While I was eating my grilled buffalo chicken spinach wrap for lunch today, CNN was running its characteristically insipid fare of what someone thinks is "news".
The leading story - the one they spent my entire 8-minute lunch telling me about - was that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. had helped make a film that was being shown at the Sundance Film Festival. The film is called "The Last Mountain Top" (or something like that) and documents a waitress in a small community and her struggle to stop open-pit coal mining in West Virginia.
One thing that RFK Jr. said stood out. In the same breath, he said that West Virginia is a poor state because the influence of organized labor decreased over time; and that his father, RFK, always said that West Virginia should be one of the wealthiest states because of its natural resources. If I'm not wrong, RFK was killed in early June of 1968. Union influence in American labor was near its all-time peak.
I wonder why West Virginia wasn't "one of the wealthiest" states in 1968. If RFK Jr. is right, and strong union presence in coal mining leads to prosperity for coal miners, then Loretta Lynn's song "Coal Miner's Daughter" should have sounded more like Madonna's "Material Girl" than a memoir of growing up poor, but happy.
If his dad is right, and having a vast wealth of natural resources properly extracted leads to prosperity, we have to ask what is pulling cash out of the hands of the good people of West Virginia.
Could it be that organized labor actually puts a drain on the wealth of its constituents? Could it be that organized labor actually puts an inordinate amount of financial strain on corporations?
I don't hate mountain tops or clean water. I don't hate coal miners or their daughters. I don't hate waitresses who get involved in their community. And I don't hate filmmakers who go to Sundance.
I really like clarity and intellectual honesty, though. And I really like seeing hard-working people keep the money they earn by an honest day's work.
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