Moving from propaganda to problem solving?

 In terms of using cynical political strategies to promote bad agendas, the "war on coal" narrative that emerged in the Obama era worked as well in West Virginia (not in a good way) as the famous Republican national  "southern strategy" that rode white resentment to power in the wake of the civil rights movement.

(Both had a more or less subtle racial dog whistle component.)

The war on coal narrative basically blamed the ills of the coal industry and coal communities--mostly the results of market forces and automation-- on the policies of the Obama administration and similar targets.

 Meanwhile, people who were serious about dealing with coalfield problems, which are very real, pushed for policies promoting what's been called a "just transition," which the Climate Justice Alliance defines as " a vision-led, unifying and place-based set of principles, processes, and practices that build economic and political power to shift from an extractive economy to a regenerative economy." As in solutions over propaganda and scapegoating.

There is actually some low hanging fruit here, along the lines laid out in the stalled RECLAIM Act, which among other things would reallocate Abandoned Mine Lands (not to be confused with abandoned land mines) funding to undo some of the damage caused by mining and create jobs. 

I was pleasantly surprised to see that the WV legislature yesterday, Republican supermajorities and all, approved a resolution calling on the federal government to allocate $8 billion to the state for more job-creating reclamation projects, which is something the Biden administration also supports.

At the risk of sounding like a certain US senator from WV, the measure enjoyed broad bipartisan support--for real--and was also hailed by environmentalists. I'm not sure how far this will go, but this kind of thing doesn't happen very often. Special shoutout to Delegate Evan Hansen (D-Monongalia County), who has taken a leading role in promoting economic transition ideas and addressing climate change. 

Earlier this month, a bipartisan group of legislators formed an informal working group to address coalfield revitalization. It would be nice if this means a real shift in focus towards problem-solving over politics.

West Virginia's southern strategy

Around 1969, a Nixon advisor named Kevin Phillips wrote an influential book titled The Emerging Republican Majority. A very crude summary of its main thesis is that the backlash of white voters against the civil rights movement would provide a base in that party in what had historically been a Democratic stronghold for years to come. It took a while, but this "southern strategy" eventually worked, ironically flipping the historical traditions of both parties. 

West Virginia's equivalent of a southern strategy arguably worked better and faster. It was the creation of a "war on coal" narrative that conveniently blamed all hardships in the coalfields, where employment had been on  a steady downward trend since the end of WWII, on the nation's first black president. 

As the Church Lady would say on the old SNL skits, "Isn't that convenient?"

According to this narrative, President Obama's environmental zeal--or just plain meanness--was the cause of all things bad rather than market forces. It worked like a charm, eventually helping not just to flip the legislature for the first time since 1932 in the 2014 elections, but even contributing to supermajorities in both houses of the legislature in 2020.

When Trump ran for president in 2016, he promised to bring back mining jobs, even telling miners here "you're going to be working your asses off." The results are in. No doubt some current or former miners are doing just that, although it might not be in a coal mine. The number of working miners in the state, around 11,000, is lower than it was when even you-know-who was president, despite the Trump administration's efforts to roll back regulations.

As conservative commentator Hoppy Kercheval (who a few years ago touted coal's comeback under Trump) noted, "there were other forces at work, market forces that are making thermal coal less marketable."

I'm sure that knowledgeable people among industry supporters knew this was going to happen. But by then the spell had achieved its purpose. 

And the political results of West Virginia's southern strategy for workers, including miners, has been disastrous, with repeal of the state's prevailing wage, passage of right-to-work-for-less, and proposed policies to undermine public sector labor organizations. 

Attacks on the labor movement ultimately undermine the position of all workers. Union jobs typically pay better and have more benefits than non-union jobs, but many non-union employers feel compelled to improve wages and conditions to be compete for workers. The more unions decline, the less pressure employers feel to step up and the harder it is to push for worker-friendly policies. And the race to the bottom continues on its merry way.

The "invisible hand" strikes again

Here's an interesting item from Forbes on the decline of coal. Some excerpts:

Blame it on Obama? No. Blame it on market forces, which have not just provided the tools to dig out shale gas but to also commercialize advanced windmills and solar panels. In lay terms, coal’s financial and political troubles are because the electorate wants cleaner air and water, which has fostered innovation. And national policy has fallen into place and enabled the evolution...

When the political campaigns begin in earnest, the “War on Coal” rhetoric will no doubt get ratcheted up. But if economic survival is, indeed, the underlying concern, the candidates may want to convince their contemporaries to attract investment in the country’s new economic engines, and to implement the policies that would help facilitate such a future.

HELP NEEDED ON IRAN DEAL. For WV readers, Senator Joe Manchin is considered to be a critical vote on the Iran deal. If you can, please contact his office in support of the deal. You can find his numbers here.

