SMALL STATE BLUES

In the last posting of this blog, I reviewed James Madison's ideas concerning the political sins committed in small territorial republics. In short, he argued that in a small republic the common good is less likely to be achieved because in a small political arena the chances are that one or very few factions – interest groups – would have inordinate influence over government policy makers. Why? Because relative to the wealth of the republic, these interest group(s) would own or have control over a significant amount of that wealth and/or other political resources. As I mentioned in that posting, Madison had first-hand knowledge of what he argued since he belonged to the elite group that controlled the politics of his home state, Virginia. He was the owner of a plantation. So were Washington, Jefferson, and Monroe, to name a few. Of course, all four of these examples later became presidents of the national republic. But even if we agree with Madison's argument based on conditions of over two hundred years ago, does his view still hold today?

In this context, I found a report on the politics of West Virginia very interesting. In that small republic, apparently their politics are not controlled by a gaggle of plantation owners, but instead their politics are highly influenced by the coal and chemical industries. This arrangement came to national attention lately when a chemical company's storage tank developed a hole which in turn caused a highly toxic chemical to ooze into that West Virginian area's drinking water. This resulted in 300,000 people being deprived of usable water for days. The effects of the contamination continued to affect the folks in the area as they remained suspect of the water since it continued to smell. Since then, it still has not been determined how extensive the toxicity of the water supply is and, to date, 400 people have been reported ill as a result of the spill.¹

Is this just an anomaly, a case of an accident, or is it closer to being the result of an industry being too cushy with the state government – a la Madison? Or stated another way, has the chemical company been allowed to run its affairs in a purely self-serving way; that is, to further or protect its financial interests? What is it?

Let's look at the record as it applies to both the coal mining and chemical industries. In the mining industry, worldwide, thousands die annually. In this country, the incidence of fatal accidents has become significantly fewer although through the twentieth century there were some memorable events. For example, in 1968 there was the Farmington, W. Va. mining disaster that killed 78 miners. I highlight this incident because among those who lost their lives was Senator Joe Manchin's uncle and five classmates. Today Manchin is a strong defender of the coal and chemical industries. As it turns out, West Virginia has been afflicted with five major incidents involving the coal and chemical industries in eight years.²

Apparently this latest incident is not an anomaly:

“This crisis is about much more than a renegade chemical company,” said Bob Kincaid, board president of Coal River Mountain Watch, an organization based in Raleigh County in the state's southern coal fields that fights mountaintop-removal mining. “It's about an entire state subjected day after day for more than a century to a laundry list of poisons by renegade companies. This particular poisoning happened to catch the world's attention, but for us, it's another day in the Appalachian Sacrifice Zone.”

The question is, [w]ill the nation continue to turn a blind eye to the mounting toll of the aging extraction industry on the health and livelihoods of central Appalachians or take action against the growing, untenable costs of mining, cleaning, transporting and burning dirty coal?³

But the question remains, how has the state government of West Virginia acted in relation to these conditions?

According to The New York Times article, cited here, the following list of actions has characterized the state government's response to the related health and safety issues:

• There are no state laws that regulate the storage location of chemicals such as those that leaked from the tanks in question. Therefore, these tanks, situated dangerously close to the Elk River, the major fresh water supply of the area, were legally placed. A distinction between production facilities and storage facilities exists in state law but there are no regulations addressing storage.
• Federal law, in which West Virginia's representatives have had influential roles determining its content, requires reporting chemical storage facilities, but does not call for inspection of them.
• State officials did not deem the spilled chemical into the Elk River as deserving a legal designation as “extremely hazardous” despite the fact the company that owned the tanks had described them as “immediate (acute) hazards.”
• In 2010, the state government sued the Environmental Protection Agency over its water pollution standards as they applied to the coal industry. This position was recently bolstered by the current governor when he was quoted as saying, “ never back down from the E. P. A.”
• West Virginia has a unique provision in its environmental laws which states that any new regulation written by its environmental agency has to get a majority vote in both houses of its legislature before taking effect. This is a significant extra hurdle that pending regulations have to overcome before taking effect. The legislature has the authority to change any details, including striking any provision of any regulation.
• The state has allowed the oil company, Halliburton, to keep confidential the chemicals it uses in its fracturing activities despite state regulations to the contrary.
• The state's environmental regulatory department recently began allowing an increase in the allowable amounts of aluminum, a toxic mining pollutant, into the state's waterways. This pollutant, beyond being toxic to fish, is expensive to remove.
• State officials have filed lawsuits against PPG Industries at the request of PPG. The aim was to outmaneuver lawsuits by environmental groups. State lawsuits call for much more lenient decisions toward PPG's water pollution activities than would have been called for if the environmental groups' lawsuits would have been successful.
• Current efforts to update the Toxic Substances Control Act – of 1976 vintage – are being pushed by the state of West Virginia's representation in Congress. The update has been judged by the Natural Resources Defense Council's representative as toothless. It doesn't even legislate the disclosure of information or further regulate the toxic substance that oozed into the Elk River.
• The state's environmental regulatory department, which employs 800 people, has a separate office to regulate the coal industry. According to one knowledgeable observer, “Dow Chemical and a car wash are regulated in the same office. Mining gets a separate office.”⁴ Since the observer refused to be identified for fear of retribution, the implication is that the arrangement exists to give coal companies favorable treatment.

Is this a cherry-picked list of complaints? Perhaps; I'm not an expert. But given the state's apparent support of the coal and chemical industries, perhaps this favoritism is allowed and even encouraged if it results in providing benefits to the people of West Virginia. Well, according to the Times, West Virginia is 49^th out of 50 states in median household income (it was 46^th in 1969). The coal industry today hires about 4 percent of the labor force. And yet Manchin was quoted as saying, “[i]f it weren't for the resources we had here, you wouldn't have the middle class.” Whether the “we” is the national middle class or that of West Virginia, it is Senator Manchin's job to represent the interests of all the people in his state. Are the politics of this small republic advancing the interests of these people? Or is it as Madison warned: advancing and protecting the interests of its few major factions?

1Breslin, S. (2014). West Virginia chemical spill worse than initially reported. The Weather Channel, January 28, http://www.weather.com/news/science/environment/west-virginia-chemical-spill-latest-20140128. 

 

2Gabriel, T., Wines, M., and Davenport, C. (2014). In a state wary of regulations, a chemical spill changes little. The New York Times, January 19, pp. 1 and 16 (“front page” section). Most of the facts reported in this posting were derived from this article.

3Biggers, J. (2014). How dirty coal foretold West Virginia's disaster. Aljazeera America, January 14, http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/1/west-virginia-chemicalspillcoalminingcleanwater.html .

4Op. cit., Gabriel, Wines, and Davenport, p. 16.

DOES THE MADISONIAN SOLUTION WORK?

“Hope for the best, prepare for the worst” is an adage I find particularly insightful. This, to a great deal, is how I see our constitution. The founding fathers, I believe, were motivated by a variety of reasons. Among them was a federalist hope to forge a nation that could congregate to meet the opportunities and challenges of the future. But they also had a healthy respect for the reality that times do change. While they laid down a blueprint with a set of goals and a structural plan for government, they made those goals broad enough and the structure and implied processes open enough to allow us, their inheritors, the ability to work out our responses to those opportunities and challenges we would meet along the way. That was the hope and as far as the foibles of being human, the structure was to address the worst: the inevitable attempts by some to exploit the situations to come.

How? They made it so that interests would find themselves pitted against those counter- interests in the competition for society's benefits. The worst would be met with a governmental mechanism which would derive the best – or at least the workable – by having people's countervailing interests vie for what would be wanted. Yes, they would compete in markets, but they also would compete before public policy makers and public policy implementers. Oh yes; they also would compete before the courts that interpret those policies.

This approach at meeting the worst is intentional. The “father of the Constitution,” James Madison, explained the thinking in Federalist Papers, Number 10. There Madison points out that in small republics, there are a limited number of interests or factions. Usually one or a very few number of factions who control the most number of financial assets can pretty well run the politics of the republic. Of course, Madison, being a Virginian, saw how the plantation owners controlled just about every aspect of southern life. These elites sponsor and support those policies that benefit them at the expense of the common good. But if the republic is large, then there are many wealthy factions whose wealth and power are derived from a variety of sources. And when one of them sets out on a strategy that offends the others, then the others will respond. These others will apply pressure on policymakers to get government to reign in that overly selfish faction. In the case of the thirteen newly formed states, you had the northern small farmers; the middle states had the tradesmen and farmers, and the South had those plantation owners. And to really put diversity into the mix, the North had a burgeoning industrial faction. Here, already along the Atlantic seaboard, a fine array of economic interests existed and promised to develop much further.

This theory of balanced governance was somewhat contrary to what was accepted as truth: republics needed to be small territorially. The political philosophers of the time followed ideas of such thinkers as Charles-Louis Montesquieu. They argued that for a republic to maintain the loyalty of its citizens – that is, for the citizenry to not engage in unbridled, self-serving strategies that would be to the detriment of all – they would need to be psychologically attached to their fellow citizens. This would be promoted by a small territory in that such a jurisdiction would be populated by the personal relations that smallness allows. In such a republic, citizens would be disposed to not act in an overly selfish way. In larger republics, the people would lose many of the personal relations that marked the social realities of a small area. And without such relations, citizens would follow their selfish natures and act in too self-serving ways. Therefore, to be in a large republic is to be in a republic with a short-lived future.

But the hypothetical relation between small size and longevity of republics offered by these philosophers proved to be wrong. We experienced how wrong they were between the years of the Revolutionary War and the writing of the 1787 constitution. During those years, we were a confederation of small republics – thirteen of them. We found the “worst” prevailed just fine. We found serious class warfare break out culminating with Shay's Rebellion; we saw the republics engage in shortsighted policies against their sister republics; we saw a serious reluctance to pay for the mutual benefiting policies such as maintaining the national military. Things were a mess and getting worse; hence, the call for a constitutional convention. But, in the public mind, the assumption was: in order for republics to last, they needed to rule over small territories.

Madison gave the public discourse another view – the one outlined above. And so, the “expanded republic” was born. But does the expansion of a republic really handle abuse as Madison foresaw? Well, we have had a Civil War; we have had the growth of corporate power which many believe is killing our republic, and we have increasing inequality that belies any claim to having equality. These are troubling developments. Where are the rise of countering factions to reign in those who are acting in an abusive way which has led to these troubles? I have wondered, for example, as we experience climate change and the resulting droughts and increased incidents and viciousness of tornadoes, why those victimized don't organize themselves and begin an organized campaign against those responsible for changing our climate – I'm told by the bulk of scientists – the fossil fuel producers. That would be the Madisonian solution. What's going on or what's not going on?

One, those who benefit from abusive behavior have invested in propaganda efforts to do two things: de-legitimize the evidence that connects their behavior to the harmful effects being felt and de-legitimize government inserting itself in addressing any area of concern – emphasizing the notion that the government that governs less, governs best. Two, the propaganda has worked and affected people to not engage in the necessary political activity that might result in the needed pressure to change things. We have such movements as the Tea Party that mistakenly argues that the founding fathers hated government. Three, business entities understand the danger of setting costly precedents that will negatively affect other monied interests in the future. If you can make corporations, for example, pay for external costs – such as pollution – what will that mean to other corporations who are responsible for external costs? Four, there are the honest concerns over the costs that will result from changing the established practices of business entities, including costs to consumers. What will it cost all of us, for example, if we stop or significantly cut back on using fossil fuels? It won't be cheap. You might be able to think of other hindrances blocking other factions from doing the Madisonian thing. But there are cases in which we are starting to see affected parties being motivated to counter the actions of the abusers or alleged abusers.

You see, in our example, climate change is beginning to step on very big toes. The concern for Coca-Cola might have begun in 2004. That's when the soft drink maker lost its contract in India. There, drought has caused water shortages: “[w]hen we look at our most essential ingredients, we see those events [droughts] as threats”¹ stated a Coca-Cola executive. Joining Coke in its concerns over climate change are the World Bank, led by its president, Jim Young Kim, and Nike. Whether these toes are big enough is a question we will have answered. There are many ways to act against corporate power, especially if you represent another corporate power. For example, you can sponsor alternative energy technologies. Each of these entities has its own affected interests. They, in this case, might find it beneficial to push for the development of other fuels, but fossil fuel interests are not alone in advancing their interests. China and India, the new large economies emerging from lesser developed status, are highly dependent on fossil fuels to “fuel” their growth.

And so we have a Madisonian conflict, one in which vested interests will engage in the politics of energy. Who will win is an interesting question and one in which we all have our own interests at stake. I wish I could report that the public will play a meaningful role. But our history suggests that an active citizenry is stirred sufficiently to act only when enough of them experience direct results of existing conditions. I and many of my cohorts were involved with the politics of Vietnam. By and large, despite our democratic rhetoric, we simply did not want to get drafted and end up being a statistic on the battlefield for a cause in which we did not believe. Madison didn't promise us an easy political future, just one that plans for the “worst.” Here's hoping that he was right when it comes to the big questions such as climate change.

1Davenport, C. (2014). Threat to bottom line spurs action on climate. The New York Times, January 23, http://nytimes.newspaperdirect.com/epaper/viewer.aspx . The facts concerning the politics of fossil fuel producers vs. other entities such as Coca-Cola, which are reported in this posting, were derived from this article.