't deter me from going up several times. What can I say? Us hillbillies like to climb things.

It reminded me of the mountain the devil was said to have taken Jesus to during his temptation.

The tower is, alas, long gone. It's unclear how long the mountain will remain, although an article in the Wall Street Journal reported that

Alpha Natural Resources Inc. of Abingdon, Va., said it doesn't intend to conduct mountain-top removal in the historic battleground area, but acquired one active operation outside the 1,600-acre boundary when it bought Massey Energy.

"We agree that Blair Mountain is an area of historical significance, and an appropriate commemoration of the 1921 events ought to be considered," said Alpha spokesman Ted Pile. But, he added, a commemoration shouldn't "abrogate the legal rights of the many property owners and leaseholders in the area."

I'm not sure how to interpret that. I like the first part of the statement, although it might have been undone by the latter part.

Once again, let me remind the Gentle Reader that the best place to keep up on all things coal is Charleston Gazette reporter Ken Ward's Coal Tattoo blog.

THE LATEST BAD IDEA. An unbalanced Balanced Budget Amendment under consideration in the US House would push through deeper cuts than even the Ryan plan.

YOU ALREADY KNEW THIS. Aside from a weak job market, wages are pretty stagnant too.

CREATING JOBS. A new study suggests that workforce training is more effective than cutting business taxes.

URGENT WEIRD ANIMAL SOUNDS UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Done deal

It looks like the sale of Massey Energy to Alpha Natural Resources is a done deal. Legal challenges to the sale have been turned back, while shareholders voted yesterday to approve it.

It really is the end of an era. For decades, Massey was a massive presence in West Virginia, not only in the coal industry, but in state politics, the media, and the courts. Its former CEO Don Blankenship was the face of Big Coal.

My initial reaction was to view the sale as a good thing. However, Ken Ward at Coal Tattoo had a great post yesterday about remaining questions regarding Alpha and promises that may have been made to retain key Massey personnel, including those connected to the management of the Upper Big Branch and Aracoma mines.

I can't help but think Alpha would have to get up pretty early in the morning to be worse than Massey in the Bad Old Days. We'll see.

Ward, who for my money is America's best coal reporter, posted this quote from Delaware Judge Leo Strine Jr. about Massey:

Convinced that it knew better than the public authorities charged with enforcing laws designed to make mining a safer and cleaner business, Massey management, with board knowledge, fostered an adversarial relationship with the company’s regulators and accepted as ordinary the idea that the company would regularly be accused of violating important safety regulations.

Of course, when a company has strong opinions about knowing better than the regulators, it is optimal to match that with a record of worker safety and environmental protection that is substantively spotless. But in the case of Massey, no such match existed, at least insofar as one credits actual judgments and other regulation-related losses suffered by the company under Blankenship’s tenure as CEO.

HOW WE GOT IN THIS MESS. Here's a brief from the Economic Policy Institute on the 10th anniversary of the Bush tax cuts.

THIS DIDN'T HELP EITHER. Here's a look at major companies that made big bucks but managed to have a negative tax rate.

SPEAKING OF MESSES, here's Robert Reich on the state of the US economy.

ALL THIS FROM TEETH? Scientists have found clues about the social structure of human ancestors from studying their teeth.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Of dogs, politics and scatology

Arpad, shown here before his summer haircut, goes wherever he wants to.

Anyone who has been around the block a few times knows that politicians can be full of surprises. Sometimes they do things that are disappointing or downright infuriating. Sometimes they surprise you the other way, by supporting decent stands for reasons which may be principled, cynical or even kind of random.

The surprises can come both from ones you like and who support your issues and from those you think are hopeless.

A while back, a friend of mine who happens to be a Quaker with some lobbying experience (you know who you are) gave me some good advice for the occasions when they go your way. I may be paraphrasing, but I remember her words coming out something like this:

When the dog uses the bathroom in right place, you gotta say "Good boy!"

Actually, the original version might have been a bit more colorful. Still, it stuck in my mind as good advice. I always try to say "thank you" when there's an occasion.

DEBT CEILING The US House majority is playing a game of debt ceiling chicken to force major cuts in domestic spending. To extend the canine metaphor, I believe that would constitute going to the bathroom in the wrong place.

STUDENT LOANS might be the next bubble.

BACKROOM DEALS?. Here are some interesting developments in the sale of Massey Energy to Alpha Natural Resources.

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN on religion.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A day late and...

I knew it was coming but somehow it slipped my mind. Yesterday, May 24, was the 70th birthday of a certain Robert Zimmerman, aka Bob Dylan. I have never met Bob, although I've seen him in concert several times. But I can say that it feels like I have a deep karmic connection to his music.

Many times, before I even knew who he was, I was stopped dead in my tracks by his songs, whether performed by him or by someone else.

I am a bit younger than those who first fell under his spell. But I recall as a kid a time my late brother came home from college and plucked out "Blowin' in the Wind" and being stunned by the words.

(As I grew up, I must confess a greater affinity for the older, more cynical, Bob than for the younger idealistic one. But still, there it was.)

I recall other moments growing up when certain Dylan songs, like Knocking on Heaven's Door or Tangled Up in Blue just froze me up where I was standing. Eventually, I figured out who this guy was and started listening to his music.

There's one question that I'd really like to know at some point. Does he really know what he's writing when he writes the lyrics or is he just a vessel of the Muses? I remember being at an Arlo Guthrie concert one time when he speculated that Bob fished upstream from other songwriters and just caught more than they did.

