The broken link

I mentioned in  yesterday's post that I worked with friends from the WV Center on Budget and Policy on a report about The State of Working West Virginia, something we've done every year for the last seven or so.

Anyhow, I'd like to point out some interesting things from the report that my friend Sean O'Leary dug up. It's all about one thing that is messed up with today's economy. According to conventional wisdom, "a rising tide lifts all boats." And sometimes it does. Just not so much around here lately.

People used to assume that if the economy was growing, jobs would too. And that if productivity went up, so would wages. Here's what Sean pointed out on GDP and jobs:

West Virginia ranked 3rd highest among the 50 states in real GDP growth from 2012 to 2013, at 5.1 percent. But the state ranked dead last in job growth, actually losing almost 7,000 jobs. West Virginia actually lost jobs even as the economy grew. In fact, the link between the growth of the economy (real GDP) and job growth has been weak for much of the past decade. While real GDP grew by 17.2 percent since 2002, job growth has been an anemic 3 percent 

Ditto the wages and productivity thing:

 West Virginia’s productivity, or economic output per worker, increased by 5.8 percent from 2012 to 2013, the third biggest increase among the 50 states. But just as growing GDP has not translated into more jobs, even though West Virginia’s workers are producing more, their pay has not reflected their production.

Since 1979, West Virginia’s worker productivity has increased by more than 50 percent, while median compensation, the wages and other benefits earned by the worker in the middle of the distribution, has only increased by 4.5 percent,,.Workers are benefiting little from both economic and productivity growth.

Holy surplus value extorted from the toiling masses, Batman! Just kidding. Mostly. But clearly something is out of whack.  One symptom of that is rising inequality. Sean again:

West Virginia’s economic growth and productivity gains of the past three decades have not resulted in widespread broad prosperity. Instead, more and more of the state’s wealth and income are flowing to the top, benefiting the wealthiest.

Between 1979 and 2011 the state’s average real income grew just 3.9 percent, but over that time period, all of that growth was captured by the top one percent of richest West Virginians. The average real income for the top one percent grew by nearly 71 percent, while the average real income for the bottom 99 percent fell by almost three percent.

Because of that lopsided income growth, the share of income held by the top 1% in West Virginia has steadily grown since 1979, and is reaching historically high levels (Figure 2.4). And as the West Virginia’s economy grows more top heavy, the income gap widens. In 1979 the average income of the top 1% was 10.1 times higher than the average income of the bottom 99%. By 2011, that ratio had grown to 17.7 times higher.

The average income of the bottom 99 percent in West Virginia would be 12.3 percent higher if they still earned the same share of income they earned in 1979. That is equal to about $5,200 per person. Instead, those income gains were collected by wealthiest in the state.

Short summary: once upon a time in the USA, we grew together. Now, we're growing apart. And we will continue to do so at great cost to our democracy unless things change. Which means unless people change things.

Okay...

I admit it. Some of the turkey boys on our farm may not be the brightest crayons in the box.

 Here are our two oldest males again chasing each other around a grill and posturing to try to impress each other and their own reflections. Round and round and round.

They seem more obsessed with each other than with the females. Not that there's anything wrong with that. The whole grill thing, however, is kind of sad.

THE ANTI-WAL-MART. Here's a comparison between wages and benefits at Costco, Wal-Mart, and Wendy's.

MORE GOOD TIMES from the WV Attorney General's office.

REAL APES don't dog paddle.

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

Master Kung

I mentioned Confucius in yesterday's post, so I might as well fess up to re-reading The Analects, a collection of sayings and anecdotes by and about this ancient Chinese sage.

It has often been observed that there are two poles in traditional Chinese thought, the Taoist and the Confucian. The Taoism expressed by Lao Tzu emphasizes simplicity and living according to nature, while Confucian thought emphasizes ritual, courtesy, and social and familial responsibilities.

The former is a bit anarchic while the latter is all about social order. It has been said that in traditional Chinese society, a gentleman might be Confucian in his public life and Taoist in his private affairs.

I generally lean towards Taoism, but have a soft spot for Confucius. This may be because one of the first places I really felt at home was a traditional karate dojo, which is kind of miniature Confucian society. A good dojo is a very hierarchical and totally undemocratic place, but one where people observe strict rules of mutual respect and courtesy. It is expected that junior students should show respect to seniors and to the teacher and that seniors and teachers had a responsibility to assist the juniors, with an overall goal of the mutual benefit and improvement of all.

There are worse kinds of places to be.

Over the next few posts, I may pass on a few of his ideas that have spoken to me over the years.

UPPER BIG BRANCH MINE DISASTER. Here's an initial report from the independent investigative team appointed by WV Governor Joe Manchin on Massey's April mine disaster. And here's a new report from NPR about a possibly serious UBB safety violation.

THE OTHER DISASTER. Here are some possible lessons from the Gulf mess.

SHRINKING PAYCHECK over several years are making the recession worse, as Robert Reich argues here.

EMOTIONS are contagious.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Been there, done that

The Gadarene swine take a dive in this Anglo-Saxon tapestry.

Well, I guess I can scratch "contract swine flu" off my to-do list. My case must have been a mild one, but it seems to have passed and I've been fever free since Friday (sorry about the alliteration in the last part of that sentence, although Anglo-Saxons were kind of into that).

Here's the official Goat Rope verdict on H1N1: if it doesn't kill you, it's not that bad. I guess you can say that about lots of things, but in this case it fits. IF your fever doesn't spike and IF you don't develop trouble breathing, it's pretty much like any other flu. The thing I remember most about it is how it made my body feel like I'd been in a pretty decent car wreck, which is something I'm pretty used to as a martial arts person.

I learned one thing from the experience: blogging can be good for your health. After mentioning symptoms in a post last week, a friend and co-worker emailed me about a medicine that could help if taken within 48 hours. I tried it and it helped. Thanks to her and to others who send good wishes.

On the down side, I missed a couple of events I'd been looking forward to. On the bright side, I got to sleep a little more and finish season 5 of The Sopranos.

Now, once more unto the breach...

DEMOGRAPHIC UPDATE. Among those swelling the ranks of the homeless are those who lost everything due to foreclosures.

WAGES are taking a dive.

ARDI'S POLITICS. A leading primatologist ponders human origins here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Imagining the enemy

Source: Sam Keen's Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination. View slides here.

Goat Rope has been looking at political paranoia this week, past and present, with a special focus on historian Richard Hofstadter's classic essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics. This series was inspired in no small measure by the current political climate and the debate over health care reform.

If this is your first visit, it might help if you clicked on earlier posts, starting with Monday's.

According to Hofstadter, in the paranoid view, the enemy

“is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman—sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced."

There are no accidents in this view of the world. Everything that happens is the result of someone’s malevolent will. The enemy is seen to hold vast sources of power, whether through mass media, educational institutions, or financial resources. The enemy is always a master of mind manipulation.

Hofstadter believed that there was also an element of psychological projection involved in this worldview, where all the unsavory traits or desires of the elect are attributed to the enemy.

As psychologist Philip Zimbardo pointed out, this view of the enemy leads to dehumanization, which can in turn lead to all kinds of nasty stuff.

TWICE ROBBED. Low wage workers are often cheated out of overtime and minimum wages according to a new report.

WHAT'S NEXT WITH HEALTH CARE might become clearer after next week.

HAPPY LABOR DAY? Wage growth continues to erode in the wake of the recession, according to this snapshot from the Economic Policy Institute. Meanwhile, bailed out CEOs are doing pretty good.

NATION AS VILLAGE. A children's book examines what America would look like if it was a village with 100 people.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The world in a grain of sand

El Cabrero sometimes teaches a night class in sociology somewhere comfortably off the campus of Marshall University. The most recent semester, now in finals week, I taught Deviance and Social Control.

Mostly I do it to get to use the library, wherein I can find all kinds of quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore with which to regale the Gentle Reader.

I often find myself bringing works of literature and poetry to class because these can often get to the heart of the matter more quickly and clearly than reams of statistics. In the last few weeks of this class, I've brought in or referred to works by William Blake, Shakespeare, Herman Hesse, Herman Melville, and others.

William Blake's poem London, for example, speaks volumes about his time (and ours) in four short stanzas.

Aristotle noted the power of poetry for this kind of thing 2,400 years ago. In the Poetics, he discusses the difference between poetry and history. In modern terms, what he called poetry would include novels, plays and other works of literature, whereas history would include most kinds of nonfiction. He puts it this way

The poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose. The work of Herodotus might be put into verse, and it would still be a species of history, with meter no less than without it. The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular. [emphasis added]

SINKING LIKE A ROCK. Stagnant or falling wages can make the recession worse, according to Paul Krugman.

WHICH GOSPEL IS THIS IN? A Pew survey found that regular churchgoers were more likely to support torture than those who were less observant.

THE FIRST GARDEN continues to attract attention.

SPEAKING OF FOOD, the ancestor of the current swine flu now sweeping parts of the world has been traced to US factory farms.

ANIMAL UPDATES. Fish may feel pain in ways similar to us, according to a recent experiment. And while we're at it, animals that are capable of voice mimicry also seem to be capable of keeping a beat.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

LET US CULTIVATE OUR GARDEN

The theme of this week's Goat Rope is the relative merits of optimism and pessimism. If this is your first visit, please click on yesterday's post.

One of funniest and most telling refutations of naive optimism was the novel Candide: Or, The Optimist, written by the French sage Voltaire (1694-1778). Voltaire may have been moved to write this classic by the brutalities of the Seven Years War and the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake, which killed tens of thousands of people.

The earthquake struck on Nov. 1, All Saints Day, when many people were in church. It was followed by a tsunami and a devastating fire. This event caused quite a crisis of faith for many religious believers, some of whom came up with elaborate explanations vindicating the goodness and providence of God. Although Voltaire as a Deist believed in a somewhat disengaged God, he would have none of it.

His particular target in this novel is the Theodicy or vindication of benevolent providence of the philosopher Leibniz (1646-1716), who argued that this was "the best of all possible worlds." Let it be noted, however, that Voltaire's jaded view on this question did not stop him from trying to make the world a better place.

The novel tells of the misadventures of the young man Candide, his lover Cunégonde, and optimistic teacher Doctor Pangloss (all talk) over several continents, where they suffer from war, various kinds of violence and mayhem, the Lisbon earthquake, the Inquisition, and a host of calamities.

Through it all, Pangloss keeps maintaining that everything is for the best:

Observe that noses were made to wear spectacles; and so we have spectacles. Legs were visibly instituted to be breeched, and we have breeches. Stones were formed to be quarried and to build castles; and My Lord has a very noble castle; the greatest Baron in the province should have the best house; and as pigs were made to be eaten, we eat pork all year round; consequently, those who have asserted all is well talk nonsense; they ought to have said that all is for the best.

and

...private misfortunes make the public good, so that the more private misfortunes there are, the more everything is well.

After suffering the buffeting of fate, Candide observed that optimism is

the mania of maintaining that everything is well when we are wretched.

By the end of the book, Candide and his band are living a modest life in the countryside. Pangloss delivers yet another optimistic harangue, but this is the response he gets:

"Excellently observed," answered Candide; "but let us cultivate our garden."

That's pretty good advice, whether it applies to our private plots or to the ailing garden we collectively inhabit.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, the overall health of the U.S. could stand some cultivation. Here's an interesting article from the New England Journal of Medicine that among other things looks at the effects of economic inequalities on health.

HOW TO (NOT) WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE. This is a response to Blackwater from Iraqis.

STAGNANT WAGES. According to the latest snapshot from the Economic Policy Institute, "Since 2001, median wages in nearly half of all states have failed to keep pace with inflation."

SPEAKING OF GOAT ROPES, El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia is in the process of overhauling its Medicaid program, with lots of confusing changes. It offers a basic and an enhanced plan, but people have to opt into the enhanced version. The new basic plan offers less services than traditional Medicaid. There also seems to be a huge information gap. Here's some good coverage from WV Public Radio.

SENATOR BYRD ON MINE SAFETY. The Bush administration is called the "weak link" that has eroded safety for coal miners.

THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID. I admit it; I'm totally hooked on NBC's The Office. And I'm pleased to say that Dwight Shrute has updated his blog. And if you're really hard core, check out Creed Thoughts.

BABOONS THINKING. Darwin once said, “He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.” Here's a stab at it.


GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

IN PRAISE OF HICKS

Caption: Orthodox icon of John the Baptist.

A while back, El Cabrero was challenged by a Goat Rope reader to write about the five things I most admire about Jesus. It took me a while to respond since I haven't found anything not to admire.

(He didn't seem to think much of goats if Matthew 25 is right, but that could be a mark of supreme wisdom.)

Anyhow, that's the theme this week. If this is your first visit, please click on yesterday's post.

The second thing I'm going highlight about Jesus reflects my personal prejudice as a hick from West Virginia. According to our pals at Wikipedia,

Hick is a derogatory term for an unsophisticated person from a rural area.

One of the few things the Roman and Jewish ruling classes would have agreed on was that Jesus was a hick. And a dangerous one at that. Indeed from the point of view of anybody who was anywhere in the ancient world, Jesus was a nobody from nowhere.

For sophisticated pagans, Rome was the place to be, and if you couldn't be there, you should be at a nice estate in the countryside worked by slaves or someplace like Athens or Alexandria. For Jewish rulers at Jerusalem, Galilee was a rural backwater whose residents were religiously suspect.

Then factor in social class. Both pagan and Jewish elites lived off of the labor and sufferings of the lower classes, whether of peasants or slaves or others teetering on the edge of oblivion. The gospels refer to Jesus as a tekton, which has traditionally been translated as carpenter but can mean any kind of manual laborer.

In a world where food security was not a given for most people and was tied to the land, a tekton would often be a landless peasant living a life even more precarious than that of those who tried to scratch a life from the soil and had to render up their surplus--and often their necessities--to the ruling classes.

Jesus knew all about living on the edge. He pretty much stayed there all his natural life.

Then factor in official credentials. Not only was he considered to be a lower class hick, but he had no official sanction to do the kind of stuff he was doing. Over and over in the gospels, people keep wondering "Who is this guy anyway? What's he think he's doing talking and acting this way?"

So the next time you get called a hick, smile, thank the person, and say you're in some pretty good company.

THE WORKER IS WORTHY OF HIS HIRE. According to a new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research,

Unionization substantially raises wages and benefits even in typically low-wage occupations, according to "Unions and Upward Mobility for Low- Wage Workers", a report released today by the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Inclusion.

The report, which analyzed 15 of the lowest-paying occupations in the United States, found that unionized workers earned about 16 percent more than their non-union counterparts. Unionized workers in these same industries were also about 25 percentage points more likely to have health insurance or a pension plan.

For workers in these low-wage industries, unionization raised their wages, on average, about $1.75 per hour. In financial terms, the union effect on employer-provided health insurance and pensions was even larger.

SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN... Here's an elegant response from Paul Krugman to the right wing attack on the Children's Health Insurance Program.

BUILT ON SAND. Excerpt from a long but good article in the New Republic about our neglected infrastructure:

Here is Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations: it is the "duty of the sovereign or commonwealth" to erect and to maintain "public institutions and those public works, which, though they may be in the highest degree advantageous to a great society, are, however, of such a nature that the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals, and which it therefore cannot be expected that any individual or small number of individuals should erect or maintain." Infrastructure is the classic public good that the free market does not and cannot provide. On the scale that is necessary, only the federal government can make the difference.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED