How cool is this?...or cheap is the new green

It has been my practice at Goat Rope these days whenever possible to blog about positive things in West Virginia (and, yes, here are some). The latest such example is a recent gathering on sustainability, health and environmental education in Charleston.

The Charleston Gazette reports that Mark Swiger, a school official from Marshall County, could boast of an estimated savings of $7 million since 2000 due to reducing energy and water use and improving other environmental practices.

Swiger, the  sustainability contact for Marshall County Schools, says his 13-school district has saved an estimated $7 million since 2000 through limiting energy and water use and improving environmental sustainability in other ways.

“With 55 counties doing this, think of those savings,” Swiger said. “ ... Sustainability should have no ideology. It is conservative, it is progressive, it is everything. When you’re saving that kind of money, everyone wants that.”

Roger that.

The long view

A while back, I picked up a copy of Wait: the Art and Science of Delay by Frank Partnoy. The title attracted me since I've been known to procrastinate once or twice in my life. In fact, I may be doing it now. Anyhow, towards the end, he makes some interesting observations on how we measure economic success.

Typically, the focus is on GDP or gross domestic product. There are lots of problems with that. For one thing, GDP might go way up in the wake of a disaster or war as people spend more to deal with it, even if they become more miserable along the way or if it grows at the expense of long term prosperity.

Focusing on things like GDP is especially problematic if the focus is on the short term. Plenty of companies have gone belly up because their CEOs focused on immediate gains rather than long term stability, let alone sustainability.

He comes up with a good analogy:

Focusing narrowly on GDP is like driving a car and only looking at how fast you are going. Sustainability means you should also ask how much gas is left in the tank or whether you need to adjust your position on a winding road.

No wonder things crash.

 SPEAKING OF THE LONG VIEW. Here's a look at WV's new Future Fund law.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A Malthusian future?

Now that's a crowd. Image from the 2008 Olympics by way of wikipedia.

As I've mentioned in earlier posts, Darwin's idea of natural selection was shaped by Thomas Malthus' ideas on population. Simply put, he argued that humans tend to multiply faster than resources do, which leads to hunger and scarcity and all kinds of nasty checks on population.

This turned out not to be the case for industrial societies, which have been able to dramatically increase production and maintain growing populations. There is also a tendency for population growth to slow as living standards rise. But Malthus might have been at least partially right. There have been numerous cases where pre-modern civilizations collapsed due to over-stressing their environment and growing beyond its carrying capacity. Jared Diamond's book Collapse gives several examples and is a compelling read.

The scary part is that if we don't work towards a sustainable approach to economy, energy, ecology and population, we might head that way ourselves. If that happens, it will be more due to our doing wrong than to Malthus being right.

BIG CHANGES. The Recovery Act is making big changes in technology and clean energy, most of which have been under the radar, as Time Magazine reports.

WHILE WE'RE AT IT, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the Recovery Act has lowered unemployment by up to 1.8 points in the last quarter. The problem is that it wasn't big or targeted enough, as Paul Krugman again argues here. Now things have gotten to the point were firefighters are being laid off in many cities.

NOT THE BEST PR DEPARTMENT. The Manhattan Mosque controversy might not be sending the best message around the world.

IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING WHY FISH IN THE ARCTIC DON'T FREEZE, click here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The missing piece in the climate debate

Random picture of the official Goat Rope vegetable garden.

Yesterday I linked to a website devoted to worker justice and environmental sustainability issues. If there's ever an issue that needs to be addressed in an energy state like West Virginia, this is it.

On the site, there's an interesting white paper with the title Climate Legislation Must Provide a Just Transition for Workers, which speaks to that condition.

Here is just a teaser from the executive summary:

1. Fear of job loss is a major reason people oppose climate protection legislation.

2. The worker protection strategy of current climate bills is flawed and inadequate.

3. Climate protection advocates need a bold program to ensure that every worker, retiree, and community impacted by climate legislation can count on a secure future.

4. Rightwing politicians and self-serving business interests are exploiting the inadequacy of worker protection provisions to gut or defeat climate legislation.

There's a lot worth looking at here (this isn't even half of the executive summary) and these are the kinds of issues that need to be addressed if we're ever going to get this right.

TODAY COULD BE THE DAY the US Senate finally helps the 2.5 million Americans who have exhausted unemployment benefits, thanks to the vote of newly appointed West Virginia Senator Carte Goodwin. Yesterday, this was the subject of a speech by President Obama.

THE NEXT THING I hope Congress moves on is extending aid to states. Without it, the recovery will be slower and weaker.

SPY ON THIS. Here's the latest edition of the Rev. Jim Lewis' Notes from Under the Fig Tree.

PASS THE RECOVERY, PLEASE. Corporate profits are up but hiring isn't.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

"...man is mortal and must learn to curb his pride"

Persian Xerxes, by way of wikipedia.

"...Let no man
Scorning the fortune that he has, in greed for more
Pour out his wealth in utter waste. Zeus, throned on high,
Sternly chastises arrogant and boastful men."

Nearly all Greek tragedies are about mythological events. The one exception is The Persians by Aeschylus, which is the earliest surviving tragedy of the earliest tragic writer.

The play is set in the Persian royal city of Susa and it portrays the royal family and court when the news of their disastrous defeat by the Greek navy at Salamis arrives by messenger. Produced only eight years after the event by a veteran of that war, it is the earliest account we have of that decisive conflict.

Perhaps surprisingly, Aeschylus did not demonize his former foes. The Persian nobles are portrayed with respect and a degree of sympathy. As the French writer Albert Camus wrote in The Rebel, "The Greeks never made the human mind into an armed camp, and in this respect we are inferior to them."

The roots of the conflict were the efforts of Athenians to aid Greek colonies that had fallen under Persian rule. The Persian ruler Darius vowed to punish Athens and attempted a punitive expedition in 490 BC which resulted in the Greek victory at Marathon. Darius vowed a major invasion using all the resources of his empire but died before he could carry it out.

That task was left to Xerxes, who is portrayed by Greek sources such as Herodotus and Aeschylus as arrogant and full of hubris. The war began in earnest in August 480 when the Spartans inflicted heavy losses and died to the last man at the pass of Thermopylae. The naval battle at Salamis occurred a month later. Under the leadership of Themistocles, the Persian navy was basically destroyed as an effect force. A land army remained, only to be repelled the following year.

Tomorrow: the play itself.

SPEAKING OF MARATHON, here's an article about a different way of training for one.

THE RIGHT TO ORGANIZE. From the AFLCIO blog, here are links to two op-eds on the Employee Free Choice Act.

OH GOOD. Thanks to the "charity" of BB&T, more Ayn Rand propaganda came our way.

DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS. Here's the messed up link to the article about Charleston's sustainability fair.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

What if?

Greek hoplite versus Persian warrior. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

Have you ever racked your brain wondering what if? What if you or I had done something differently at a critical point in our lives?

For that matter, what if, say, Lincoln or Julius Caesar weren't assassinated? What if Alexander the Great lived another 40 years? What if Trotsky won out over Stalin in the early USSR? What if Hitler had died in a mortar attack during World War I? What if....

That kind of thinking can drive you crazy, but it does serve to point out that personal and world history has lots of places where things could have gone lots of different ways.

One such turning point in the ancient world was the war between Greece and the Persian empire. If anyone was taking bets then, the smart money would have been on the might of Persia rather than on Greece, which was not a nation but a number of independent city states that spent much of their time warring against each other.

Greek tragedy, the theme lately here at Goat Rope, came into its own in the aftermath of the Greek victory over the might of Persia. Aeschylus, the earliest tragedian whose works survive, was himself a veteran of that war. He fought at the battle of Marathon and possibly at Salamis and Plataea.

Although he wrote as many as 90 plays (of which only seven survive) and won many honors for this, his epitaph mentions none of this. Instead, it says:

Aeschylus, Euphorion's son, this tablet hides
Who passed away in Gela where the wheat fields grow:
His bravery the glorious shrine of Marathon can tell
Where the deep-maned Medes had learnt it well.

Interestingly, one of Aeschylus' surviving tragedies portrays this world historic conflict from the point of view of his enemies--and he does it well and respectfully. We seem to have lost that ability.

More on that tomorrow.

CLIMATE CHANGE. Here's something else for the coal industry to deny.

CENTER WHAT? This article argues that American attitudes are leaning in a progressive direction.

DEREGULATION. In this op-ed, Paul Krugman suggests that the roots of the current economic crisis can be traced to the explosion of debt from Reagan era deregulation.

SUSTAIN THIS. Four animals from Goat Rope Farm (eight counting humans) were represented at Charleston WV's Sustainabilty Fair.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

An accidental librarian

Before stumbling into my current career, I spent 10 happy if ill-paid years working in public libraries. Believe it or not, it turned out to be a pretty good preparation for working on social justice issues.

It was pretty much an accident. The local library in my small town needed a part time custodial engineer when I started taking college classes. The job mostly involved coming in after hours. I cannot say that I pursued this task with heroic diligence, but they kept me around. It was on evenings like those when I should have been running the vacuum that I made the acquaintance of Langston Hughes' poetry and the more radical political writings of Mark Twain.

Then a huge flood trashed the library and most of the town and I got plenty of extra work. At some point, they figured out I could read and write and had me start working with the public. It was kind of like being a bartender with books.

I discovered I enjoyed bantering with people of all ages, hearing all kinds of juicy gossip and hunting for hard to find information. The elementary school was just a block or so away, and it wasn't unusual to have six or seven classes a day roll in like little sailors on shore leave.

The main librarian there lacked a degree but had this remarkable gift for making it a place that was welcoming to everyone. She was also a coal miner's daughter and a yellow dog Democrat with deep union sympathies. Her basic philosophy was to find out what people want or need and figure out a way to get it to them.

The job market being what it was in the 1980s, I stuck around. Later on, I wound up working in the reference department at a city library, which was a whole different game. Talk about dealing with all kinds of people, some of whom had major issues... The thing I liked about reference was the challenge of having to hunt up all kinds of bizarre and random information. Recall, Gentle Reader, that this was WAY before Google. On really tough questions, I liked to Zen it, which involved emptying the mind of preconceptions and chasing it down.

One thing I really enjoyed doing was programming, which is to say thinking of weird and entertaining things to get people to come in. Kids had to go to school, but generally nobody has to go to a library. You gotta make em want it. A few such efforts that come to mind involve visiting elementary schools in a monkey suit and staging worm races.

I still view public libraries as vital resources in many ways for anyone interested in working on public issues or finding out what is going on in a community. Each well run library is a little liberated area, a public space open to all where "from each according to his [or her] abilities, to each according to his needs" pretty much applies.

TOWARDS SUSTAINABILITY. Which is more important, well-being or growth? (This article raises interesting points, but Aristotle got there first.)

WONKY BUT GOOD. Here's Jacob Hacker discussing health care reform and how to get where we need to go.

ANOTHER EVOLUTION BATTLE is heating up in Texas. Next stop...Copernicus? After all, the Bible clearly says that Joshua made the sun stand still, not the earth. So there.

ANOTHER PUBLIC SERVICE. Poetry reading in the US hit a 16 year low, according to the National Endowment for the Arts. In order to help reverse this trend, El Cabrero has composed the following poem:

ON THE READING OF POETRY

Read some, read some. Yes, you should.
Some of it is pretty good.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

WE COULD BE HEROES

The ancient Greek hero Theseus didn't take any bull from anybody. Here he is in a dust up with the minotaur.

Aside from news and links about current events, the theme at Goat Rope lately is Homer's The Odyssey. If this is your first visit, please click earlier posts. The series started Aug. 4.

Odysseus, the eponymous main character of the Odyssey, is one of many classical Greek heroes, although the word meant something different then than now. We tend to think of heroes as morally exemplary people who do good things. Think about the firefighters who died on 9/11.

For the ancient Greeks, a hero was someone who lived larger than life and whose deeds were remembered after their death. Many prominent heroes did as many or more bad things as good one. Oedipus, for example, was a hero. On the positive side, he solved the riddle of the Sphinx. But then there was that whole father killing/mother marrying/plague causing thing...

King Agamemnon in the Iliad was a hero--and a jerk who sacrificed his own daughter, caused a plague of his own, and enraged his best fighter Achilles at great cost to the Achaeans, as the Iliad recounts. Heracles and Theseus were heroes who did some good things, like killing the occasional monster, but some of their other deeds were not so nice.

Being a hero didn't save you from coming to a bad end, either. Jason of Golden Fleece fame had a miserable fate after dumping the witch Medea for a new model. Medea didn't go quietly, to say the least.

Still, Greek cities treasured the tombs of their local heroes and offered them sacrifices in the hopes that they would aid the home team when it needed it. There was a nice legend about the ghost of Theseus appearing at the battle of Marathon to help defend Athens from the Persian invasion.

The thing to remember is that Homer is not trying to prepare Sunday School lessons or political propaganda. He tells a story that shows the characters with warts and all. The message is not so much "be like them" as it is to learn from the story.

OH GOOD. Israel may be preparing to attack Iran. That should make everything just perfect.

GREEN DAY. Businesses are starting to get serious about sustainability, according to Newsweek.

MORE ON WAL-MART'S POLITICAL AMBITIONS here.

GOT KAFKA? Here's a review of a biography of the world's most realistic writer. And I'm not just saying that because I woke up as a giant bug today.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

DEFENSIVE THINKING

Caption: Illustration from the Bubishi, an anonymous Chinese martial arts text of the 18th or 19th century sometimes referred to as "the bible of karate."

For the last two weeks, the theme here has been about writing to change things that should be changed or preserve things that should be preserved. There's also a daily dose of links and comments about current events.

I'd like to close off the series by taking some lessons from the martial arts and applying them to the subject of writing and working for social change or preservation. Why martial arts? Because unlike many things, they actually work and have proven themselves over the centuries in many difficult situations.

In trying to make things better, we are often faced with more powerful opponents. But the strategies developed by these arts can be great equalizers, provided people focus the energy they have at the right time and place.

Here's the first thing: think, write and act defensively.

Most martial artists spend a good bit of time sparring with highly skilled opponents. Sometimes it can get rough. But one invaluable lesson you get from that kind of practice fighting is immediate feedback. You learn "If I do this, they can do that" and vice versa.

Even if your sparring partner is your best friend, it is their sacred duty to nail you if you leave yourself open. It's your sacred duty to do the same, preferably before they nail you. After a while, you should start automatically acting in ways that create the smallest possible opening or opportunity for an opponent to attack (not to mention take advantage of any opening that occurs).

I remember when I first joined my current karate club over 30 years ago. It's a fighting dojo. While we're easy on kids and beginners, consenting experienced adults sometimes ramp it up. I was an intermediate student fighting a female black belt. I decided to dazzle her with my high kicking ability. She responded by kicking me in the groin while my foot was sailing around at head level.

I told you it could get rough. I wasn't expecting a move like that and hit the ground like a sack of potatoes. (Most dojos don't allow groin kicks in sparring, but ours did at the time. It was a great way of keeping kickers honest.)

That was one of the best lessons I ever had, although it didn't feel like it at the time. I've kicked a lot of people since then (recreationally and gently, for the most part) but I've been pretty careful about leaving myself open in that particular way. Thanks O., wherever you are! Sort of.

Similarly, when I was trying to learn the grappling arts of judo and jiu jitsu, I learned pretty quickly that if I let the opponent get behind me, I could expect to choked; if my balance was broken, I could expect to be thrown; and if my arm or leg was extended, it would be joint-locked.

This is something that people interested in trying to change things should always keep in mind and ask themselves at all times: if I say, do, or write this, what could an unsympathetic opponent do?

The idea is to present as small a target as possible--even better no target at all. If you don't, then don't be surprised if they respond in a way that can discredit and dismiss you and the change you are hoping to achieve.

That's just the way it works.

I've seen several groups adopt some ill-advised course of action, get clobbered for it, and then say "No fair!" Whoever said it was?

ON THE POSITIVE SIDE. Could contemporary economic and environmental ills push us in a more sustainable direction?

SPEAKING OF WHICH, Bill McKibben argues here that it's getting pretty close to now or never to get there. The alternative is unacceptable.

MOTHER'S DAY came and went, but pro-family policies haven't got here yet.

TRAUMA ON THE BRAIN. New research sheds light on the strenght and persistence of traumatic memories.

SPEAKING OF THE BRAIN, this article blames its engineering on some of our shortcomings.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

HOWS AND WHYS

Caption: Auschwitz. Photo credit: Photo by betauser courtesy of everystockphoto.com.

Recently I renewed my acquaintance with a classic book, Man's Search for Meaning by Dr. Victor Frankl (1905-1997). The book is his account both of his experiences as an inmate of Auschwitz and other concentration camps in the Third Reich era and of his psychological theories. It has had a huge impact, with millions of copies in print.

Frankl's book contains his ordeal and that of many others in the most extreme and dehumanizing conditions as well as his insights into how to remain human in spite of it all. Fortunately, one doesn't have to be in an extreme situation to benefit from his basic ideas.

Prior to his imprisonment, Frankl was a Viennese physician and psychologist who had me Freud and Adler. In 1942, Frankl, his wife, and parents were deported to Thereisenstadt, where, in spite of everything, he gave lectures on mental health and related topics. He was later shipped to the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Turkheim.

Frankl lost almost his entire family in the Holocaust, with the exception of a sister who escaped to Australia.

After the war, he resumed his practice in Vienna, where he developed his insights into a method he called logotherapy, from the Greek words for reason and healing.

In a very real sense, his work was a practical commentary on a line from Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols:

He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.

About which more tomorrow...

HEALTH CARE BLUES. According to Business Week, a new survey shows that more Americans want a total overhaul of the health care system than do citizens of six other industrialized nations.

FORGIVE US OUR DEBTS...NOT. Also from Business Week, this interesting article shows that big financial institutions are still collecting from consumers whose debts were supposedly cancelled by bankruptcy.

MEGAN WILLIAMS MARCH. Here's Charleston Gazette coverage for a march organized by Black Lawyers for Justice yesterday. The march was peaceful, although name-calling continued. A number of local organizations, including branches of the NAACP, the Charleston Black Ministerial Alliance, the Logan County Improvement League, and West Virginians United for Social and Economic Justice did not support the event, in part due to concerns about its possible impact on the case against her alleged attackers.

WHAT WOULD SUSTAINABILITY LOOK LIKE? Here's a suggestion.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE TURN OF A PHRASE

Icon of the Archangel Michael.

This week on Goat Rope, El Cabrero is responding to a challenge from a reader to write about the five things I admire most about Jesus. The hardest part was figuring out where to start.

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

The fourth thing I'm going to write about is Jesus' way with words. Official Goat Rope verdict: he had one. Big time. Whole libraries have been written on the sayings of Jesus and more could and will be written. I'm going to focus today on his awesome one liners.

My personal favorites include some of his comic visual images, like when he nailed hypocrites who made a show of religion while neglecting simple justice and compassion:

You blind guides, who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel!

And speaking of camels, let's not forget this one:

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God

.

How about these for cutting through the #$&%:

No one who puts his hand on the plow and looks back is fit for the Kingdom of God.

What goes into your mouth will not defile you, but what comes out of your mouth, that will defile you.

Be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.

To save your life is to lose it; to lose your life is to save it.

Follow me and let the dead bury their dead.

The first shall be last and the last shall be first.

Exalt yourself and you will be humbled; humble yourself and you will be exalted.

I could go on and on but I'm sure the Gentle Reader knows where to find more.

WHERE YOUR TREASURE IS. In light of the new Census report on poverty, health coverage, and incomes, the American Friends Service Committee calls for new priorities:

Congress should redirect the $720 million a day the U.S. is spending on the Iraq war to programs that reduce poverty at home, urged the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), responding to Census Bureau data released today.

“For $720 million, we could provide over 400,000 children with health care, or over a million children with free school lunches,” notes Joyce Miller, the American Friends Service Committee assistant general secretary for justice and human rights. “America’s shameful poverty rate should lead everyone to ask ourselves how we want to spend our tax dollars — on war or on education, health care, job training, affordable housing, and the like.”

CONSIDER THE LILIES. Did you ever want your own Spiderman suit? As in a real one? A group of Italian scientists say nanotechnology could make it happen.

MORE ON THE CAMEL/NEEDLE'S EYE THING. CEOs of major U.S. companies made more in a day than the average worker in a year.

MORE ON THE WHERE YOUR TREASURE IS THING. Here's an interesting essay by David Korten on rethinking the meaning of wealth in terms of life.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

GILGAMESH, ANYONE?

Gilgamesh, represented here by the rooster Stewpot, was a mighty ruler in Uruk.

If it's midsummer and you need a guiding theme to fill up a week's worth of blogging in an unpredictable world, there's just one clear choice--duh!--The Epic of Gilgamesh, of course. It is, after all, one of the earliest written stories in human history, even though it was only discovered in the 19th century. It could also be considered the first (literary) tragedy.

It has been a fairly long time since El Cabrero went on a weeklong mythological tear, and Sumerian/Mesopotamian mythology would be a Goat Rope first. We proceed...

As far as I can surmise, the basic theme of the epic is that, as Dirty Harry once said, "A man's got to know his limitations." It's a lesson we all have to learn.

Though written much later, it seems to refer to a possibly real ruler of the Mesopotamian kingdom of Uruk in what is now Iraq in the 3rd millennium BC. Gilgamesh was undoubtedly an alpha male, as we can see from the opening lines of the epic:

I will proclaim to the world the deeds of Gilgamesh. This was the man to whom all things were known; this was the king who knew the countries of the world. He was wise, he saw mysteries and knew secret things, he brought us a tale of the days before the flood. He went on a long journey, was weary, worn-out with labour, returning he rested, he engraved on a stone the whole story.

The story goes that he was the son of Queen Ninsun and King Lugulbanda and was 2/3rds god and 1/3 human. The arithmetic is never explained.

Gilgamesh was also kind of a pain to his subjects, rock and rolling all night and partying every day. His subjects began to complain:

Gilgamesh sounds the tocsin for his amusement, his arrogance has no bounds by day or night. No son is left with his father, for Gilgamesh takes them all, even the children; yet the king should be a shepherd to his people. His lust leaves no virgin to his lover, neither the warrior's daughter nor the wife of the noble; yet this is the shepherd of the city, wise, comely, and resolute.

They pray to the gods to think of some way of keeping Gilgamesh occupied and the gods respond by creating a companion for him, the wild and hairy man Enkidu, who lives with beasts in the forest and eats grass. Gilgamesh was destined to "love him like a woman"--not that there's anything wrong with that.

Unlike Gilgamesh, who is a founder of civilization, Enkidu is a child of nature, innocent of both culture and sexuality. A trapper who has seen him in the wild goes to Gilgamesh for advice on how to domesticate him. He prescribes the charms of woman. An unnamed sacred prostitute is sent to the (literal) watering hole where Enkidu hangs out.

Of that funky stuff which was the subject of 1970s song, Enkidu could not get enough. He treads the primrose path of dalliance with her nonstop for six days and seven nights, which would make him something of a prodigy. One hopes they kept themselves hydrated...

After that tryst, Enkidu loses his wilderness mojo. The wild beasts run from him and he can't keep up with them. It really IS always something, isn't it? The woman tells him:

You are wise, Enkidu, and now you have become like a god. Why do you want to run wild with the beasts in the hills? Come with me. I will take you to strong-walled Uruk...there Gilgamesh lives, who is very strong, and like a wild bull he lords it over men.

So they head to the big city for the next phase of the epic, about which more tomorrow.

COGITO ERGO BLOG.Goat Rope was recently nominated a "Thinking Blog" by the masterful blog of all things West Virginian Lincoln Walks at Midnight. Considering the source, I take that as quite a compliment--Thanks!

There's a cool little graphic that comes with it but El Cabrero can't think well enough to make it show up here. As part of the deal, I need to nominate five blogs that make me think, but I need to think about that some more.

LABOR JOINS THE FIGHT FOR GREEN JOBS. According to Leo Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers union,

We need to put an end to the lies, the myths, the hysteria, that say you can have either a clean environment or good jobs. You can have both, or you have neither.

For more on high road approaches to economic growth and sustainable energy, click here.

HIGH ROAD LOW ROAD. On a related theme, here's an op-ed by yours truly on the choices facing WV as we try to build a better future.

THIS IS WHAT I'M SCREAMING. One fairly easy step that can be taken to get WV on the high road is making high speed internet available throughout the state. Here's a step in the right direction in Charleston. And you know what?--they didn't have to eliminate minimum wage or mine safety laws to do it.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

GETTING DOWN TO BUSINESS

Caption: Big Jim Fuzzy Rooster wasn't sustainable...a possum got him. R.I.P.

El Cabrero has run across a few of what you might call vulgar Marxists in his day.

Those are people who attribute every action by governments to the dictates of the ruling class of corporate magnates.

(Admittedly, sometimes that explanation works pretty well...)

But while the Bush regime continues tacking to the hard right, some major corporations are moving significantly in a different direction. Not so much left as forward.

An interesting discussion of how some corporations are moving in a more socially and environmentally responsible direction can be found in "Beyond the Green Corporation," which appeared in the Jan. 29 Business Week.

It's worth reading and I won't try to summarize, but a significant number of major corporations are looking at environmental impact and sustainability, labor practices, global health, and poverty reduction. Some do it better than others. Some do it the easy way (i.e. voluntarily) while others need a little...help.

(One could cynically attribute this to the desire for good PR, but El Cabrero believes that all human motivations are inherently ambiguous, particularly his own.)

Here's the strategic thing to think about: progressive people spend a whole lot of time trying to influence government policy at various levels. As well they should. But given the enormous power wielded by corporations, people can and do have a huge impact by influencing their actions and behavior.

Some corporations are pretty harmless to start with. Some adopt better policies and procedures spontaneously. Sometimes this can happen with sweet reason, dialogue, and discussion. That's the easy way.

Sometimes, particularly in cases of major irresponsibility, labor disputes or promoting workers rights, it takes a coordinated corporate campaign. That's the hard way.

But at times it can be worth worth doing.

The easy way if at all possible. And, if absolutely necessary, the hard way.

MINIMUM WAGE UPDATE. The U.S. Senate voted 87-10 Tuesday to end debate on the minimum wage bill. A final vote is expected this week. The Senate version includes $8.3 billion in business tax breaks, while the House wants a clean bill. If it passes the Senate, it will go to conference, which should be interesting.

It's still not too late to call your Senator using the American Friends Service Committee's toll free number, which will be working until the increase passes. That number is 1-800-459-1887.

Calls are especially needed from states with senators who have not been supportive of a clean increase. The "ask" is that they pass the increase without further delays or amendments.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED