A big win for public education in West Virginia

 In what was a clear case of people power versus money power, West Virginia voters overwhelmingly rejected two state constitutional measures on the ballot this election day that would have (further) threatened public education in West Virginia.

Amendment 2 would have given the legislature the power to eliminate business equipment taxes, most of which go to local governments to support public education, emergency service, public libraries, senior centers, parks, etc. It was a power grab that would have taken away control from local voters and governments and given it to politicians in Charleston to give tax breaks to their supporters. Needless to say, business interest groups and dark money supported the amendments.

Amendment 2 was defeated by a nearly 2 to 1 margin.

Amendment 4 was equally bad because it would have taken control of public school curriculums away from boards of educations and given it to the same politicians, opening the way to censorship, book banning, stifling of education, and bogus culture wars. 

Amendment 4 was shot down by a margin of approximately 60 to 40.

Credit for this was due to mobilization from many quarters, including boards of education, county commissions, unions, parents, educators and school support workers, firefighters, grassroots advocacy groups and many others. Lots of people I know (myself included) hit the road and threw hearts and souls into stopping 2 and 4.

For once anyway  people power won over money power.

Please vote no on WV 2 and 4 Nov. 8 to protect education

 Public education was a major concern of West Virginia’s founders. Article 12 Section 1 of the state constitution states that “The Legislature shall provide, by general law, for a thorough and efficient system of free schools.”

Article 12 Section 6 of the state constitution that specifies that “the school board of any district shall be elected by the voters of the respective district without reference to political party affiliation.”

Two constitutional amendments on the ballot in November could threaten the intent of those provisions.

Amendment 2 would essentially give the legislature to power to eliminate business taxes on equipment and property that now provide over a quarter of funding for counties, cities, and schools. As a sweetener, it would also give them power to eliminate taxes on personal vehicles, although the lion’s share of more than 70 percent would go to businesses, many of which are out of state corporations.

If voters approve this amendment, the legislature could cut property taxes by over $500 million dollars. As things now stand, 66 percent of this revenue funds county school districts. Another 33.5 percent goes to county and municipal governments to provide funding for things like emergency medical services, fire protection, public safety, public libraries and senior citizen centers and other services.

This would end a long tradition of constitutional protections for local services, take authority for property taxes away from local voters and communities, and could impact bonds and levies supported by supermajorities of 60 percent or more of local voters. Currently 44 of West Virginia’s 55 counties fund services through voter-approved levies.

Supporters of Amendment 2 say that local governments will be “made whole” by state funding, but there’s no guarantee of that—and doing so would simply require cuts to state funding for other programs. The budget surpluses the state now enjoys are mostly the result of one-time federal COVID relief funding. Making long term plans based on temporary gains is a bit like counting on lottery winnings in making a family’s budget.

The likely long-term results will be either cuts in public services or regressive tax increases that fall on working class families…or a combination thereof.

As Governor Jim Justice put it, “We’re taking away an income stream and betting on good times forever and putting at risk our schools, our EMS, our firemen, our police and whatever it may be. We have to step back and think about what we are doing.”

And while eliminating those taxes might do significant damage to funding local services, it’s not likely to result in more jobs for West Virginians. State and local taxes make up less than two percent of the cost of doing business, so we’re talking about a fraction of a fraction. Some evidence even suggests that cuts in equipment taxes can result in automation and loss of manufacturing jobs.

Amendment 4 would threaten the constitutional intent of school governance without regard to party affiliation by giving partisan politicians control over classrooms and taking authority away from educators, school boards, parents, and voters. This could turn schools into political battlegrounds, stifle learning, create a climate of intimidation, impose a narrow range of ideological and religious perspectives, and lead to censorship and book banning.

What both proposed amendments have in common is the centralization of power by a partisan legislature at the expense of local voters, governments, and school boards.

 For those reasons, we are compelled to express our opposition to Amendments 2 and 4.

(Sorry if this sounds familiar but it's kinda important.)

To protect education, just say no

 Public education was a major concern of West Virginia’s founders. Article 12 Section 1 of the state constitution states that “The Legislature shall provide, by general law, for a thorough and efficient system of free schools.”

Good luck with that these days.

The public education system that taught most people reading this newspaper is now under attack as never before. And the source of that attack is some of the leadership of the West Virginia legislature. 

In recent years, a majority of legislators pushed through a bill allowing public money to be diverted to profit-making charter schools, which have little or no public accountability, as well as a program that essentially pays parents to take kids and funding out of the public schools that the vast majority of West Virginians rely on.

Now some want to rewrite the state constitution with two amendments that would centralize in their hands control over school funding and curriculum that now resides with county governments, local voters, and school boards. 

To paraphrase the late great Mister Rogers, can you say power grab?

Amendment 2 would essentially give the legislature to power to eliminate business taxes on equipment and property that now provide over a quarter of funding for counties, cities, and schools. As a sweetener, it would also give them power to eliminate taxes on personal vehicles, although the lion’s share of more than 70 percent would go to businesses, many of which are out of state corporations.

If voters approve this amendment, the legislature could cut property taxes by over $500 million dollars. As things now stand, 66 percent of this revenue funds county school districts. Another 33.5 percent goes to county and municipal governments to provide funding for things like emergency medical services, fire protection, public safety, public libraries and senior citizen centers and other services.

This would end a long tradition of constitutional protections for local services, take authority for property taxes away from local voters and communities, and could impact bonds and levies supported by supermajorities of 60 percent or more of local voters. Currently 44 of West Virginia’s 55 counties fund services through voter-approved levies.

Supporters of Amendment 2 say that local governments will be “made whole” by state funding, but there’s no guarantee of that—and doing so would simply require cuts to state funding for other programs. The budget surpluses the state now enjoys are mostly the result of one-time federal COVID relief funding. Making long term plans based on temporary gains is a bit like counting on lottery winnings in making a family’s budget.

The likely long-term results will be either cuts in public services or regressive tax increases that fall on working class families…or a combination thereof.

As Governor Jim Justice put it, with the apparent approval of Babydog, “We’re taking away an income stream and betting on good times forever and putting at risk our schools, our EMS, our firemen, our police and whatever it may be. We have to step back and think about what we are doing.”

And while eliminating those taxes might give a break to corporations and the politicians they financially support, it’s not likely to result in more jobs for West Virginians. State and local taxes make up less than two percent of the cost of doing business, so we’re talking about a fraction of a fraction. Some evidence even suggests that cuts in equipment taxes can result in automation and loss of manufacturing jobs.

Then there’s Amendment 4. If passed by voters, this would essentially nullify the intent of Article 12 Section 6 of the state constitution that specifies that “the school board of any district shall be elected by the voters of the respective district without reference to political party affiliation” by giving partisan politicians control over classrooms and taking authority away from educators, school boards, parents, and voters.

Do we really want politicians to be able to control and censor the books kids read, the lessons they learn, and even the songs they sing? 

Once you go down that road, there’s no telling how things will end up, but it’s never a good place. It’s a slippery slope from book banning to book burning.

Here’s hoping West Virginia voters of all stripes show up in November to vote “no” on 2 and 4 and protect the education system we need for a decent future as well as local control of the investments we rely on for everything from emergency services to parks and recreation.

(This appeared as a column in the Charleston Gazette-Mail.)

Big stakes for schools riding on November ballot

 Those of us of a certain age who remember a certain debacle in the Middle East, might also remember when then secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld said in a justification for the war on Iraq:

“As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

I was reminded of this famous “known unknowns” soundbite recently after hearing the concerns raised by the Raleigh County commission regarding Amendment 2, the property tax amendment that the state legislature voted to put on the ballot in the upcoming November election.

A county commissioner said that “the unknowns are what scares everybody,” and because of this uncertainty, Raleigh County is among fifteen county commissions to date that publicly oppose Amendment 2. 

The commissioner is spot on, there are many scary unknowns as to how counties could make up for the potential loss of $515 million in revenue if Amendment 2 passes muster with West Virginia voters.  

There are also some known knowns, the first of which is who is behind this effort to strip local county governments of the power to set business and manufacturing property tax rates, and give that authority over to the state legislature.  Just follow the money.  

Of the estimated $515 million in revenue generated by these taxes for the counties, over seventy per cent is paid for by large businesses, the majority of which are wealthy, out-of-state corporations who want nothing more than another tax break.  

To be sure, these moneyed interests have been lobbying our legislature for years to eliminate this tax.  Putting a constitutional amendment on the ballot is their latest attempt.  

Another known known is who stands to lose if Amendment 2 were to pass, and the list is long. Nearly all of these business property taxes fund local services including public schools, libraries, EMTs, firefighters, among many other public goods and services.  Amendment 2 would permanently eliminate local control over one of the biggest funding sources for these critical public services.   

And lest we forget that it’s these public services that businesses one way or another rely on, to educate future employees, keep their employees and their families safe in emergencies, and create a thriving community where businesses would want to locate. 

In the “known unknown” category is what will future legislators do.  A common defense of Amendment 2 is that it doesn’t mean the legislature will cut these business and manufacturing taxes, it simply means they can.  

But the truth is that current politicians cannot say that future legislatures will ensure counties have adequate revenue.  Because of the inherent unpredictability of power at the state legislature, assurances made for revenue replacement can be nothing more than empty promises. 

Speaking of promises, after Labor Day West Virginians will be inundated with fancy ads on TV, in print, and on the radio tying a vote for Amendment 2 to a break on their car tax.  Gee I wonder who will be paying for all that expensive advertising.    

Fortunately a known known is that West Virginians have a keen eye for a wolf in sheep’s clothing.  The sheep will be the “car tax promise” and the wolf is a $515 million power grab away from local governments.  As the saying goes, remember in November! 

(This op-ed was published in the Charleston Gazette Mail by my co-worker Lida Shepherd.)

Make Orwell fiction again

One of the better slogans I’ve seen lately is “Make Orwell Fiction Again,” a reference to the British writer best known for books like Animal Farm and 1984, and for his hatred of totalitarianism and authoritarianism.

He was particularly concerned with how words can be distorted by the powerful to justify or hide injustice.

Here are some lines from his “Politics and the English Language”:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible…

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer...

Political language--and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists--is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

For an example close to home, we need look no farther than House Bill 4011 and Senate Bill 498, which would basically stifle the teaching of history and of issues related to race and gender. They’ve been titled the “Anti-Stereotyping Act” and the “Anti-Racism Act,” respectively.  

(I’ve often wondered lately how different things would be if some legislators were as concerned with sanitizing and monitoring the quality of our rivers, lakes, and streams as they are with the teaching of history and public education…but I digress.)

Fortunately, HB 4011 was turned into a study resolution, but SB 498 passed the Senate and was referred to House Education and Judiciary committees. It’s not clear now what kind of amendments might be tacked on.

It’s hard to know where to start with this, but here are some issues in no particular order:

*This is a solution in search of problems. These bills didn’t originate from any situation in West Virginia. Rather, they’re part of a well-orchestrated national effort to impose cookie-cutter legislation on states designed to foment bogus culture wars and thus distract people from their real agenda of pushing policies that make the very rich richer at the expense of everybody else. 

This is why we can’t have nice things.

*This would have a chilling effect on public education, which is already under attack in West Virginia in so many ways. There seems to be an effort now to punish teachers and school service workers for winning during the historic 2018 work stoppage.  

*Sticking with the issue of undermining public education, these attacks also seem to be consistent with other none too subtle efforts to promote the privatization of education for the sake of profit. And sticking with the theme of history, we’re moving from extracting wealth from strip mining the land to doing the same with public education funds. 

(What’s next? Oh yeah, state parks, as in HB 4408.)   

*It’s impossible to look at American history without considering race, starting with the impact on indigenous people during and after “the Columbian exchange”—another Orwellian whopper—to the Middle Passage of the transcontinental slave trade to the role of slavery in shaping the American economy (agriculture, manufacturing, banking, finance, insurance, transport, etc.) to the Civil War to post-war Klan terror and sharecropping to Jim Crow to the Civil Rights Movement to mass incarceration and beyond. Yes, there are some horrific things there, but there’s also a lot of heroic and inspiring acts as well. Keeping people ignorant of them isn’t doing anybody any favors.

*It’s just as impossible to appreciate West Virginia history without discussing race. There are huge events like the biracial raid on Harpers Ferry, the Civil War and the creation of the state in 1863, but we’ve also been graced by brave individuals who made history here, whether they passed through or were born here. 

Those include trailblazing educators like Booker T. Washington and Carter G. Woodson; groundbreaking legislators like Elizabeth Simpson Drewry and Minnie Buckingham Harper; scholars and advocates like W.E.B. DuBois; attorneys like J.R. Clifford; math and science geniuses like Katherine Johnson; rank and file union coal mine leaders like Dan Chain aka “Few Clothes Johnson;” white labor leaders and civil rights champions like Walter Reuther, and more.

*Speaking of history and manipulating education in the interests of the powerful, generations of West Virginians already experienced a censored version in 8th grade West Virginia studies classes that left out the history of our colonial economy and multi-ethnic labor struggles, something that only changed in the 1980s with films like Matewan and books like Denise Giardina’s Storming Heaven. 

*Then there’s the idea that sometimes learning can make kids uncomfortable. I get that. It happened to me lot too, usually in any math class after 7th grade--or when I was required to read Great Expectations in 9th. But real education is about challenging our minds. As an adult, I’ve come to appreciate subjects like algebra…and Pip’s journey to insight and adulthood.

*Finally, if we ever want to keep our brightest in the state or invite others to come from elsewhere, it might be good if we stop publicly embarrassing ourselves.

(This ran as an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail. There was a public hearing today at which 24 people spoke against SB 498 while only four spoke in favor. Outcome TBD.)

At least this didn't happen in West Virginia

I'm so relieved that this happened in Florida and not here.

Commissioners in Citrus County Florida declined library funding for an electronic subscription to the New York Times because it was "fake news."

The vote was apparently unanimous, with member Chris Carnahan reportedly saying, “I will not be voting for this. I don’t want the New York Times in this county.”

I mean God forbid public libraries carry materials with diverse points of view. The results could be...democracy or something.

According to Forbes, the vote happened shortly before Trump ordered all federal agencies to cancel subscriptions to the Times and the Washington Post.

I just hope this doesn't give anybody ideas...

Groan

(This is what libraries looked like when I started working in them.)

All we need these days is another embarrassing story about West Virginia. Well, guess what? We got one. This one hit a little close to home.

First a digression. By an accident of fate, I spent 10 years working in public libraries in WV. I started out as a part time janitor after high school. In fact, I got some of my best reading done when I was supposed to be cleaning the little library in my home town.

After the big flood of 1978 trashed my town, including the library, there was a lot of extra work. Eventually I started working with the public. I really loved bantering with people, waiting on kids, helping people find the information they needed (even if they weren't very clear on it sometimes) and putting on programs people wanted to come to.

Aside from the whole poverty thing, it was a good gig.

Libraries are like little liberated areas carved out in the midst of the reign of greed. They are refuges for people of all ages and passports of the mind.They are places where people can make a fresh start on education, careers, and personal development. They are places that provide a venue for many diverse viewpoints.

They're also outposts of free speech and bulwarks against book banning. Or were meant to be.

That's where the groan comes in. A national news story recently broke about the library director in Berkeley Springs who tried to keep a copy of Bob Woodward's Fear off the shelves. Fortunately, the library board lost no time in reversing the decision.

I'm hoping that the exposure this incident has gotten sends a loud and clear message that this kind of **** is not to be tolerated.

The distance between book banning and book burning isn't that far.

It all started on Facebook

OK, so today, when I was technically supposed to have be working, I accidentally checked Facebook to find the following hilarious post by a pal  in regard to the West Virginia coal/poetry censorship episode that officially didn't happen.

Here's what he wrote:

"Practicing for next year's poetry contest: Roses are red, Violets are blue, coal is from heaven, and it is awesome too."

This inspired me to invite my fellow West Virginians to take part in an Acceptable Poem Contest in which we write pro-coal poetry that would be permissible to read aloud in public places in West Virginia. Here's what I came up with:

Once upon a midnight dreary,
coal kept the lights on.

Any takers?

Short takes

I'm not always on the same page as the editorial writers of the Charleston Daily Mail, but I think they nailed it with this item on the passage of legislation creating the Future Fund from natural resource taxes.

Meanwhile, holy PR malfunction, Batman! Does anybody else wonder what really happened here? It gives a whole new meaning to the term "poetry slam."

Diversity of bad ideas

Overwhelmingly but with some exceptions, participants in the Occupy movement have adopted, often explicitly, nonviolence as a method of action. However, in some places there are those who argue for "a diversity of tactics," which basically seems to consist of throwing things at cops.

Presumably such people believe that this is the best way to win over the hearts and minds of the 99 percent they claim to represent.

Sorry, but the most charitable thing I can say about that approach is that it is, in one of the Spousal Unit's favorite phrases, "dumber than dog ****." I say that not only as someone who works for a Quaker organization that promotes nonviolence, but also as a gun owning Gandhi-allergic Scotch Irish hillbilly with a black belt.

This has nothing to do with any belief on my part regarding the moral arc of the universe, the evidence for which is underwhelming to me most days. It comes down to this: as much as some seem to like throwing stuff as a method of change, the rulers generally have way more stuff to throw. And they can throw it harder. Second, most people are not all that turned on by the sight of people throwing stuff.

It seems to me but simple prudence to avoid giving one's opponent the excuse and/or ability to crush and/or totally discredit and isolate you unless there is a compelling reason to do so and I don't imagine that happens very often.

As a friend of mine once said about ultra "left" groups that engage in provocative action, "If they're not getting paid by the other side, they're getting ripped off."

IT'S MONDAY so it's gotta be Krugman bashing austerity.

HISTORY IS MESSY, so the Tennessee Tea Party wants to clean it up--by keeping slavery and such unsavory matters of American history out of the textbooks.

WHAT IS 24 MILLION GENERATIONS? If we were playing Jeopardy, that would be the number required for mouse sized mammals to evolve to elephant proportions assuming natural selection was favorable.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A FREE SOUL IN PRISON

Photo credit: Chicago Daily News negatives collection, DN-0003451. Courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society, by way of the Library of Congress.

Welcome to the last day of Eugene Debs Week at Goat Rope. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier entries.

Despite his status as a national spokesman for labor and the socialist movement (not to mention a perennial candidate) Debs did not aspire to be a conventional "leader" but rather encouraged ordinary people to take the lead:

I am not a Labor Leader; I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into this promised land if I could, because if I could lead you in, someone else would lead you out. YOU MUST use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourselves out of your present condition; as it is now the capitalists use your heads, and your hands.

His biggest brush with the Powers that Were came in the wake of the First World War, which many socialists and others believed was a disastrous slaughter driven by imperialism--a view that many later mainstream historians came to endorse.

In a famous 1918 anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio, he said:

...that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose — especially their lives.

Making an ant-war speech at that time carried considerable risks given repressive wartime legislation. He noted that

...it is extremely dangerous to exercise the constitutional right of free speech in a country fighting to make democracy safe in the world... I would rather a thousand times be a free soul in jail than to be a sycophant and coward in the streets.

(Golly, it's a good thing we don't have to worry about restrictions on liberty during wartime any more, isn't it?)

Debs was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 1919 for that speech. Never one to pass on a chance to make a statement, he saved some of his best for the trial. This is what he told the judge during his sentencing hearing:

Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

Debs eventually had his sentence commuted by Republican President Warren G. Harding in 1921 after serving time in Moundsville, WV and the federal prison in Atlanta. He lived until 1926, but was unable to regain his own vitality or that of the movement he dedicated his life to serve.

Wartime repression dealt organizations like the Socialist Party and the IWW a blow from which they never recovered. In addition to persecution and defection, a rival communist movement sprang up in the wake of the Russian Revolution, about which the staunchly democratic Debs became more and more critical.

While in some respects the ending was tragic, Debs remains an inspirational figure for his courage and idealism. And indirectly, many of the reforms he and his comrades supported were eventually enacted into legislation. Finally, he inspired the next generation, including such labor leaders as WV's own Reuther brothers.

Requiescat in pace.

PROTESTING THE NLRB. El Cabrero was in DC this week and drove by one of the protests against the Bush National Labor Relations Board described here. I wanted to hop out and join them.

MEGAN WILLIAMS CASE. Here's the latest.

DINOSAUR UPDATE. They found a new one that ate like a cow.

IT'S NOT JUST US. It looks like cockroaches also have conformity and peer pressure issues.

CENSORSHIP UPDATE. It looks like Pat Conroy's novel Beach Music has survived an attempt of censorship at Nitro High School. I'm sure there is gnashing of teeth in the domestic Taliban camp.

MORE ON ARCHIVEGATE, the WV tempest about the bizarre and unjust firing of a state archivist and future plans for the state archive can be found at the Uberblog of WV news, Lincoln Walks at Midnight. A protest is planned for today.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

DOING IT THE FIRST TIME LIKE IT'S THE SECOND TIME

Photo credit: This image courtesy of everystockphoto.com.

In addition to links and comments about current events, the theme of this week's Goat Rope is drawn from physician, psychologist, and Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl's classic, Man's Search for Meaning. Frankl developed his psychological theories, which he called logotherapy, at least in part from his experiences as an inmate of several concentration camps.

If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

Considering the heaviness of the topics covered in his book, Frankl's best known book is also hopeful and even humorous at times.

I was probably under 20 when I first read it. It made enough of an impression on me that parts of it have stuck with me through the years. On re-reading it in a new edition, I came upon a key sentence that could have made my life a whole lot easier. It was contained in an essay added to later versions of the book.

But first, ask yourself this question: have you ever wished you could go back in time and do things differently knowing what you know now? Yeah, me too...

Well, here's the part I missed. According to Frankl, the "categorical imperative of logotherapy"--his approach to mental health-- is this:

"Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!"

Doh! I wish I would have seen that the first time around...

HOUSE PASSES PROTECTIONS. The US House of Representatives voted yesterday to extend workplace anti-discrimination laws to cover sexual orientation. That should give the domestic Taliban something else to howl at the moon about. They've been stuck on trying to ban books lately.

SPEAKING OF THE DOMESTIC TALIBAN HOWLING AT THE MOON, here's the latest on the book-banning effort in Kanawha County.

ANTHROPOLOGY GOES TO WAR? El Cabrero has been following this story for a while now. The Pentagon has developed Human Terrain System which seeks to embed anthropologists and other social scientists in the military. The American Anthropology Association has expressed its concerns about this trend. I'm still trying to adjust to the employability of anthropology majors.

COMING HOME FROM WAR? This is from CNN:

More than 25 percent of the homeless population in the United States are military veterans, although they represent only 11 percent of the civilian adult population, according to a report to be released Thursday.

On any given night last year, nearly 196,000 veterans slept on the street, in a shelter or in transitional housing, the study by the Homelessness Research Institute found.

Meanwhile, many veterans are still not receiving the health care they've been promised.

AN ENCOURAGING SIGN? While newspaper readership declines, the often laugh out loud paper The Onion is doing great.

RELATIVELY SPEAKING. Here's an interesting take on the moral relativism of the right wing, which has been hammering others about moral relativism for years now.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

DAY OF THE DEAD

Welcome to Goat Rope's official Haint Week. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

"Haint" is Appalachian for that which haunts, which is a pretty good theme for Halloween week.

A Mexican custom of which El Cabrero is a big fan of is the Day of the Dead, which corresponds with All Saints Day in the Church calendar. Halloween, you recall, is All-Hallows-Eve or the day before. Similar customs are observed elsewhere, but it is the official Goat Rope verdict that this is the coolest.

The celebration likely has pre-Christian roots. During the Aztec month of Miccailhuitonli (say that 10 times while spinning around), there was a festival presided over by the "Lady of the Dead" which was dedicated both to children and the dead. Originally, this was celebrated in the summer, but there was an understandable post-colonial shift.

Now the festivities usually continue for the first two days of November and include acts that symbolically welcome the dead back into their homes and visiting family graves. There's special food including "pan de muerto" or bread of the dead. Family altars and gravesides are decorated with religious objects and symbolic offerings of food flowers and even alcohol and cigarettes.

I think the basic idea is right on, i.e. that the living and the dead are connected. That idea is enshrined in the ancient creeds of Christianity, which speak of "the communion of saints."

Maybe that's because the dead aren't quite as dead as we tend to think or the living aren't as alive as we tend to think. I'll leave that to the reader's discretion...

YOU DON'T NEED A WEATHERMAN... Here's a sobering item on climate change and global warming.

NO FEAR? Consider reconsidering.

A FAIR DAY'S WORK FOR--WHAT? Here's a call for decent wages and conditions for all.

BOOK BATTLES. The recent efforts by some Kanawha County parents to ban Pat Conroy's novels from AP English classes reminds some folks of an epic book battle that took place more than 30 years ago.

MINE SAFETY LEGISLATION MOVES IN US HOUSE. A House panel approved stronger mine safety measures, a step that the industry and Bush administration will oppose.

MEGAN WILLIAMS MARCH UPDATE. Here's the Daily Mail interviewing the Rev. Matthew Watts, a member of the Charleston Ministerial Alliance, about a march planned for this Sunday by out of state groups. Several WV groups have declined to support the event.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

PRESSED INTO SERVICE

Photo credit: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

This is Pirate Week at Goat Rope. If this is your first visit, please click on the earlier entries.

As mentioned yesterday, pirates of the Golden Age (1715-1725) were folk heroes to many members of the lower classes--including sailors in the Royal Navy and in merchant vessels, many of whom would voluntarily join them given the chance. According to Colin Woodard, author of The Republic of Pirates,

They were sailors, indentured servants, and runaway slaves rebelling against their oppressors: captains, ship owners, and the autocrats of the great slave plantations of America and the West Indies.

Consider the lot of a sailor on a merchant vessel. In Woodard's words,

Merchants were compelled to adopt aggressive tactics to fill their crews. Some hired "spirits," or men who, in the words of sailor Edward Barlow, went about inns and taverns looking to "entice any who they think are country people or strangers...or any who they think are out of place and cannot get work and are walking idly about the streets."

The spirits promised good wages and cash in advance but wound up keeping several months of the sailor's wages as a commission. Some captains relied on "crimps" who took advantage of drunkards or indebted people or resorted to outright kidnapping. Once on board, the sailors were legally obliged to serve until the end of a voyage that could last for months or years.

The Royal Navy offered worse pay and harsher punishments and often resorted to press gangs that would round up any seaman or unfortunate soul they could find to meet the quote of men.

As we'll see tomorrow, the conditions aboard ship were pretty terrible.

I don't know about y'all, but I'm about ready to take the pirate oath...

MEGAN WILLIAMS SPEAKS. Here's an interview by AP with Megan Williams.

KANT WOULD CALL THIS "HETERONOMY." It appears some folks at the (WV) State Journal, a business paper sometimes more ideological than commercial, have adopted the position that because the coal industry might be inconvenienced if the human contribution to global warming was acknowledged it therefore isn't happening. Meanwhile, check this out.

IT'S NOT EASY BEING GREEN according to this Business Week article.

BAD MEDICINE. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, the decline in family incomes will have serious health impacts in this country.

ALONG THOSE LINES, here's a briefing paper by the Economic Policy Institute on the impact of globalization in its current form on wages for US workers.

MORE ON BOOK BANNING. According to this Gazette piece, author Pat Conroy has responded to efforts to ban his books from AP classes in Kanawha County. Here's his letter to the editor.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

WEEKEND SPECIAL: STEWPOT ROOSTER, CULTURE WARRIOR

For first time readers, this blog generally covers fairly serious human issues during the week. Weekends, however, are reserved for the commentaries of various animals in and around Goat Rope Farm.

This weekend, we once again welcome Stewpot Rooster, culture warrior. Stewpot is director of the Goat Rope Farm Family Values Coalition and is an ardent supporter of the recent effort to ban books at Nitro High School and anywhere else for that matter.

It is our hope that by providing room for the expression of (bio) diverse viewpoints, we are reducing the tragic polarization of our times and promoting a climate of deep listening and profound mutual respect.

Disclaimer: the opinions expressed by talking animals are not necessarily those of the Goat Rope staff or management.

STEWPOT ROOSTER, CULTURE WARRIOR, SPEAKS ON CENSORSHIP

It's about time they got around to banning books around here. Books are stupid anyway. Once people start reading them, they get all kinds of crazy ideas.

You don't want your precious innocent children having ideas do you? I didn't think so. It's been proven over and over again that ideas lead to thinking and thinking leads to harder stuff.

How else do you think the weaselly bunch of pointed headed swishy pinko liberals are going to succeed in taking over the country if they don't get people to think? First, they get your kids reading, then they turn em into a bunch of gibbering homosexuals, then they take your guns. Then it'll be too late!

Goodbye Hank Jr., hello show tunes...

All I can say is, not on my watch!

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

PARTHIAN SHOTS

Caption: Seamus McGoogle is a Nietzschean Uber-Cat.

This week's Goat Rope has featured nuggets from Nietzsche along with link and comments about current events. Even though he was way out there sometimes, he had his moments.

If memory serves, the English phrase "parting shots" is derived from the term "Parthian shots." This refers to the tactic of ancient Persian cavalry to turn and shoot unexpectedly when appearing to flee.

El Cabrero had trouble coming up with a single parting shot from Beyond Good and Evil to close out the week, so here are a few to ponder:

One is punished most for one's virtues.

The belly is the reason man does not so easily take himself for a god.

Who has not for the sake of his reputation- sacrificed himself?

Under conditions of peace the warlike man attacks himself.

Mature manhood: that means to have rediscovered the seriousness one had as a child at play.

One ought to depart from life as Odysseus departed from Nausicaa--blessing rather than in love with it.

CHIP GAINS VOTES BUT NOT ENOUGH to override Bush's veto. Here's how they voted. I guess the president wanted to save the money for a worthier cause such as his unnecessary war in...

IRAQ. This neat video against the war was reportedly produced by a 16 year old.

MAKING SENSE. This op-ed on the global economy by WV delegate Nancy Guthrie is worth a look.

HEARTBREAKING...NOT. From AP's Lawrence Messina's recent story about Massey CEO Don Blankenship:

Don Blankenship believes he cannot remain chairman, CEO and president of Massey Energy Co. and stay involved in West Virginia politics ---- unless he prevails in his federal lawsuit against Gov. Joe Manchin, his lawyers contend in the pending case.

The mere contemplation of such a loss causes El Cabrero to grow faint. Excuse me whilst I revive myself with smelling salts...

OK, I'm back.

IT'S EASY BEING NOT GREEN. El Cabrero is not usually a big fan of state rankings by business magazines like Forbes. But I believe this one...

EVERYBODY CAN RELAX:

The Internal Revenue Service recently released its fun-filled report on 2005 individual income taxes. The headline is that the super-rich were even more super than in any year since 1986 when the IRS first had comparable data. The news pages of The Wall Street Journal duly took note, but not many others did.

The top 1 percent of all taxpayers earned 21.2 percent of all the money that individuals in the country earned in 2005. So one-hundredth of the taxpayers earned one-fifth of all income. (The data are available here.)

That's a relief, huh? The rest of the story is here.

MORE ON CENSORSHIP from John Milton:

As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's Image: but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the Image of God, as it were, in the eye.

That one goes out to WV's domestic Taliban for its latest book banning stunt (see yesterday's post).

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ALTISSIMA

CHICKENS COMING HOME TO ROOST

Caption: The consequences of our actions are sometimes distinctly uncool.

This week, in addition to links and comments about current events, Goat Rope is offering its readers a daily Nietzschean nugget from his book Beyond Good and Evil.

Admittedly, Nietzsche was kind of whacked at times, but when he was good, he was very, very good.

Today's selection highlights one of the irritating things about life:

The consequences of our actions take us by the scruff of the neck, altogether indifferent to the fact that we have 'improved' in the meantime.

I hate it when that happens. Don't you?

PEOPLE SUPPORT CHIP. A new survey shows overwhelming support for expanding the Children's Health Insurance Program (70 percent) and most (64 percent) support overriding the Bush veto.

HEALTH CARE and growing inequality is the subject of this column by WVU-Tech's John David.

YOU WOULDN'T KNOW IT given all the bashing of public education these days, but African-American students have made significant progress in closing the achievement gap according to this EPI snapshot.

OH GOOD. In yesterday's Gazette, no less than two leaders of the religious right have issued fatwas against the infidel.

One called for the banning of Pat Conroy's novels from AP English classes. Now I haven't read Conroy and no doubt would have picked something different since I'm an unapologetic member of the let-them-eat-classics school of literature. I've even tortured more than one GED class by making them read Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" aloud.

But that's not the point. It does not appear to have occurred to the people in question that vastly more harm has been done by people not reading than by reading, not to mention the harm done by censorship itself. Congratulations to the students who attended a school board meeting last night to assert their opposition to censorship.

The other one was mostly about the the "radical homosexual agenda to force their decadent lifestyle upon the citizenry at large." It also castigated some members of Congress for "normalizing and recognizing sodomy as a civil rights entitlement..." (Note to self: look up some legal definitions).

Another target was the recent action of the Charleston City Council to pass a measure opposing discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The piece also managed to come out in favor of the death penalty.

It occurs to me that there are certain regimes around the world which share the priorities of these groups and which they might perhaps find more congenial to their felicity.

ON A RELATED NOTE. There are groups in WV, such as Create West Virginia, which have argued that if WV is going to attract creative people and investments and build a high road economy, we need to be open to diversity.

Let's imagine how the actions of the domestic Taliban might look to someone from outside considering West Virginia. They might say "Hmmmm. They like to ban books there. Maybe they'll get around to burning them soon. And they seem to hate x group there, but tomorrow it might be y or z. Thanks but no thanks."

TO CLEAR THE PALATE, it looks like the humble sea cucumber could teach us a lot about tissue regeneration. And it looks like going to the beach and eating seafood is an older tradition than we thought.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ENCIMA DEL MUNDO