Talking sense about West Virginia

I'm not saying it doesn't happen very often, but I'm always glad when it does. Here's a article from the State Journal that talks sense about higher education, taxes and the state budget. And then Ken Ward at Coal Tattoo tries to do the same on a bit of a tender subject these days. 

Something useful for a change

West Virginia's political leaders threw a world class ruling class hissy fit in the wake of the Obama administration's efforts to deal with climate change, which can't be true here because of money. For what it's worth, I'd like to pitch two reality based assessments of the current situation. First, here's Kentucky's Jason Bailey talking about some practical ways of dealing with Appalachia's problems. Second, here's Ken Ward from Coal Tattoo calling leaders to a higher standard. Whether anyone is listening is an open question.

Feel the noise

If you hear anything really loud next week, it just might be WV's ruling class throwing an epic hissy fit over the Obama administration's efforts to rein in carbon emissions and address climate change/global warming.

The hissy fit has been going on with peaks and valleys pretty much since 2009, but it's probably going to hit a new level.

Yesterday, I tweeted (@elcabrero) something like this:

World history WV style: the US entered WWII after Obama and the EPA bombed Pearl Harbor.

Sadly, that really isn't that much of an exaggeration.

Over at Coal Tattoo, my friend Ken Ward wonders when if ever folks here will actually deal with it. And Paul Krugman looks at the actual costs here.

At some point, I hope people here get around to facing a few facts. Like how the market, which some people worship as a god, is doing way more to coal than regulations. Or that maybe climate change/global warming is real (how bout the weather, by the way?). Or that however much coal has been and will be part of WV's economy, we're never going back to the WWII days when mines employed over 100,000 people. And that we need to have some rational, grown up discussions about what's next.

Meanwhile, apparently the nice folks at the WVU Bureau of Business and Economic Research didn't get the hissy fit memo. They recently released a report that forecast steady economic growth for WV over the next few years.. Here's some news coverage and here's the full report.

Three from WV

West Virginia's efforts to improve child nutrition in schools got a shout out today from Off the Charts, the blog of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington. The post focuses on WV's implementation of the Community Eligibility Provision, a federal policy that allows school boards to provide free meals to all kids in high-poverty schools. Former first lady and current state Board of Education President Gayle Manchin recently published an op-ed in support of the program as well.

June 30 is the deadline for school boards to opt into (or out of) the program. I'm hoping and working to see the numbers increase this year.

IF THAT WAS THE GOOD, this piece on the politics of coal would probably be the bad and the ugly.

A (VERY) LITTLE JUSTICE. People who have lived in Masseyland over the last 20 years or so might be interested to learn that Hugh Caperton finally won a legal round in his long fight with the former coal giant. The award was pretty small though.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The silver lining

OK, so this is more of a tweet than a self respecting blog post, but a friend of mine had a great one liner today when we were talking about West Virginia's water woes, from the chemical leak in January to the latest coal slurry spill.

He said the only good thing about the water mess was that it made West Virginia's ruling class stop talking about the Obama administration's so-called "war on coal" for a month or so.

I think he might have been right.

Out of the same spirit

There's an old joke about a Zen master walking up to a hot dog stand and saying "Make me one with everything." I think Ralph Waldo Emerson would take his hot dogs that way too, metaphorically speaking.

I've been blogging lately about Emerson and his ideas and at the moment I'm on his Harvard Divinity School Address. In it, among other things, he embraces a kind of cosmic idealistic monism (as in all is one) and thus seems to suffer from the kind of over optimism that characterizes such world views.

Here he lays it out:

...the world is not the product of manifold power  but of one will, of one mind; and that one mind is everywhere active, in each ray of the star, in each wavelet of the pool; and whatever opposes that will is everywhere balked and baffled, because things are made so, and not otherwise.

He adopts a position on evil that goes back to St. Augustine and Plato, which views being as such as good and evil as merely the absence of good:

Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he. For all things proceed out of this same spirit, which is differently named love, justice, temperance, in different applications, just as the ocean receives different names no the several shores which it washes. All things proceed out of the same spirit, and all things conspire with it. Whilst a man seeks good ends, he is strong by the whole strength of nature. In so far as he roves from these ends, he bereaves himself of power, of auxiliaries;  his being shrinks out of all remote channels, he become less and less, a mote, a point, until absolute badness is absolute death.

Let those who can believe it. As far as I can, some of those motes and points can do quite a bit of damage.

10 YEARS OUT. Here's Krugman on the Iraq War anniversary.

WAR ON COAL? Here's another view.

ANIMAL RESURRECTIONS. Given cloning and all, which extinct animals would you bring back?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Their admonishing smile

This is a busy time for El Cabrero, so rather than hunt up stuff to post each day, the theme for this stretch is the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose essays and poems had such a huge influence on much of American life and letters in the mid 1800s. This week, we're looking at his essay Nature, in which he makes more than one good point.

I admire this passage, which is in part about solitude and in part about how we don't value that which we take for granted.

To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds will separate between him and what he touches  One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years  how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty  and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

It really is true that if these celestial lights were only visible once in a great while we would give them more of the attention and reverence they deserve. The same is no doubt true of many other things.

WAR ON COAL? Whatever.

CHILD POVERTY PROBLEM? Real.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Good point

We hear a whole lot in this political season about President Obama's "War on Coal," which is basically a cynical way to assign the blame for the industry's woes, many of which are due to basic market forces, on a person who just happens not to be white. The specific political subtext in all this is the assumption that if the president's opponent wins, everything will be all good here all the time.

Meanwhile, nobody around here seems to have noticed that programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, which Romeny/Ryan have targeted for gutting, have an even bigger impact on the state's economy than the coal industry.

The folks at the WV Center on Budget and Policy point out here that

...in 2011 approximately $12.7 billion or 20.5 percent of the state’s $62 billion in personal income came from Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. The U.S. average was 12.8 percent...

For comparison, only 5.5 percent or $3.4 billion of personal income in 2011 was derived from coal mining and natural gas extraction – two of the largest industries in the state.

I don't mean to belittle the economic hardships in the coalfields. These need to be faced in a proactive way rather than used to score dubious political points. But imagine how bad things would look in places like southern West Virginia if drastic cuts to the bedrock safety net--Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid--went hand in hand with market-driven declines in mining.

MORE ON THAT here.

A TALE OF TWO STORMS. Krugman does a heckuva job contrasting Katrina and Sandy.

IT'S ALREADY WORKING. Here's a cheer for the Affordable Care Act.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

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.

Full house

Earlier this year, I worked with several allies on a report about prison overcrowding in West Virginia. We were hoping that the report might nudge the WV legislature into passing a pretty decent bill to begin addressing the problem.

Things looked pretty good until everything fell apart on the last day of the session. As a fallback, state leaders contacted the Justice Center of the Council of State Governments to study WV's system and make suggestions for addressing the problem. Some of those were released yesterday (and echo some of the points we made in our report).

The Justice Center has done similar work in other states, including some very conservative ones, so maybe their work can help provide political cover for state politicians to finally take action on this issue. It's all about reducing mass incarceration and saving money without compromising public safety. Here's hoping we can move this along.

On the same subject, here's an op-ed by my friend the Rev. Matthew Watts on mass incarceration and how it impacts the African-American community.

CALLING BS. Here's Media Matters for America on the whole "war on coal" thing.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Coal stuff

You can't be around most WV politicians very long without hearing about the Obama administration's "war on coal." According to this scenario, the EPA is a rogue agency totally bent on destroying the inoffensive industry and everything would be just peachy without it.

This post from the WV Center on Budget and Policy suggests that regulations aren't the main problem here.

Meanwhile, this post by Beth Spence reminds me that the same people jabbering on about the "war on coal" are the same ones who could make meaningful mine safety legislation pass--but they can't be bothered to do that.

So I'm a troll

I seem to recall reading somewhere that Karl Marx, when overcome with an outbreak of carbuncles, found solace in writing obscene Portuguese poetry. That wasn't an option for me during my week + of zombie fever, which I devoutly hope has passed. While the Spousal Unit is fluent in that language, my knowledge of it is limited to one obscenity (anatomical in nature).

Instead, as I have mentioned before, I've found what solace I could in trying to out-troll right wing trolls lurking around the Charleston Gazette website, always a target-rich environment. In one recent article about the Affordable Care Act, a troll wrote that "government should not be in the business of deciding who lives and who dies." I wrote that I totally agreed and that these decisions should be left to corporations and the market like they are now.

Recently, the Gazette ran a thoughtful editorial about how some of our political polarization is based on deep psychological factors. Yeah, well, whatever. Here's what my troll alter-ego had to say about all that:

This is just a clever attempt to take the reader's mind off the eternal struggle between the forces of Coal, which are all good, and the forces of EPA, which are all evil all the time. Remember, in the last days, Coal will triumph over its enemies and make everyone who ever lived bow down before it, the way most WV politicians do now, for the final judgment.

If nothing else, I can rest my fever-ridden body a little easier in the knowledge that I've attempted to keep the web as a refuge of sanity and rationality.

JUST ONE LINK TODAY, about the end of the world, of course.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: THE NEXT NOTCH ABOUT ELEVATED

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.

Feeding the trolls, again

Over Memorial Day weekend, some women shaved their heads in protest of mountaintop removal mining. I admire their dedication, although I obviously wasn't consulted on tactics. Maybe this is just the martial artist in me talking, but I prefer strategies that inconvenience one's opponent/s rather than oneself or one's allies.

Unfortunately for the protesters, it didn't seem to get a lot of press other than a picture and brief paragraph in the Gazette.

That was enough, however, to bring out the trolls, i.e. all the right wingers who lurk around media websites so they can spew their views. So far, over 60 comments have been made on the article. I highly recommend checking them out.

Hats off to one commentator, ProudRight, who I believe to be a great satirist. He comes so close to saying the things that real people say in forums like this so it's kind of hard to tell what is jest and what is not. Here are two gems ProudRight added to this discussion:

Either you're a friend of coal or an enemy of coal. Almost all the people here like MTR and want to keep mining the coal. By getting rid of the mountains we make WV better. If they don't like the way we mine coal, why don't they do us all a favor and leave? The people against coal are using big words and talking it up because they think they are better than the rest of us. How smart is it to shave your head, like we're not going to mine coal because you shave your head? The truth is these protesters can't stop us doing our job. They're just a wasting their time away. Coal is WV. Everybody likes coal just like they like the Mountaineers. How you tree huggers going to watch ball if your sitting there in the dark? I'm sick of looking at ugly green mountains when we could have more factories. Coal is the future they can't stop.

and

The know it alls just use the fancy facts and numbers to lie about coal. We mine the coal because WV is coal. Without coal there will be no WV. You don't see us going around shaving our heads. In November we're going to vote Obama out and vote the tree huggers to jail where they belong. I'll be watchin the Mountaineers win football games and riding my 4 wheeler while you tree huggers will be sitting in the dark. EPA out of WV, Obama prison.

I think the only thing that distinguishes ProudRight's satire from the sincere venting of those he/she imitates is the fact that the author manages to insert a reference to Mountaineer games in every comment.

Rock on, ProudRight. And wake up, America!

Then what?

El Cabrero is getting a little worried about the ruling class in my beloved state of West Virginia. As I've mentioned before, they are several years into a protracted hissy fit over the allegedly job-killing agenda of the Obama administration and its "war on coal."

They had a bit of a setback recently when it was noticed that coal jobs are actually significantly up to their highest level since the mid 1990s, higher even than the ruling class Golden Age of the Bush administration.

Resourceful guys that they are, no pun intended, they managed to dodge that bullet by essentially saying, "Yeah,  well, maybe, but he's about to start killing jobs."

(It is a truth universally acknowledged amongst the WV ruling class that declining jobs in coal mining are exclusively caused by black commanders in chief and not by things like a warm winter, cheap natural gas and competition from other places.)

Here's what I wonder about though. Suppose Romney wins in November and the EPA is gutted or abolished and mining regulation falls back into industry hands and enforcement is replaced by "compliance assistance." If coal jobs go down then, as will probably be the case, who are they going to blame?

The Obama excuse is bound to wear off in time and then it may become apparent that there were plenty of warning signs about the long term decline of Appalachian mining but that the people running the state were in a state of denial and blew any chances to work towards some kind of transition that might have eased the crunch because they were too busy throwing a hissy fit.

But, knowing them, they'll probably find somebody else to blame it on.

So close

This week saw a series of taxpayer funded pep rallies for coal in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia. I'm not sure whether the festivities included torchlight parades, but there were plenty of ritualistic denunciations of the EPA and President Obama, both of which are regarded by the great god coal as the source and font of all evil in the world.

Newspaper coverage of such events is always good for lively comments from the trolls that lurk about the web the way giant carp lurk around the bait shop at Beech Fork State Park. A friend of mine highlighted one such comment, which I'm pretty sure is satire and good satire at that. But it's not that far removed from what lots of folks say with utter sincerity:

What is good for coal is good for WV. Coal is WV. Either you are a friend of coal or an enemy of coal. The enemies need to move out of this state. People don't mind the pollution because they know pollution doesn't hurt anyone. Global warming is as lie. Using tax dollars to support coal companies is the best investment we could make. Think of how much better WV will be 20 years from now when when get rid of the stupid mountains and forests. Public enemy number one of coal and WV is the Kenyan born socialist Obama. Obama's eco-thugs are shutting down the mines and laying off miners. Without coal our state will become a waste land and there won't be any jobs. We won't even be able to watch the Mountaineers play ball because the tree huggers will take away our TV's. From the 1800's on, the coal industry brought prosperity to WV. We need to stop the regulation. If a miner gets hurt its his fault. Don't like the smoke from the power plants? Then don't breath. Do us all a favor"