Reflections on Gaza

(A photo I took there in 2015)

 In 2015, I was part of a delegation to Palestine, with stops in Israel in Tel Aviv and Jaffa.

We visited Ramallah, Nablus, Hebron, Bethlehem, and East and West Jerusalem. And Gaza. That sounds like a lot, but everything is close there in terms of geography. In terms of Palestinian people’s ability to freely move around and between the West Bank and Gaza, not so much.

Obviously, that doesn’t make me an expert, but I saw things I wish I hadn’t seen and learned things I wish I didn’t know. Sometimes knowledge brings no joy. 

I’m not interested in picking any fights, justifying any atrocities, minimizing anyone’s suffering, or valuing some lives and deaths over others. But I can say some things about Gaza or what Gaza was with some confidence.

One, it has often been called an open-air prison. Don’t take my word for it—just google the term. In my experience that wasn’t far off the mark.

Two, it’s tiny. For comparison, one of our smaller counties is Wirt with around 235 square miles and a little over 5,000 people. Gaza is more than 1/3 smaller, at around 140 square miles, but it has—or had—2.3 million people, one of the world’s densest populations. In parts of it, you’d have a hard time shaking a stick without hitting someone. 

Three, it’s been under military blockade for 15 or so years. Everything was scarce, including safe drinking water, food, power, sanitation, and all the basics. At the time, people were trying to rebuild after the last conflict. Around then, the UN said it wouldn’t be livable by 2020. As for the accuracy of that prediction, I guess it’s a matter of definition. It’s definitely true now.

Four, the unemployment rate was around 50 percent before the war. I saw lots of people sitting at tables and hoping to sell things nobody would ever buy. Before this crisis, around 80 percent relied on aid from the UN.

Five, about half the population consists of children under 18 living in very adverse conditions. There’s lots of science about how adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) can lead to all kinds of problems down the road. 

Six, it wasn’t easy to get into and almost impossible for most residents to leave. I found the sense of claustrophobia overwhelming. 

Seven, I’m sure most people there were not connected with those wielding power. That’s true everywhere in the world and is especially true of the women and children who have made up the bulk of casualties.  A pre-war poll found that 44 percent of Gazans had no trust at all in the government and 23 percent had “not a lot of trust.” 

Eight, there are Christians there, representing Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions, although church buildings have been damaged or demolished by bombings from recent or previous conflicts. Gaza’s only Christian hospital, once connected with Southern Baptists, was bombed in mid-October. It was the only that treated cancer.

Nine, it has one of the world’s highest literacy rates for men and women, above 97 percent, higher than ours. Gazans value higher education, although resources were slim and are now nonexistent. I remember talking with men and women university students about their love for English language writers like Dickens, Twain, and Hemingway. Reading and writing were their ways of dealing with the feeling of isolation from the world.

Ten, most people there are or are descended from people displaced from Israel. Many are or were still  living in refugee camps.

As a thought experiment, try closing your eyes and imagining a situation like this happening anywhere in the world.

One of the most striking things about the people was their refusal to be defined by their situation. More than once, members of the delegation teared up when seeing the conditions. “Why are you crying? We’re living our lives” was their typical response.

I’m sure many of the people I saw have been killed or injured and all have been displaced and are dealing with horrible conditions  of hunger, thirst, disease, lack of medical care, and trauma.

Watching this reminds me of the aftermath of 9/11, when people were understandably afraid and outraged. Unfortunately, the response by US leaders had disastrous consequences, including invading Iraq, which wasn’t involved in the attacks. The result was around 4,500 US military fatalities and 32,000 wounded. Well over 30,000 US veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have committed suicide, a number that grows every day. The death toll for Iraqis is impossible to calculate, although it’s in the hundreds of thousands. The long-term cost will be around $2 trillion. And the situation in that part of the world still isn’t rosy.

The use of force is always unpredictable, with unintended consequences for all parties, as any glance at history shows from the days of the Iliad to our time. Violence tends to lead to more of a growing spiral than a cycle, with each act leading to a more severe reprisal. Who knows how many seeds of spiraling violence have been sown over the last few months- or who will reap that whirlwind?

No wonder that public opinion polls in the US and across the world show overwhelming support for de-escalation, massive humanitarian aid, and a ceasefire.

One thing seems clear to me: the longer this situation lasts, the worse the long-term outcomes are going to be. For everyone concerned.

(This ran as an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail.)

Interesting times

I don’t know if it’s authentic, but supposedly there’s an ancient Chinese curse that goes, “May you live in interesting times.”

(According to the late British author Terry Pratchett, there are two related curses. One is, “May you come to the attention of those in authority,” and the other is, “May the gods give you everything you ask for.” He wasn’t sure about the authenticity of those either.)

At any rate, our time is getting a bit too interesting for my preferences. It’s very rarely a good thing when a historical event on a global scale comes knocking on the door. I’m thinking of things like the decision to invade Iraq, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Serbia in 1914 — not that I was around for all the above.

I’m reminded of a quote about history by the great German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who spoke of it as “the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimized ... .”

Now that’s a cheery thought.

I think it’s interesting that the ancient Greeks had two words for historical time, chronos and kairos. Chronos referred to ordinary, not-too-interesting times — business as usual. Kairos meant a special time of challenge, crisis or decision. In the New Testament, for example, when Jesus said things like “the time is fulfilled” (Mark 1:15) or “my time is not yet come” (John 7:6), the word was kairos.

If there ever was a time of kairos, this is one.

Another word of Greek origin comes to mind, as well: apocalypse. Contrary to common usage, the word itself has nothing to do with the end of the world. Rather, it means something like uncovering, revealing or lifting the veil.

I’m hoping this crisis has lifted the veil on the world we live in. It has revealed that the real heroes who keep everything going aren’t hedge fund managers, CEOs or billionaires, but the helpers, retail workers, drivers, etc., who often work for low wages and no benefits. That needs to change.

It has revealed that health care, investments in public health and paid sick days aren’t luxuries or utopian notions, but necessities.

It has revealed the bankruptcy of an ideology that worships markets and the private sector while disparaging public goods and services, reasonable regulations and democratic and accountable governance.

It has revealed that entrusting government to those who believe government can’t do anything doesn’t bring about good government.

It has revealed that we ignore science to our peril.

And it’s a reminder that we need to pay more attention to the natural world we depend on — before it pays more attention to us.

Hegel also said, “What experience and history teach is this — that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”

For all our sakes, I hope he’s wrong about that.

(This appeared as an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail.)

Sustained outrage: a newspaper like no other

If you haven't already, check out "Sustained Outrage," a Reel South program  about the Pulitzer Prize-winning Charleston Gazette-Mail. It aired on PBS and temporarily available here.

It's hard to describe to someone outside of West Virginia just what a huge role this paper has played in exposing corruption, greed and various forms of skulduggery over the years. I can't imagine how much worse things would be without it.

The episode features among other things Eric Eyre's epic reporting on the opioid crisis, which snagged the Pulitzer, and MacArthur "genius" award winner Ken Ward, who has covered environmental issues for years. Sadly, neither of them remain at the paper. Eyre's book on his investigations, Death in Mud Lick: A Coal Country Fight against the Drug Companies That Delivered the Opioid Epidemic, was released in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak, although it has received rave reviews, like this one in the NY Times. And it's a safe bet we'll hear more from Ward.

Like many independent papers, it has had and continues to have challenges. There was a huge scare in 2018 that the paper, then in bankruptcy court, would be sold to the right wing Trump-loving and climate change-denying Ogden chain. At what seemed like the last minute the paper was bought by HD media, which owns the Huntington Herald-Dispatch and other local papers. There a huge collective sigh of relief when that happened.

Hard times persist at the paper. People were laid off. Some pillars of journalism have recently left, voluntarily or otherwise. Still it hangs on, thank God.

In my 31 years at AFSC, I've often worked with reporters and editors there. I have particularly fond memories of barging in with a friend to the office of the late Don Marsh, a legendary editor, and saying "We're on a mission from God." Sometimes, that really seemed to be the case. And I'm very grateful that for an even longer period of time the Gazette has allowed me to be a contributing columnist in its pages. The sense of having a voice, however limited, has made a huge difference in my life.

The first edition of what would become the Gazette came out in 1873. I hope it has another hundred or so years.

Let's not "gig" working families

There are lots of ways working people can be deprived of their rights on the job. They can be discriminated against on the basis of race, nationality, religion, sex, sexual orientation, etc.

They can be denied pay for overtime, a practice known as wage theft. They can be cheated out of break- and mealtimes. They can be deprived of their rights to associate and organize.

They can be compelled to work under unsafe conditions. They can have promised benefits, such as pensions, taken away.

But maybe the worst way to abuse working people is to deny that they are workers at all.

Unfortunately, that’s just what Senate Bill 528, now making its way through the West Virginia Legislature, does. Titled the “Creating Uniform Worker Classification Act,” the bill comes straight from the American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate-funded group that cranks out model state legislation that benefits big donors.

SB 528 allows businesses to reclassify workers as “independent contractors.” And that makes all the difference.

While U.S. and West Virginia labor laws are pretty weak compared to other economically advanced nations, state and federal laws do provide some protection for employees, sometimes including legal remedies.

By allowing companies to classify workers as independent contractors, this bill would take those protections away.

For example, an employee injured on the job is generally eligible for workers’ compensation. Independent contractors are not.

When employees lose jobs through no fault of their own, they’re entitled to unemployment insurance. Independent contractors are not.

Employees are protected to a degree by anti-discrimination laws (although West Virginia has yet to enact state anti-discrimination legislation based on sexual orientation). Independent contractors are not.

It’s tough to do these days, but employees have the legal right to organize unions and bargain collectively. Contractors don’t.

In the case of programs like Social Security and Medicare, costs for retirement and post-retirement health care are jointly paid for by the employer and the employee. Independent contractors are totally on their own.

Supporters of such legislation claim this will help facilitate the so-called “gig economy,” (a term that makes me think, perhaps appropriately, of the practice of stabbing or “gigging” frogs with barbed, pitchfork-like spears to harvest their legs for food).

The non-frog version refers to those parts of a workforce based on temporary and often short-term engagements. While there are people, generally those with specialized skills in high demand, who fit this profile, being reclassified as an independent contractor is a losing proposition for most working people.

According to the National Employment Law Center, SB 528, if enacted, would “allow employers in any industry to easily convert virtually any worker into an independent business, simply by presenting the worker with a take-it-or-leave-it contract that may not reflect the actual relationship between the parties.” Examples might include people working in home health care, construction, transportation, retail, etc.

The measure doesn’t just undermine workers’ rights and labor standards. The law center also cites research showing this kind of reclassification actually would result in lost revenue while also putting responsible employers at a disadvantage.

So is it possible to legitimately distinguish between an employee and a real independent contractor? In a word, yes.

Fortunately, there’s such a thing as an “ABC test,” according to which people may be fairly classified as independent contractors if they are outside the control of the hiring entity, the work they perform is outside the hiring entity’s usual business and the contractors are customarily engaged in this kind of work. That’s a sensible approach and one that should be allowed to stand.

West Virginia’s working families are having a hard enough time getting by these days. They certainly don’t need to be “gigged” by this kind of trick.

It’s bad enough when it happens to frogs.

(This ran as an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail.)

West Virginia's construction workers deserve better

In 2016, the West Virginia Legislature repealed the state’s prevailing wage law, which set pay standards for workers on public construction projects.

The intent of prevailing wage laws was to prevent these projects from turning into a race to the bottom, with out-of-state contractors profiting at the public expense by underbidding local businesses and importing low wage, low skill workers laboring under unsafe conditions.

The idea for that kind of legislation didn’t come from a bunch of labor radicals. Rather it was the brainchild of two Republican U.S. senators, James J. Davis of Pennsylvania and Robert L. Bacon of Long Island, New York.

In 1927, Bacon was angered to learn that an Alabama contractor won a bid to build a veteran’s hospital in his district, bringing in poorly treated workers to do the job. In his words, they were “herded onto this job, they were housed in shacks, they were paid a very low wage, and ... it seems to me that the federal government should not engage in construction work in any state and undermine the labor conditions and the labor wages paid in that state.”

In his view, setting locally based wage standards for public projects would ensure fairness and allow local and distant contractors to compete for bids on an equal basis.

Davis believed that the government had a responsibility to “comply with the local standards of wages and labor prevailing in the locality where the building construction is to take place.”

Their legislation, known as the Davis-Bacon Act, was passed in congress in 1931 and became the model for state prevailing wage laws, including the one that used to protect West Virginia’s workers and contractors.

Opponents of the legislation, who, as far as I can tell, are also opponents of working people generally, argued that repealing the legislation would save taxpayers money.

For example, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Craig Blair, R-Berkeley, argued at the time that “without prevailing wage, you could build five schools for the price of three.” He also claimed that the repeal would save the state $200-300 million annually.

If that really happened, the state would have a huge budget surplus. Instead, the governor has ordered $100 million in cuts due to a budget shortfall.

And the School Building Authority reported in 2017 that, while workers’ wages had gone down on school projects since repealing prevailing wage, “the overall cost of school construction does not reflect a reduction of overall construction costs on SBA projects at this time. At this time the SBA is not realizing an overall savings that would allow for the construction of ‘five new schools for the price of three,’ as some have previously claimed.”

What did go down were the inflation-adjusted wages of carpenters, electricians and operating engineers.

I find it particularly disturbing that repealing prevailing wage seems to have reduced the number of younger workers in apprenticeship programs. In 2016, there were over 5,400 active apprentices. By 2018, that number dropped to 4,400.

That’s 1,000 fewer people likely to earn a living wage with the kinds of benefits it takes to raise a family with a degree of economic stability — a real loss to many struggling communities.

Worse still is the decline in worker safety. On-the-job construction injuries increased by 26 percent since repeal, according to a study from Michael Kelsay, economics professor at University of Missouri-Kansas City, and Frank Manzo, of the Midwest Economic Policy Institute. The study was commissioned by the Affiliated Construction Trades and the West Virginia State Building Trades Council.

According to the report, “Costs associated with worksite injuries and an overall decrease in worker productivity have offset any savings from lower labor costs, resulting in public school construction costs that are not statistically different since prevailing wage was repealed, even after adjusting for inflation.”

Then there’s the hit to local businesses. The shift from union to non-union contractors winning construction bids opens the door for a larger share of out-of-state firms “performing work on taxpayer-funded school projects, and taking their earnings back with them to their home states upon project completion.”

Any way you look at it, repealing our prevailing wage law was a bad deal for West Virginians. It’s time for the Legislature to undo the damage.

(This appeared as an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail.)

Don't take food away from kids

Over the last few years, West Virginia has made major progress in school-based child nutrition, thanks to the federal Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, West Virginia’s 2013 Feed to Achieve Act and the wise decisions of nearly all county school boards.

The main reason for that is something called the Community Eligibility Provision, which allows school boards to provide free meals to all students in schools where 40 percent or more of students are certified as being low income. Nearly every county (with the notable exception of Putnam) participates in the program in some or all schools.

It’s a winner all around. It improves nutrition, learning and discipline; gives working parents a break; and cuts down on paperwork and other costs for schools.

Child nutrition is one of the few areas where West Virginia is something of a national leader. According to the Food Research and Action Center, West Virginia led the nation in school breakfast participation for the fifth consecutive year.

When the ranking was announced in February, state schools Superintendent Steven Payne said, “We know that hungry children cannot learn and when we meet the nutritional needs of our students, student achievement increases and classroom disruptions decrease ... I am proud of the work our schools do every day to meet the needs of their students.”

He’s not making that up. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, research shows that access to nutritional meals improves learning.

Unfortunately, some of that progress could be undone due to collateral damage caused by the Trump administration’s efforts to change eligibility for SNAP (formerly food stamp) food assistance, a move that could cut over 3 million Americans off that program. The proposed rule change is an end run around the will of Congress, which declined to enact such measures when the massive Farm Bill was reauthorized in 2018.

The deadline for public comments on the proposed eligibility changes ended in late September. According to The New York Times, the USDA got buried by over 75,000 comments, the vast majority of which opposed the changes. That number included 70 comments from mayors, 17 from governors and at least three from state congressional delegations.

So what does SNAP have to do with feeding kids in school? It works like this: Changing eligibility for SNAP will also change it for kids who receive free school breakfasts and lunches. FRAC estimates that these changes, if enacted, would cause 500,000 kids to lose eligibility.

In other words, the rule change would cut kids — and some entire schools — off by changing the way kids are certified.

I think that American Federation of Teachers (AFT)President Randi Weingarten nailed it when she said, “In the richest country in the world, no child should be denied access to lunch at school because of their parents’ income level or a cruel attempt by the Trump administration to cut food benefit programs for needy kids.”

She also said, “Hungry children cannot focus on learning. Instead of shaming them, we should be investing in programs that support them and help them feel safe and welcome at school: nutrition programs that promote healthy habits and nurture families facing food scarcity, affordable breakfast and lunch for any kid who needs it, and other community and school supports that build students up, not tear them down.”

(This ran as an op-ed in yesterday's Charleston Gazette-Mail. It may bear an eerie familiarity to an earlier post.)

Condemned to repeat it?

Teachers don't strike often, but when they do they rip away the veil from West Virginia's open secret, which is hidden in plain sight. To wit, our colonial economy, the legacy of 100+ years of absentee corporate ownership and exploitation, which created private wealth for the overlords and public squalor for everyone else. 

Historian John Alexander Williams wrote that this colonial arrangement that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was characterized by

...a high degree of absentee ownership, which took on a new and increasingly controversial form as large corporations displaced the smaller firms and individuals who pioneered in industrial development; heavy dependence upon extractive industries oriented to distant markets; and a relative lack of those manufacturing industries that provided the greatest stimuli to material growth and welfare in the nation at large.

He also wrote that

 In its repetitive cycle of boom and bust, its savage exploitation of men and nature, in its seemingly endless series of disasters, the coal industry has brought grief and hardship to all but a small proportion of the people whose lives it touched.

All that is old news. But recent reporting by the Charleston Gazette-Mail's Ken Ward puts it into context for the new century in two recent ProPublica-supported pieces on the human costs of coal and whether we'll learn anything from it in the era of fracking. The jury's still out, but the home team isn't looking too lucky at the moment.

While I'm giving shoutouts to the Gazette, I second these words of political reporter Phil Kabler on the choices facing voters in the next election:

A fundamental question for voters in this election cycle and for the foreseeable future: Should state governments follow the Koch brothers/ALEC approach of shrinking funding for programs and services to the point of dysfunction in the pursuit of tax cuts that primarily benefit corporations and the wealthy, or should states impose a level of taxation that provides adequate funding for programs such as public education, higher education, transportation, infrastructure, public health, public safety, corrections and, yes, perhaps even the Human Rights Commission.

"Let all who are hungry come and eat"

Time is running out for WV Governor Jim Justice to veto HB 4001, a mean-spirited bill that would take away food from thousands of poor West Virginians, stress local charities, and take millions of dollars from our economy.

Lots has been said and written about this, but the one that moves me the most is this op-ed by Charleston Rabbi Victor Urecki in the Charleston Gazette-Mail. He reminds us that at the sacred Seder meal celebrating Passover, the original freedom holiday, it's customary to pray, "“Let all who are hungry come and eat. Let all who are needy come and celebrate with us.”

The whole thing is well worth reading, but here's just a bit that moved me.

At every Passover Seder, my revered teacher of blessed memory taught me that, at the beginning of the meal, we break one matzah and take the larger piece and wrap it for the end of the meal; we eat only the smaller piece as the meal begins. This is done to remind ourselves of the needs of the poor. He taught me that those who do not know where their next meal will come from never eat a full “loaf”; they worry that, tomorrow, they may not have bread to eat.

People in poverty are always insecure without a safety net. I will cherish that lesson as a moral obligation to act. We who live with abundance should never forget what it is like to be worried about food and translate that custom into a call for action to end hunger in our communities.

...
May the doors of compassion be open in our state, and may we declare: May all who are hungry come and eat.

I hope his words move Governor Justice as well.

May all who are hungry come and eat.

Leftovers

Well, the legislative session is finally over. Some bad stuff happened. We didn't get all we wanted and got a good bit of what we didn't. On the other hand, we had a huge successful nonviolent uprising. I guess you can't have everything.

Speaking of which, we discussed the lessons of the teachers' strike on the latest edition of The Front Porch. It's great to watch the ripples spread out around the country.

I had trouble getting published in the Gazette this year, with only one op-ed on the dangers of oligarchy getting printed.

Here's the last edition of Wonk's World, which we produced on the day before the session ended.

Speaking of the Gazette, we got the good news that the paper was bought by HD Media, a non-evil locally owned newspaper group. For a long while it looked like it would be bought by Ogden, which seems to specialize in producing not-too-readable reactionary stuff. That would have been for WV what Bedford Falls would have been if Mr. Potter took over in the movie It's a Wonderful Life.

Last word (for now) goes to Gazette-Mail political columnist Phil Kabler (who just dodged a likely bullet, as the above paragraph explains), who summed up the session pretty well here.

What a difference a watchdog makes

I'm still thinking about the impending bankruptcy of the Charleston Gazette-Mail, often referred to as West Virginia's watchdog newspaper.

That expression hit home to me. For several good years, Goat Rope Farm was watched over by Arpad the Magnificent (above, with deer carcass), our Great Pyrenees. The bad guys stayed away while the big dog was on watch.

After he died, the predators moved in. Some chicks here, some grown chickens there, a turkey or two. It was on.

I hope the same thing doesn't happen here. Things are plenty bad enough already.

Don't seek and you won't find

According to a news story was first reported by my friend Ken Ward Jr. at the Charleston Gazette-Mail, the Trump administration recently pulled the plug on a study by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine on the health effects of mountaintop removal mining. This occurred in spite of numerous scientific studies that suggest increased rates of birth defects, cancer, cardiovascular and respiratory diseases 

 This shouldn't be too much of a surprise. As a Gazette editorial put it,  "This administration is anti-science and very pro-coal. It is not so pro-coal miner, or coal miner’s family or community. A clearer understanding of how and why coalfield residents get sick, die and have too many birth defects might get in the way of enthusiasm to mine more coal at all costs."

A serious scientific study of the health effects would have at least helped to clear the air, metaphorically speaking, about the issue. One thing's for sure: you probably won't find what you don't look for.

Poverty pays if you aren't poor

“Poverty pays unless you’re poor.”

So said Don West, a rebellious Appalachian poet and educator and friend of mine who devoted his life to the struggle against it.

The evidence suggests he’s right.

Way back in 1971, sociologist Herbert Gans enumerated the different ways poverty benefits the non-poor in an essay titled “The Uses of Poverty: the Poor Pay All.” His findings hold up pretty well.

Then as now, it turns out that those who benefit the most from it are the wealthy.

Among the functions of poverty are these:

*Poverty ensures that the “dirty work” of society gets done in the form of the many jobs that are low-pay low-trust and low-status but are absolutely necessary for a society to work.

A pool unemployed and underemployed people also imposes “discipline” in the labor market and helps drive down wages for all workers. A bad job looks pretty good when you step over homeless people or drive past people holding “Will work for food” signs on your way to work. When hundreds apply for a handful of living wage jobs, it sends a strong message to the lucky few that they can be easily replaced.

This population can also be mobilized by the powerful and wealthy as strike-breakers or cannon fodder in war time or even as angry mobs that can be used to target other vulnerable populations.

*Because the poor work at low wages, they can perform the tasks (cleaning, child care, etc.) that make the leisure of the affluent possible. They also pay a higher proportion of their income in sales and consumption taxes, something likely to get worse if some in the Legislature get their way.

*Poverty creates a lot of jobs and economic opportunities for people, businesses and organizations which “service” the poor, from pawn shops to plasma centers to professionals to prisons.

*Poor people can be counted on to buy or otherwise consume the goods that others don’t want, whether it’s old food, second hand goods, or used cars. In a twist Gans couldn’t have imagined, huge corporations now get major breaks for dumping unwanted and often unhealthy food products to pantries and charities.


*Poor people are an ideal group to punish in order to uphold social norms. As Gans put it,
“To justify the desirability of hard work, thrift, honest, and monogamy, for example, the defenders of these norms must be able to find people who can be accused of being lazy, spendthrift, dishonest, and promiscuous. Although there is some evidence that the poor are about as moral and law-abiding as anyone else, they are more likely to be caught and punished when they participate in deviant acts.”

They are also less able to defend themselves against stereotypes and legal punishments.

*Speaking of deviance and social norms, the non-poor can derive a vicarious thrill from contemplating the real or imagined moral laxity of the poor.

*The affluent also have a long history of what I call cultural strip-mining, which consists of finding, commodifying, and profiting from the cultural creations of the non-wealthy. Think blues music, mountain ballads, folk art, etc. To paraphrase the Clash, the spice of poverty adds life where there isn’t any.

*A poor population helps boost the status and self-esteem of those who aren’t poor. It also gives the aristocracy a chance to display its generosity on the “worthy poor,” which presumably helps justify its existence.

*Because of their relative powerlessness, Gans noted that poor people can absorb the costs of change. If you need to wipe out a neighborhood for a new highway or development project, close down a school or locate a toxic dump, poor communities are a ready target.

There are also a lot of ways the affluent can use the poor for political purposes, some of which Gans couldn’t have anticipated.

He noted that “An economy based on the ideology of laissez-faire requires a deprived population that is allegedly unwilling to work or that can be considered inferior because it must accept charity or welfare in order to survive.”

An “unworthy” population is a powerful argument against working for a more just social order, since presumably such people would benefit the most from such an arrangement.

Politicians such as Ronald Reagan and many others elevated this process to an art by stirring racially-charged resentments against mythical “welfare queens” and “strapping young bucks” buying steaks with food stamps. Wealthy people and corporations are still reaping the benefits of that strategy.
Tapping such resentment served to further enrich the already wealthy and contribute to a level of inequality unprecedented in recent history.

Finally, and this is just me talking, it seems like some people in positions of power and influence derive some kind of gratification by proposing and imposing laws and policies that impose humiliation, surveillance and degradation on poor people. The pleasure seems to be enhanced when masked as compassion. To me it’s the political equivalent of bullying or cruelty to animals.

Considering all the benefits the poor convey to the wealthy, there doesn’t seem to be much gratitude. But I guess that would defeat the purpose.

I’m reminded of some lines by the English poet William Blake:

“Pity would be no more
If we did not make somebody Poor;
And Mercy no more could be
If all were as happy as we.”

An act of war

In case you missed it, please take a look at this great reporting from Gazette-Mail journalist Eric Eyre about WV's opioid epidemic. It's really hard to get your head around. Or my head, anyway.

Teaser: a handful of drug companies poured 780 MILLION pain pills into WV over a few years, even while our overdose rate increased. They specifically targeted a handful of rural communities in the coalfields.

It reminds me of Great Britain's shameful behavior towards China (or is that Jina?) during the opium wars, when that empire forced addictive drugs on the Chinese people.

If another country did this to us, we'd go to war. Unless it was Russia, which apparently gets a pass from the president elect.

Sticking it to which man?

This op-ed of mine ran in Tuesday's Charleston Gazette-Mail, although for some reason it didn't get posted online:

There’s a lot of talk lately about the working class. In an ordinary year, I’d be ecstatic because this is something I care about.  But this isn’t an ordinary year.

Lately, the term is often racialized, which is never a good sign. The Electoral College victory of the president elect is attributed to the white working class. While there are lots of ways of parsing the results, let’s assume that’s true and consider how working people are likely to fare now.

I guess we could start by saying that white working class people probably won’t have their names added to a registry, face mass deportations, or have travel restricted for reasons other than lack of money. There’s that anyway, although I kind of doubt this would have happened in any case.

But a number of policies now on the agenda could be harmful to working people.

Let’s start with the Affordable Care Act.  Around 30 million Americans could lose coverage if it is fully repealed without being replaced. Of these, over half are white, most of whom work for a living.

 In WV, Medicaid expansion alone covers nearly 180,000 people, about one out of ten. That doesn’t include people with disabilities or the tiny TANF or welfare population.  Around 37,000 working West Virginians got covered through the exchange.  Around 18,000 young people up to age 26 are now covered on their parent’s insurance. These people are overwhelmingly in working families. White ones too.

Losing expansion funding would be a devastating blow to hospitals and health care providers here and would result in job losses in one of the few growing industries.

The new administration could breathe new life into House Speaker Paul Ryan’s plan to turn Medicare into a voucher program. Medicare is a health care program for people age 65 and older who have worked and paid into the system. It provides coverage to over 55 million Americans and around 400,000 here, over 1/5 of the population. We’re tied with Maine in having the highest percentage of beneficiaries.

Ryan has also proposed block granting—and effectively cutting--programs such as SNAP and traditional Medicaid, both of which benefit working families. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says the data shows that “The overwhelming majority of SNAP recipients who can work do so.”  SNAP benefits go straight to local businesses and help support thousands of retail and agriculture jobs.

Traditional Medicaid covers 70 million, including long term care for the elderly and people with disabilities. Many seniors who worked all their lives run out of savings when they need long term care. Medicaid picks up the slack. With block granting, some would have to quit jobs to care for elderly family members, even though they may be unequipped to do this. More seniors who worked all their lives will be in danger of abuse or neglect.

This would also mean losing federal matching funds, again with job impact. More than 10 years ago the WV Bureau of Business and Economic Research found that Medicaid spending supported economic activity that generated nearly 33,000 jobs. That number has only gone up since.

Medicaid and CHIP provide health care to children in many working families earning up to 300 percent of the federal poverty level—and most workers want their kids to live and be healthy. The programs also bring millions of dollars to local communities and sustain jobs.

The latest round of proposed tax cuts—a remedy that has yet to produce impressive results--would likely benefit the very wealthy, increase inequality, and reduce the ability of the federal government to respond to the needs of working families—for example by making vocational and post-secondary education more affordable.

From the earliest days of the republic, working people fought for a free public education for their children, which is likely to be undermined by a secretary of education committed to undermining it with a system of vouchers and privatization schemes. Speaking of labor history, another key demand of the past was the abolition of child labor, which has been praised by a group the newly appointed education chief has supported.

Then there’s trade, a major issue for working people. I’m not mourning the death of the Trans Pacific Partnership and I support revisiting trade deals to ensure workers’ rights and save American jobs. But a heavy handed approach could set off a trade war which the conservative Peterson Institute described as “horribly destructive.” Peterson estimated that this could cost between 1.3 and 4 million jobs. Progressive groups that ordinarily oppose Peterson on trade issues, such as the Economic Policy Institute, share similar concerns.

If the US ignores the dangers of climate change, working people will be hit the hardest by extreme weather events, like those that hit much of the state this summer. Scientific models project more droughts, floods, food shortages, wildfires, disease epidemics, etc. While we’re at it, if the US goes to war with the known universe over perceived slights on Twitter, it’s a pretty safe bet that working people would pay the highest price.

Then there’s the pick for secretary of labor, a fast food baron who opposes the minimum wage and talks about replacing workers with robots, saying that the latter are ““always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex or race discrimination case”

Sorry, but If this is a case of sticking it to the man, I’d have to ask, which man would that be? From where I’m sitting, it seems to be the one who is living paycheck to paycheck.

I think a real pro-working class program would be based on solidarity, not scapegoating. It would include such things as full employment and trade policies to strengthen the middle class; patching the holes in our pension and health care system, ensuring paid sick days and family leave; making debt-free post high-school job training and education a reality; strengthening K-12 public education; investing in things like early childhood programs and infrastructure; and guaranteeing the right of workers to organize. And, since widespread poverty exerts a downward pressure on everyone’s wages, it would support an increase in the minimum wage indexed to inflation.

It would recognize that an injury to one is the concern of all, just as the labor movement of the 1800s came to recognize that free labor could never prosper while slavery persisted. And it would promote international policies that would guarantee fair trade, a sustainable future, and what Lincoln called “a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

I haven’t heard a lot of that.

On Iran, death, hell and other stuff

WV Senator Joe Manchin is starting to feel the heat around the Iran deal, as this news story and this commentary show. I'm hoping that in the end he'll take advice like this.

NOT SURE I'M READY FOR THIS. It looks like Warner Brothers is going to make a film version of Dante's Inferno. Ironically, a silent version made over a century ago got it right. These days, who knows how bad it'll be? I guess the car chases will be cool anyway.

BEFORE HELL, COMES DEATH (unless it's a really bad day). Here's a look at how Americans die compared with other parts of the world.

THE END OF AN ERA. There have been lots of changes at the Charleston Gazette-Mail since the papers merged. Longtime journalist Paul Nyden is retiring. I hope he keeps sending stuff in though. He really rocked the pillars in the day.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED