The day the pacing on the blog broke.
The mining industry is horribly corrupt and cavalier with the lives of workers. These guys are the heirs of the assholes who paid their workers in company scrip only redeemable at the company store, who unleashed Pinkertons and even bombed striking miners. No doubt Natilo knows the history better than I, but there are good reasons that the labor movement had strong support from miners back in the day.
Harlan County, USA (online @hulu).
His shenanigans with the WV judicial system are fairly astounding.
I posted this to my FB feed yesterday, with the note that it was the only uplifting thing I'd seen all day (I was in a crappy mood for personal reasons, but I've been feeling pretty serious despair about the world for months now).
I wonder how hoi polloi in WV feels about this - Lord knows they support every political preference of Blankenship.
Note that JRoth uses "hoi" in "hoi polloi" to mean "the"!
I appreciate the macaronic pedantry on display but admit it makes the sentence sound weird to me.
Note that JRoth uses "hoi" in "hoi polloi" to mean "the"!
Not even Noël Coward was that scrupulous.
I thought the WV polloi still contains strong democratic elements, largely because of unionizing work against Massey energy and the like.
Last time I drove through WV I was impressed by the high number of roadside bathtub shrines. Those don't generally coincide with a Democratic polloi.
Almost the entire population of WV is white working class rural people, despite its status as the birthplace of Randy Moss and T.D. Jakes. It also has the highest percentage of people over 65 in the country at 16% according to the 2010 census. So it should be no surprise that as these demographic groups become exponentially more Republican, so does West Virginia.
Inasmuch as the number of actual jobs in the mining industry is very low nowadays, the labor unions in the mining industry don't have much power to counter these trends, if they ever did.
Blankenship is not popular in WV. Most people realize he is villainous. They may have similar political preferences to him, but blue collar republicans don't mind seeing corrupt executives prosecuted. A few years ago, tea party demonstrations were one of the only places it was common to hear vocal popular support for jailing all the bankers--and opposition to their "bailouts". (OWS was the other.)
9. That's interesting. The Boston area has a lot of Mary-in-a-bathtubs, which I associate with ethnic Catholics, and around here they seem to still mostly be Democrats.
12 is right. I could stand on a street with a dozen of them if I walked about fifteen minutes from my office.
At least 591 of them just here in Somerville.
6: I never used - or really understood - the term before I learned it in Greek, so the common usage is grating to my ears.
Come to think of it, something I read in my adolescence led me to think it had a meaning opposite to its correct meaning; I'm not sure if it was a misuse, a misreading by me, or a combo (i.e., an ambiguous use that I then misread). Or maybe I was just being confused by "hoity toity".
15.2: That's an extremely common mistake!
Probably because only hoity toity people use "hoi polloi" correctly.
Pittsburgh and Ohio appear to have drawn away much of what would have been the educated youth of West Virginia.
20: Not that we're from WV, but I discussed it with coworkers at lunch and we agreed it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy unless it were Jamie Dimon. Blankenship's sleaze factor was legendary.
Charlotte kind of sucks. It just a giant mess of freeway. Or at least, that's all I've ever seen of it.
I also think of Atlanta as a giant mess of freeway.
It wouldn't be strange to have a significant chunk of the population thrilled by the idea of having malevolent '80s style corporate villains punished but try to achieve this by voting for the people covering for them - even if those politicians are openly selling themselves as 'pro-business'. It is one of the most enduring and charming features of American politics.
My daughter happens to be in the Mountain State working on coal mining program related activities. But she does not know any civilians and that kind of thing seems to be avoided in the office. (And she says she only learned and knows of it via twitter.)
(See, this is the problem with being so vague and allusive all the time.)
"Storm Crower's Daughter" is the next big country hit
I suppose it's inevitable now that Taylor Swift has completely abandoned country for pop.
19: for shame! I never thought I'd see the day...
39: (See, this is the problem with being so vague and allusive all the time.)
One man's problem is another man's doesn't give a shit.
Actually she is working with a government agency involved with after-the-fact effects of mining. Unsurprisingly everyone there is extremely guarded about their personal views of anything that touches on the politics of the work she says (she's not been there long and is not in a permanent position, so its not like she'd be anybody's confidante). And they are also keenly aware that any official statements or reports are instantly scrutinized by folks looking for "war on coal" material (and in due time by folks more politically interested in environmental concerns).
34: Yeah, I figured it was probably something like that. Sounds like interesting work.
I watched an in-depth news report recently about a mine explosion that killed a bunch of miners in China. They interviewed the mine execs, who were all serving lengthy prison sentences. I think the shortest was about 5 years for a low level supervisor to 20+ for the CEO.
I'm against the death penalty, but if we're going to have it, I'm not totally opposed to it being applied to those who run criminally negligent and/or corrupt corporations.