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.

The war on whatever

It is an article of faith among West Virginia's ruling class that any and all of the ills of the coal industry are solely the fault of a certain black man in the White House and his diabolical EPA. Actually, I imagine that some of the smarter ones know better but still feel obligated to pretend that this is the case.

I guess it would be too inconvenient to recognize that the gas boom in northern WV has anything to do with the coal bust in southern WV.

Many "conservatives" around the country are joining the "war on coal" chorus. The irony here is that the real driving force behind the relative decline of coal as an energy source is the market which these same people worship as a god.

Meanwhile, here's a bit of rationality about the subject from the Christian Science Monitor.

More fun with coal

Hardly a week goes by in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia without some kind of coal related drama. This week is no exception.

 Yesterday, a friend emailed me this story about WV's junior senator Joe Manchin, for whom some days are better than others. Apparently Manchin is concerned that the youth of America are in danger of not getting enough exposure to mercury, thanks to those evil environmental extremists in the Obama administration. Apparently, the belief is that mercury exposure creates a lot of jobs or that curtailing it kills them.

All this is part of the EPA-is-the-devil narrative which blames all the ills of the coal industry on the black guy. The fact that the real war on coal is being waged by the natural gas industry (which seems to be winning) goes unnoticed.

Even weirder that all this is the effort of Republican senatorial candidate John Raese, who is challenging Manchin again this year, to portray Manchin as an environmental extremist and close ally of President Obama.

Raese doesn't have nearly as many good days as Manchin. Not so long ago, he compared bans on smoking to the Nazi treatment of Jews.

As we head into the 2012 general election, look for lots more war on coal posturing on one side and lots of subtle and not so subtle reminders that candidates of a certain party can be associated with a black man on the other.

Should be fun to watch.