However it happened, he has the power of the Word. And I even like the voice that delivers it. The raspier the better.

SPEAKING OF WHOM, some birthday tributes can be found here
and here.

RAKING IT IN. Massey Energy executives stand to profit big time in a sale to Alpha Natural Resources if the deal goes through, in spite of playing games with the lives of coal miners. My best advice is that the Gentle Reader make Ken Ward's uber-blog Coal Tattoo a regular site to visit.

STRANGE AS THIS WEATHER HAS BEEN. Bill McKibben suggest a connection between climate change and extreme weather events here. I think he's right.

BECAUSE I NEED TO SLEEP AT SOME POINT, this post has been scheduled for publication in advance. Well may the world go and I'm against anything bad that happened between then and now.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Wrecker of mead-benches

El Cabrero is having fun here with Beowulf lately, although you'll also find links and comments about current events. If you like this kind of thing, check earlier posts.

If one were to make a list of the qualities of a good political leader these days, the ability to wreck the drinking halls of his foes might not make it to the top of the list, but it sure did in the opening lines of Beowulf. That was one of several attributed to an early king of the Spear-Danes.

Just for fun, here are the opening lines in the original Anglo-Saxon:

HWÆT, WE GAR-DEna in geardagum,
þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon!
oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,
monegum mægþum meodosetla ofteah,
egsode eorlas, syððanærest wearð
feasceaft funden; he þæs frofre gebad,
weox under wolcnum weorðmyndum þah,
oð þæt him æghwylc ymbsittendra
ofer hronrade hyran scolde,
gomban gyldan; þæt wæs god cyning!

Did everybody get that?

Seriously, though, it's hard to recognize that as English apart from a few words, although it was just that in second half of the first millennium AD. It still might have been if a certain Norman called William the Bastard didn't become William the Conqueror. The alphabet was a bit different, as you can tell. For example the thing that looks like a weird letter p had a th sound. I haven't got around to figuring out the other ones yet.

Here's Seamus Heaney's version of the same passage:

So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns.

There was Shield Sheafson, scourge of many tribes,
a wrecker of mead-benches, rampaging among foes.
This terror of the hall-troops had come far.
A foundling to start with, he would flourish later on
as his powers waxed and his worth was proved.
In the end each clan on the outlying coasts
beyond the whale-road had to yield to him
and begin to pay tribute. That was one good king.

Scourging, wrecking, rampaging, collecting tribute. A "god cyning" (good king) indeed.

(My favorite phrase from the original is "hronrade," which means "whale road," i.e. the sea. I'm thinking about referring henceforth to the muddy river I grew up around as "the carp road.")

SAD BUT PREDICTABLE. Some conservatives are re-writing the narrative of the Great Recession by--you guessed it--blaming the poor.

POST-MASSEY. Will Alpha be any better? Here's Ken Ward's take on it. My guess: it would be hard to be worse.

DOING MORE FOR THE WORKING POOR. Here's a call for a state earned income tax credit.

UNCERTAINTY about Republican efforts to repeal health care reform has left many Americans in a tough spot.

GETTING REAL. Still, West Virginia is getting ready to implement reform (probably). The state insurance commission is proposing creating a state insurance exchange. Meanwhile a major expansion of Medicaid is on the horizon.

FILLING IN THE TRICERATOPS FAMILY TREE. A newly discovered ancestor of the three horned dinosaur weighed in at around 15,000 pounds and had a skull eight feet long.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Hwaet!

The theme at Goat Rope these days is Beowulf, although you'll also find links and comments about current events below. The title of this post comes from the first word of the poem in old Anglo-Saxon (although the a and e were joined together in the original). The word means something like Listen, or Behold, or Hear this! Seamus Heaney's translation renders it as So.

It's a way of saying, "The show is about to start." And it is quite a show. Heaney calls the poem "a work of the greatest imaginative vitality, a masterpiece where the structuring of the tale is as elaborate as the beautiful contrivances of its language."

If I had to say what it was about, aside from the whole monster and dragon killing thing, I'd have to say it was about aging and how those glory days that Bruce Springsteen sang about pass you by. In the beginning of the poem, Beowulf is a young man eager to gain fame and a name for himself by killing the monster that haunts the hall of the Spear Dane king Hrothgar. He goes home to Geatland and eventually becomes king, ruling justly for 50 years.

In his old age, when a dragon threatens his realm, he determines to fight it alone, as if it see if he's still got it in him:

"I risked my life
often when I was young. Now I am old,
but as king of the people I shall pursue this fight
for the glory of winning, if the evil one will only
abandon his earth-fort and face me in the open."

He reminds me a bit of Tennyson's Ulysses, who decides in old age to hit the whale road again:

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

He does pretty good, but it doesn't turn out too well for the king, the kingdom or the dragon.

BIG NEWS. It looks like Alpha Natural Resources is about to buy Massey Energy, which continues to dispute MSHA's version of the Upper Big Branch mine disaster. For more, click here. It will be interesting to see what changes--and what doesn't.

SEVEN SOCIAL SINS. Here's an op-ed from the Gazette by Perry Mann on some problems as identified by Gandhi.

DODGING THE ISSUE. Most high school science teachers avoid taking a strong stand on teaching evolution in biology classes.

MEDITATION ON THE BRAIN here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED