The Other Shoe Drops

The wait is over, the jig is up, El Presidente has caved in to the radical right, and we have Samuel A. Alito nominated for Sandra Day O'Connor's seat on The Supremes.

I just wrote a personal note to all of the Gang of Fourteen in the Senate, and threw in our own worthless lock-step Senators from North Carolina and Arlen Specter, too, who has to preside over the committee hearings on Alito. We urge all of you to write them, and we recommend this handy page for quickly getting to each senator's web-mail form (most of them make you fill out a form when writing, but it's pretty fast to do).

The Gang of Fourteen hold the balance of power RE a filibuster:

Republicans:

John McCain
Lindsey Graham
John Warner
Olympia Snowe
Susan Collins
Michael DeWine
Lincoln Chafee

Democrats:

Joe Lieberman
Robert Byrd
Ben Nelson
Mary Landrieu
Daniel Inouye
Mark Pryor
Ken Salazar

Throw in:

Arlen Specter (he's supposedly pro-choice)
Elizabeth Dole
Richard Burr

Even though those last two won't listen any more than Madame Foxx does, they need to hear from North Carolina people on this nomination.

The Water Crisis

On October 25th, a joint meeting between the towns of Boone and Blowing Rock, ASU, and Watauga County discussed the feasibility of a "Water Partnership" among those entities. Almost all municipal and county elected officials were there -- for good reason. Boone and Blowing Rock have essentially run out of water, ASU's supply is weak, and the county has no water service.

Jeff Hughes, director of the UNC School of Government Environmental Finance Center, told the group of two options: The first would be a water system run by the town, by the county, or by both entities together. The second would be a separate water and sewer "authority," a new unit of government that could own assets, assume debt, and borrow money totally independent of the municipalities, the county, or the university. The governing board of a water "authority" could be elected or appointed or both

The water issue is complicated: dwindling resources, many entities seeking it, and any solution promising a huge price-tag for the necessary facilities and infrastructure to collect raw water, to guarantee its purity, and to distribute it to users. An additional important complication from a comprehensive planning perspective is that Watauga County government wants water on its main highway corridors but shows no noticeable inclination to enact land-use planning to control density, set-backs, buffers, etc. The chair of the County Commission said that the Town of Boone just needed to respect the fact that the county doesn't have zoning rules.

Fortunately, no decisions were made at this meeting. All agreed to talk within their various entities and come back together in a month or so.

CAUSE FOR CONCERN. An autonomous Water/Sewer Authority with an appointed board not directly accountable to the citizens, acquiring water at enormous cost to taxpayers, and running that water to traffic corridors wholly unregulated for growth is not a recipe that we'll want to taste the results of. Who does this benefit? Likewise, a partnership between town and county, where the county intends to enrich a limited number of landowners along our most-traveled corridors while refusing the town's restrictions on development, appears on the face of it to be a lopsided arrangement and not a solution aimed at protecting the welfare of all our citizens.

There exists strong opposition to any county water system. D. Greene and K. Carter are likely to be leaders of that opposition. Add to that the worries of the progressive community about uncontrolled growth, and you've got a most unlikely coalition poised to fight.

All That Old Stuff

Yesterday's Watauga Democrat (front page) brought news that the Appalachian Cultural Museum is being forced out of University Hall by Chancellor Ken Peacock to put in his new nursing program. What Frank Ruggiero's article makes clear is that the Chancellor decided to kick the museum out of that space without having any new space for it to move in to.

"Administrators at the museum refused to comment..." Hmmm. But even at this distance we could see the cloud of steam coming out of their ears.

The museum workers have every right to be furious. They've built one of the best regional museums anywhere in the country, dedicated to the history and culture(s) of a region that is the most stereotyped in the country, and yet this museum managed to avoid all the stereotypes, defy expectations, and offer a fresh, original, and invigorating gloss on life in these here mountains. Through donations and generous loans from area families, it managed to amass in short order a huge (and irreplaceable) collection of furniture, musical instruments, self portraits, textiles, tools, folkart, Junior Johnson's race cars ... only a fraction of which is on display in the museum's permanent galleries. The staff has worked tirelessly and effectively with willing volunteers to build a complex of offerings which include traveling and special exhibitions, demonstrations, and guided travel tours to other locales. The Appalachian Cultural Museum is one of our gems, a tremendous asset to the campus, the town, and the county, and it was built on starvation budgets through the sweat and dedication of its director.

Now look at it.

Chancellor Peacock wants that space and like the corporate CEOs he so admires and seeks to emulate, he has delivered a curt eviction notice. "You've got to be out by Christmas. We don't care where you go or how you get there, just GET OUT!" Not only that, the last we heard, he's offered no money for crating, boxing, and otherwise securing the integrity of thousands of priceless objects, nor has he guaranteed any monthly rent money to pay for a storage facility with the thousands of cubic space the collection is going to require.

Everyone on campus and many people in town (everyone except perhaps newspaper reporters) knows what's been going on, the high-handed and callous treatment of our collective cultural heritage by this new university administration, which appears from the Watauga Democrat article to have dropped the problem of finding space for the museum in the lap of community leaders and county officials. How did County Planner Joe Furman get in charge of the mess Ken Peacock created?

What seems likeliest -- and will suit the Chancellor and his henchmen just fine -- is that come December the stuff will get shoved into several tractor-trailers out behind the Broyhill Center, with no heat and humidity controls, not to mention no security, where it will inevitably deteriorate. At which point we sincerely hope that some of the families who graciously gave over family treasures for safe-keeping will sue for breach of contract.

We're sure that Chancellor Peacock's new "Institute for Health and Human Services" will be a fine addition to higher education. But personal empire-building is not so fine when it runs its cleats over something as fragile as our cultural heritage. "I need me an EMPIRE!" and so what if a small, undefended, indigenous population gets wiped out in the process?

The destruction of the Appalachian Cultural Museum is just shoddy practice in the service of personal ambition, and plain low-class.

More on Virginia Governor Race

According to Bloomberg News, Larry Sabato, the University of Virginia political scientist, says "Bush is a drag, even in Virginia." That, in reference to the fact that "political ineptitude" brought El Presidente to Virginia today for a stale speech (at least what I heard on CNN was a total carbon copy of the same speech he gave last week), even though the Republican candidate for governor, Jerry Kilgore, didn't want Mr. Bush anywhere near the Commonwealth this close to the election.

And a few months ago no one thought the Democratic candidate, Tim Kaine, the current Lieutenant Gov., had a ghost's chance of carrying a state that Bush won by 8 percentage points in 2004 and which hasn't voted Democratic in a presidential race since 1964.

But Kaine's hanging in there. One big asset is his wife Anne, who is the daughter of former Republican Governor Linwood Holton, who is backing Kaine. The biggest mark against him? A Harvard law degree.

Kaine was mayor of Richmond and has a spotty record of effectiveness. The lieutenant governor's job is basically being a cypher while trying not to drool in public, so Kaine has been relying on the popularity of Gov. Mark Warner, who can't succeed himself. My own EXTREMELY Republican in-laws up in Virginia say they would vote for Warner for another term, if he could run for another term, which conveniently he can't.

(I notice that when Republican relatives want to be extra nice to their heathen Democratic family members, they say stuff like that: "I'd vote for Warner if he could run again," or "I thought Harvey Gantt was such a nice man, and if he were running now I'd vote for him." Their conditional "ifs" are always chosen carefully; i.e., they're out of the realm of possibility.)

The Bloomberg report speculates that if Kaine actually wins the governorship, it would automatically boost Warner's cachet as a potential presidential candidate. We would like to believe that, since Lord knows we'd rather have a strong governor with a record of budget-balancing to head the national ticket rather than a ... U.S. Senator of either gender. One good governor outweighs the combined heft of 42 John Kerrys.

The Republican candidate, Jerry Kilgore, the current attorney general of Virginia, comes from the strong-arm political world of southwest Virginia. His own mother, Willie Mae Kilgore, an elections official in Scott County, has been mentioned in a vote-buying scandal. So we don't look for Kaine to carry a lot of Virginia's mountain counties, if you get our drift.

Thank Gawd We've Got an Oil Man for President!

Earlier this morning, according to Reuters, Exxon-Mobile posted the largest quarterly profits in U.S. history ... $9.9 billion.

"Analysts have warned that record profits for Big Oil, at a time when consumers are paying sky-high prices for gasoline, could add to calls for a windfall profits tax or other penalties on oil companies."

To wit: Congressman Dennis Kucinich is calling for a windfall profits tax on Big Oil. Lottsa luck, Dennis!

Bush Will Reinstate Davis-Bacon; Foxx Is Frowning

El Presidente slipped it out quietly yesterday, sending forth his Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao to announce that the Davis-Bacon Act would be reinstated November 8th ... to pay "prevailing wages" to workers in the hurricane reconstruction zone.

Madame Virginia Foxx ain't happy 'bout that!

But this was apparently El Presidente's trade-off in trying to win "moderate" Republicans to vote for the slash-and-burn budget the House conservatives are cooking up, very much with Foxx's help. The House Committee on Education and the Workforce, on which Foxx sits, has worked up $18.1 billion (BILLION) in cuts to student aid, something the good Madame hasn't believed in since approximately the time she swept up the schoolhouse as a super-poor high school student. And what are the conservative Republicans (Foxx & Friends) calling this evisceration? "A Plan to Strengthen Higher Education," of course! The plan to strengthen higher education apparently includes, for Foxx & Friends, making it harder to low- and moderate-income families to send their kids to college.

The most conservative Republicans in the House (Foxx & Friends) are working busily on finding $50 billion they can cut from social programs like student aid and food stamps, combined with (you guessed it!) additional tax cuts for the very wealthy. And El Presidente himself (of the failure-to-ever-veto-a-single-spending-bill Bushes) was telling these mean cats to "push the envelope" on cuts.

"I have never felt that a budget going through the Congress of the United States is more disconnected from reality than this budget," said Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota, the senior Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee.

Bellwether

n. A male sheep, usually castrated, with a bell hung from its neck, that is followed by a flock of sheep.

El Presidente is coming to Norfolk, Va., this Friday, 11 days prior to the Virginia gubernatorial election, and the Republican candidate for governor, Jerry Kilgore, is not following. Kilgore is not planning to appear anywhere in the president's general vicinity.

"I think it's highly likely that the Kilgore campaign folks just don't see Bush as an asset," said Mark J. Rozell, a public policy professor at George Mason University. That's even considering that Bush polls better in Virginia currently than nationwide. But still.

It's not as though Kilgore can't use the boost. He's been running some of the nastiest TV ads against his Democrat opponent, without moving up in the polls. If the Democrats win in Virginia, reddest of the red, it truly will be a sign.

The Wal-Mart Leak

Someone inside the higher levels of the Wal-Mart corporation leaked a draft copy of a secret memo sent to the company's Board of Directors recommending how to squeeze employees even further while simultaneously protecting a poor public image (exploiter of wage labor and a burden to public health care). Wal-Mart Watch, a nonprofit group allied with labor unions, received the memo in the mail, which then got into the hands of the NYTimes. Here are some low points:

1. Last year, Wal-Mart earned $10.5 billion profit on gross sales of $285 billion.

2. Full-time Wal-Mart employees earn on average around $17,500 a year.

3. 46 percent of the children of Wal-Mart's 1.33 million United States employees are uninsured or on Medicaid.

4. The memo recommends that employees be forced to pay more for their spouses' health insurance.

5. Also recommends that the company cut 401(k) contributions to 3 percent of wages from 4 percent and also cut company-paid life insurance policies to $12,000 from the current level, which is equal to an employee's annual earnings. (Life insurance, the memo asserted, is "a high-satisfaction, low-importance benefit, which suggests an opportunity to trim the offering without substantial impact on [worker] satisfaction.")

6. "...our critics are correct in some of their observations. Specifically, our coverage is expensive for low-income families, and Wal-Mart has a significant percentage of associates and their children on public assistance."

7. Too many Wal-Mart workers stay around too long: "...the cost of an associate with seven years of tenure is almost 55 percent more than the cost of an associate with one year of tenure, yet there is no difference in his or her productivity." Give a gal a job, and she thinks she can stay forever! Sheesh.

8. Too many Wal-Mart workers are too fat or too sick or both: workers "are getting sicker than the national population, particularly in obesity-related diseases," including diabetes and coronary artery disease. "The least healthy, least productive associates are more satisfied with their benefits than other segments and are interested in longer careers with Wal-Mart. The memo proposed incorporating physical activity in all jobs to "dissuade unhealthy people from coming to work at Wal-Mart."

And This Week's Hypocrisy in Action Award Goes To: Wal-Mart. As soon as the company knew this memo was going public, it rushed on Monday of this week to announce a new health insurance plan for some workers, allowing them to buy in for $11 a month. The company also announced "a sweeping plan to conserve energy" and (my favorite part) said it supported raising the minimum wage.

The Highlander Center

News of the death of civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks contained deep in it this sentence: "At the urging of an employer, Virginia Durr, Mrs. Parks had attended an interracial leadership conference at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tenn., in the summer of 1955." She learned at Highlander the concept of non-violent resistance. She learned it from Myles Horton and his wife Zilphia, who ran the Highlander School.

(As a kid in West Texas I remember billboards, both the "IMPEACH EARL WARREN" screamers and the ones showing a photograph of Martin Luther King "at a Communist training school." The so-called Communist training school was in fact Highlander. The sure-fire way to shut up opposition in the 1950s was to brand it "Communist." They use different labels now, but with the same intent.)

When I first got to Highlander, it was no longer located on the Cumberland Plateau and Myles Horton was no longer in charge. I did meet him eventually, and eventually it was my honor to publish the interview Bill Moyers did with Myles Horton, "The Adventures of a Radical Hillbilly."

I went to Highlander the first time in 1977, hard on the heels of massive flooding in the Appalachians but particularly destructive floods in southern West Virginia, made all the worse by strip mining. I met there with a whole new generation of mountain young people who were becoming radicalized by the strip-mining issue and the whole notion that Appalachia was treated like a resource "colony" by the rest of the nation. I met Gurney Norman for the first time. Pauletta Hansel was there. And arriving fresh from the floods in southern West Virginia, full of righteous fury, were Jim Webb and Bob Henry Baber.

These guys and many others who were at Highlander, and a whole host of foot soldiers who weren't there, were turning the tide of public opinion against rich coal corporations that robbed the mineral, reduced the landscape to a barren moonscape of scars, and left the people destitute. Soon after, the Carter administration passed and signed the Strip Mine Reclamation Act.

But as we've learned the hard way, federal regs are only as good as the administration running the government. Following Carter, we got 12 years of Republican predatory policies (ah, "Reaganomics"!), succeeded by some amelioration during eight years of Bill Clinton. With the Second Bush, mountaintop removal has been unleashed with a renewed fury.

Highlander endures as the Highlander Research & Education Center at New Market, Tennessee, still dedicated to helping local activists teach themselves the tools they need to organize local people into movements for positive change.