Reality TV Show? How About a Taste of This

 Clean Elections, Mountaintop Removal  No Responses »
Feb 252013
 

The New York Times reported that Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) said, “Economic growth is what is going to make mountaintop removal palatable.”

Since becoming a West Virginia public figure Manchin has been the state’s mouthpiece for the coal industry, shouting from the flattened mountaintops the praises of the industry. When a lie is big, one shouts it much louder.

Senator Manchin addresses the astroturf group FOC - Friends of Coal

Senator Manchin addresses the astroturf group FOC – Friends of Coal

Ignoring the growing links to cancer, congestive heart failure, nervous system damage, respiratory diseases, asthma, lower life expectancies and severe birth defects in coal field communities, Manchin only sees dollar signs.

Coal towns with mountaintop removal sites resemble wartime towns pillaged by an advancing army, that army being coal profiteers. For maximum profits, they raped former panoramic landscapes, blasted away majestic mountaintops, and left desolation behind.

Since Manchin’s 2005 election, nearly 100 people have been killed in West Virginia mining accidents, including the methane gas explosion that killed 29 miners in April 2010 in Montcoal, the worst mining disaster in the nation in more than 25 years.

Despite the growing deaths, health impacts and irreparable environmental damage, Manchin continues to wave the ‘Friends of Coal Banner.’ So now we ask him to bring his ‘palate’ to a coal town and live for six weeks in a community directly affected by mountaintop removal.

As the cameras roll for this Reality TV Show, Manchin and his wife will live their lives as far too many Appalachians do. After six weeks in a coal town, affected by tainted water, polluted air, massive explosions and poverty, let’s see how palatable mountaintop removal will be to Manchin’s rich-man taste buds.

Navigating the Candidates in Campaign 2012, Part 2

 Clean Elections, Tips  No Responses »
Jul 102012
 

A guest blog by OVEC membership committee member Sylvia Arthur

A good website for finding out about elected representatives is Open Congress. Open Congress is a project of the Participatory Politics Foundation, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization that builds free and open-source software for civic engagement. The Sunlight Foundation, also a non-profit organization, is the founding and primary supporter of Open Congress. Open Congress brings together official government data with news coverage, blog posts, public comments, and more to give you the real story behind what’s happening in Congress.

If you don’t already know who represents you in Congress, you can look them up by your zip code. Note: If you live in a split district you should put in your full address whenever possible. On the pages of your Senators and Representatives, you can look through their full voting history, their recently sponsored bills, and see who made their campaign contributions. By subscribing to their RSS feeds, you can easily keep track of your representative’s latest votes and sponsored legislation.

Open Congress wants to help people to lobby more effectively. On the Issues page, you can look back through the results of major votes on issues you care about. You can identify prominent sponsors of legislation, as well as “swing” votes in Congress — members of Congress who tipped the balance in close votes. This makes it possible to better focus your lobbying efforts, as well as refer to specific bills and votes, when you call or write to your members of Congress. Open Congress has good information. It is easy to find what you are looking for. You can write representatives directly from the site

GovTrack.us is a tool created by Civic Impulse, LLC to help the public research and follow legislation in the United States Congress and the state legislatures. Launched in 2004, initially as a hobby, its goal is to promote and innovate government transparency, civic engagement and civic education. It has since gone on to win multiple awards for online education. You can use their congressional directory to research and track your current congress persons. They carry similar information like vote history, sponsored bills and a money trail. Information also includes how far to the left or right they are, relative to everyone else in Congress and the committees they sit on. They will have redistricting maps available in January of 2013.

Some related websites to research the issues

If you are inspired to write to your representative you might suddenly realize, (as you finally sit down to do it) that you have an opinion, but not many facts. The OVEC website is full of helpful articles and information that can help “back you up” as you attempt to contribute and educate your legislators. They are very busy and you would be surprised at what they don’t know. Your letter can make a lot of difference to how they might vote on an issue. Here are two sites that can also help you get your facts straight and build your case.

ProCon.org is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit public charity that has no government affiliations of any kind. ProCon.org promotes critical thinking, education, and informed citizenship by presenting controversial issues in a straightforward, nonpartisan, primarily pro-con format. It’s great to see issues broken down into a few brief statements. One problem however, is that all pros and cons are not equal. ProCon.org does have a system for rating the quality of each side. But, for instance, we are well aware of the recent million dollar efforts to deny or rebut climate change. The actual debate about climate change happened over the past 40 years or so and consensus has been reached. As a matter of fact the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences released reports concluding that the build-up of carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases” in the Earth’s atmosphere will likely lead to global warming in 1983. So, the danger is that one can manufacture controversy where there is none and receive equal standing in a pro-con presentation.

A second good spot I found is actually a homework help site. This web page was created to meet the needs of Multnomah County Oregon middle and high school students researching current social issues from multiple perspectives. Works for me!  Click here. If this link does not work you can click here, then click on the Research tab on the menu on the top of home page, then click “Homework web sites” on the research page. From there choose “social issues”.

Have you ever wondered where our legislators get their information from? I mean besides the high powered lobbyists? Go to: Open CRS Congressional Research Service Reports for the People. Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports are provided to members of Congress for background information on a number of issues. Open CRS is a project of the Center for Democracy & Technology. Their mission is to provide citizens access to CRS Reports that are already in the public domain and they encourage Congress to provide public access to all CRS Reports. You can search by subject. This site is very useful because you can see what information is actually being provided to congresspersons. Some states also have public access to the information provided to legislators.

Navigating the Candidates in Campaign 2012

 Clean Elections, Tips  No Responses »
Jun 282012
 

A guest blog by OVEC membership committee member Sylvia Arthur

When it comes to elections many times we are faced with the same questions. Who is this person?” “What are their policies?” “What is their background?”

I would like to show you a few good web sites where you can get information about candidates for the up coming elections.

1. One of the first sites to come on line was Project Vote Smart. It is a 501(c)(3) educational organization funded exclusively through contributions from private citizens and philanthropic foundations. The site is very easy to navigate. You can locate all your representatives, from national to state, through their Voter Self Defense System. Put in your address to get instant access to your representative’s biography, voting record, interest group ratings, issue positions, public statements and campaign finances.

Project Vote Smart will give you information about Federal, State elections. They have a Vote Easy interactive program that matches your stand on issues with the 2012 Presidential candidates. They also have a Vote Smart Ambassador program. Interested persons can receive information about Project Vote Smart to share in their communities. You can also get candidate information by phone at 1-888-VOTESMART.

2. Congress.org is another early site for following legislators and legislation. It is a nonpartisan news and information website dedicated to encouraging civic participation. On the bottom of the home page there is a link for Elections 2012, where you may explore candidates and get advice on how to talk with your legislator.

Drawing from the newsroom of CQ Roll Call, the largest news organization on Capitol Hill, the website provides daily coverage of the public policy issues being discussed by your lawmakers. Their weekly MegaVote email newsletter makes it easy to track how your representatives are voting. You can write all of your elected officials at one time.

3. A final tip is to Google the search phrase “choose your candidate.” There are programs out there that are similar to VoteEasy. Answer a few questions and the program will match you with the candidate with views most similar to yours.

Do you have any favorite spots that you like to go to for information about candidates? Let us know, e-mail vivian@ohvec.org and she’ll pass the info along to me for possible future blog postings.

Stayed tuned for another posting with more information on tracking representatives who are already seated.

Until Friday: Sample Cut and Paste Letter to Subcommittee

 Mountaintop Removal  No Responses »
Jun 142012
 

To follow up on yesterday’s post, here’s a sample letter to copy and paste if you haven’t time to write your own.

Please add your name below (before the reprinted editorial) and e-mail this letter to:

naturalresources@mail.house.gov

Dear Representative Lamborn, Representative Hastings and Subcommittee staff and members:

I wish to submit the following letter for the public Congressional
record of the Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources Oversight
Hearing on Friday, June 1, 2012, at 10:00 AM, entitled “The Obama
Administration’s Actions Against the Spruce Coal Mine: Canceled
Permits, Lawsuits and Lost Jobs.”

Dear Mr. Lamborn:
After your subcommitttee forced Maria Gunnoe to endure 45 minutes of
police questioning for alleged child pronogrpahy, you and Doc Hastings
need to issue a public apology to Maria Gunnoe, the family of the
young child in the photo, and the photographer.

What is dirty about the photo you refused to allow in the record is
the water – and the practice of mountaintop removal that is making
people sick and destroying their water. You can deny that reality all
you want but that won’t make it go away.

I hope you saw the editorial of June 10 in the Lexington (KY) Herald Leader
(reprinted below). I ask that you include this editorial in the
hearing record.

Sincerely,

Lexington Herald-Leader Editorial

Editorial: EPA should hang tough in coalfields

Published: June 10, 2012

federal enforcement is best hope for protecting kentucky’s water

U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colo., and his staff owe an apology to
award-winning environmentalist Maria Gunnoe of Boone County, W. Va.

Although, really, in the scheme of wrongs perpetrated against
coalfield residents, a false accusation of child pornography is no
biggie.

Compared with poisoned water, elevated rates of cancer and birth
defects, floods, blasting, ubiquitous dust, close encounters with coal
trucks, poverty and the knowledge that anyone who protests the abuses
is taking a personal risk, the harassment Gunnoe suffered recently at
the U.S. Capitol is just about par for the course.

Someone in Lamborn’s office sicced the Capitol Police on Gunnoe, who
was there to testify before Lamborn’s House Natural Resources
subcommittee. Her offense? She wanted to include in her slide show a
photograph of a Kentucky pre-schooler in a bathtub in the child’s Pike
County home.

The photo stands out from countless family photos of youngsters in
bathtubs because of the water: It’s a nasty burnt orange caused by
pollution of the family’s well by among other things, arsenic, from
nearby coal mining.

Although the family and photographer Katie Falkenberg had given their
permission for the photo to be shown to the committee, they did not
want it reproduced here. Not because they think there’s anything
pornographic about it, but to protect the child, now 9, from any
possible repercussions, in light of the brouhaha.

The episode serves as a perfect metaphor for what we have seen time
and again: Those in power, notably elected officials but also state
regulators, refuse to see what extreme mining is doing to people and
the region.

They’d rather trump up distractions or sling around contrived catch
phrases like “war on coal” than talk about how to ameliorate the
destruction. They have no plans for diversifying the economy.

They shut off concerned citizens such as a delegation of Kentuckians
who tried to meet with U.S. Rep. Hal Rogers last week at his
Washington office to talk about mountaintop removal. Seven of them
were arrested.

Our so-called leaders would rather blame President Barack Obama for
what competition from cheaper, cleaner natural gas is doing to demand
for Appalachian coal than engage in an honest discussion of how to
mine without ruining water.

That dynamic was on full display in Kentucky last week at public
hearings in Frankfort and Pikeville that the Beshear administration
requested from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

At issue are 36 surface mining permits being blocked by the EPA on
what the Beshear administration and industry contend are invalid
grounds. (For perspective, there are 355 active, pre-final reclamation
surface mining permits in effect in Eastern Kentucky right now; the
EPA has not shut down mining.)

Rather than providing a forum for discussing standards for protecting
Kentucky’s water from the toxic fate of the Pike County pre-schooler’s
well, Kentucky pols just wanted to beat up the EPA on the coal
industry’s home court.

So much lame vitriol was spewed against the EPA and those who want to
drink clean water it’s hard to know where to start. One of the zaniest
has to be House Speaker Greg Stumbo’s assertion that the burial of
hundreds of miles of mountain headwaters by the coal industry is
justified by this newspaper’s failure to protest the burial of a creek
in downtown Lexington more than a century ago.

Dig through all the chest-pounding, and you arrive at the central
question: Can Kentucky’s state government be counted on to enforce
coal industry compliance with clean water and other environmental
laws.

Decades of evidence tell us the answer is no.

After questioning Gunnoe, Capitol Police determined no crime had been
committed. Still, she deserves an apology for what she rightly terms
as an attack on her character.

Likewise, the people of the mountains deserve real enforcement of
clean water laws. The only possibility of that happening is for the
EPA to hang tough

Until Friday: You Can Go On Congressional Record re: Maria Gunnoe’s Testimony and That Photo

 Mountaintop Removal, News  7 Responses »
Jun 132012
 

This Joel Pett cartoon appeared in the Lexington Herald-Leader on Sunday, June 10

If you haven’t already, please take a few minutes to read this Sunday, June 10 Lexington Herald-Leader editorial, “EPA should hang tough in coalfields.” The paper also published the Joel Pett cartoon, at right, that day.

The editorial tells the story of what happened to OVEC organizer Maria Gunnoe on Capitol Hill on June 1. And it asks that she receive a public apology, as does the staff at the Goldman Prize, the “Green Nobel,” which Maria won in 2009.

In his home district and beyond, Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO) and his staff on the House Natural Resources Committee have been receiving some bad press about the horrid incident.

The Congressional Record for the June 1 hearing is open for two more days. This is a public record, and according to House rules, the public is free to submit letters, documents, and information for the Congressional record of any hearing.

So here’s your chance to turn your outrage over what happened to Maria — a woman who is trying to save our homeplaces, and protect kids and families here – into action.

Write a letter now to the committee and to Mr. Lamborn for the Congressional Record.  Insist on a public apology to the family of the young child in the photo, the photographer and to Maria Gunnoe, whom the committee outrageously detained for police investigation because she wanted the committee to see the photo of a little girl force to bathe in toxic coal pollution. Make sure to include that you wish for your letter to be entered into the Congressional record of the hearing, otherwise your comments won’t be included in the record.

This statement should do the trick:  I wish to submit the following letter for the public Congressional record of the Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources Oversight Hearing on Friday, June 1, 2012, at 10:00 AM, entitled “The Obama Administration’s Actions Against the Spruce Coal Mine: Canceled Permits, Lawsuits and Lost Jobs.”

Send your letter to:  naturalresources@mail.house.gov

Let’s hold Mr. Lamborn and his staff accountable for their sorry actions. Let’s tell his committee that we won’t allow them to continue to deny and distort the truth while taking Big Coal’s dirty money, which it makes from destroying communities, blowing up mountains, and harming families and children, like the one in the photo that Mr. Lamborn refuses to look at. Remember you have until 5 p.m. (Eastern-time) this Friday, June 15 to submit your comments.

Please take the time now to write your message to the committee to tell the members how you feel about how they behaved toward award-winning mountain hero Maria Gunnoe.

Update: Maria says Representative Doc Hastings also needs to be issuing apologies. Please include him in your communication. You can also contact him directly here.

Below are some ideas for messages you could send, but your own words are always the best!

To Mr. Lamborn, Mr. Hastings and House Natural Resources Energy and Mineral Resources Subcommittee staff:

I wish to submit the following letter for the public Congressional record of the Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources Oversight Hearing on Friday, June 1, 2012, at 10:00 AM, entitled “The Obama Administration’s Actions Against the Spruce Coal Mine: Canceled Permits, Lawsuits and Lost Jobs.”

– What is dirty about the photo you refused to allow in the record is the water – and the practice of mountaintop removal that is making people sick and destroying their water. You can deny that reality all you want but that won’t make it go away.

– Mr Lamborn, Mr. Hastings – I hope you saw the editorial of June 10 in the Lexington paper about your committee’s offensive behavior.  I would like to submit it for the hearing record. (if you choose something along these lines, be sure to include the text of the editorial, available at the link up top).

– Send a bathtub photo of your own kids if you have one.  If your baby is not bathing in filth, the message could be something like, “This is my son in the tub.  Fortunately for us, he has clean water in which to bath because we do not live downstream from mountaintop removal.  Please enter this photo and my message for the record of the June 1 subcommittee hearing on the Spruce mine.  If you think this photo of my baby is also pornography you can tell the Capitol Police how to find me.” 

– Mr Lamborn, Mr. Hastings – I hope you saw the editorial cartoon of June 10 in the Lexington paper. As they say, a picture can say a thousand words.  Since you denied the right of citizen activist Maria Gunnoe to place the photo of the girl bathing in mining-polluted water in your committee’s hearing record, I ask that you include this editorial cartoon in the hearing record.

Lamborn Doesn’t Want You to Call Today to End MTR

 Mountaintop Removal  No Responses »
Jun 062012
 

Congressman Doug Lamborn (middle) (R-CO) stares at Maria Gunnoe (hair only visible in foreground, left) during another hearing his committee hosted on Sept. 26, 2011 in Charleston, W.Va. More info here: http://ohvec.org/newsletters/woc_2011_12/. Photo by Vivian Stockman.

“I accept the judgment of professional staff,” Lamborn said Tuesday. “If it’s inappropriate, I don’t think I should be viewing it. The fewer people who viewed it, the better.”

That from Rep. Lamborn in a Denver Post article this morning titled  “Rep. Lamborn panel blocks bath photo over child-porn concerns.”

He also said, “If it’s inappropriate, I don’t think I should be viewing it. The fewer people who viewed it, the better.”

Guess that backfired.

The Colorado Springs Gazette ran a story, too, “Lamborn panel axes photo of child bathing in polluted water,” and it’s among the paper’s “most viewed” stories so far today.

Remember, today is the National End Mountaintop Removal Call-In Day.  Please make the call.

If you tweet, please follow us @OVEC_WV and re-tweet about the call-in day.

“No Criminal Activity,” Now Join the Call-In Tomorrow

 Mountaintop Removal  4 Responses »
Jun 052012
 

Maria Gunnoe has won numerous awards for her courage in the movement to end mountaintop removal. Photo by Vivian Stockman

Whoever it was on that House subcommittee who had OVEC’s Maria Gunnoe detained and investigated for child pornography for attempting to show this photo during her testimony… whoever that was, he wasn’t thinking too far past his own anger at Maria for daring to speak the truth about what the coal industry gets away with here.

Whoever made that accusation against Maria made it without considering the implications for the child in the photo and her family. If that person professes to be about “family values,” well, he sure doesn’t care about this family or Maria’s family. If the person professes to care about “the American Way,” he sure doesn’t care about freedom of the press or free speech. If the person (or the person’s employer if it was Committee staff) receives campaign contributions from the coal industry, well, there you have it.

When this went down Friday afternoon after Maria’s testimony, we knew if the story got “legs” it would end up coming back to bite whoever perpetrated this injustice. Geez, how many more people are seeing the photo and reading Maria’s comments about mountaintop removal because of all the blogging going on about this outrage? This one blog alone had more than 25,000 hits yesterday morning.

And how many more people are completely disgusted with Congress now?

After a weekend of worry — despite having done nothing wrong at all — and anger for all invovled (i.e. anyone who wants an end to mountaintop removal), word came late Monday afternoon that the Capitol Police’s investigation was over. The outcome? “No criminal activity.” At least on Maria’s part. Wonder if anyone is investigating the person who used his position to harass Maria. Could this at the very least be a case of slander? Maybe a case of thought crime? What is going through the mind of a person who would find that image pornographic?

Maria, the family of the child in the photo and the photographer all deserve a formal, written apology on subcommittee letterhead to clear their names from any association with the vile, false and hurtful accusation.

As blogger Beth Wellington points out “Would be nice is all these eyeballs on the story would actually write Congress and the Obama administration and Romney about their outrage. Sadly, for the photographer, publications are using Tumblr to reuse her copyrighted image without permission or payment.”

Indeed. OVEC contacted the photographer and contracted with her a fee for a one-time use of the photo, projected in a PowerPoint only during this hearing, no hard copies. We also contacted the family for their permission to show the photo.

Ok all you eyeballs out there, please take up Beth’s challenge. If writing letters is just too much to ask as your first step in joining the movemnt to end mountaintop removal, note there’s something really simple you can do tomorow: join in the National Call-In Day to End Mountaintop Removal.

Update: This Mother Jones post says:  Late Monday, a Capitol Police spokesperson said the investigation had so far “discovered no criminal activity;” in a separate phone interview with Mother Jones, Hayden said the case was still open and declined to detail any specifics. “We look at everything, and then the US attorney makes a decision about whether or not to prosecute,” he said.

This post names the names of who deemed the photo ‘inappropriate.’

Bady Blog

 Mountaintop Removal  No Responses »
Jun 042012
 

Aaron Bady is the son of OVEC co-founder Dianne Bady. This weekend he blogged in regard to Maria Gunnoe’s Friday, June 1 testimony before a House subcommittee, specifically on some craziness someone on the subcommittee worked up: Obscenity: I Know It When I See It. Please take a few minutes to read the posting. As of Monday morning, this blog posting had 25,000 hits. Well stated, Aaron!

Aaron is finishing his PhD dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley, in English. His specialty is Post Colonial literature, particluarly that of East Africa. (Growing up watching citizens struggle to try to make Southern West Virginia post colonial — in other words, free from the dominating influence of Coal, and Coal’s politicians — surely influenced his academic interests!)

Aaron blogs at here and at The New Inquiry, and tweets at @zunguzungu, where he has close to five thousand followers.

Beth Wellington has also blogged on this subject. Check that out here.

OVEC’s Maria Gunnoe to Testify Before Congress Today

 Mountaintop Removal  1 Response »
Jun 012012
 

Here’s the press release we sent out yesterday about Maria Gunnoe’s testimony (and the Alliance for Appalachia’s upcoming End Mountaintop Removal Week in Washington) at a Congressional oversight hearing, which starts at 10 a.m. today. You can watch the hearing on live streaming starting at 10 a.m.

Here’s Maria’s written testimony and check out this photo, which she will show as she speaks.

We’ve collected the news coverage so far here (see June 1, 2012 entries). We’ll update this throughout the day.

Maria, thank you! Appearing before this committee takes some big courage, IMHO. But hey, Maria’s a veteran at this — this is the third timed she’s testified before Congress.

Update: Maria was going to show this photo while she spoke, but the committee staff  told Maria the baby in bathtub photo is inappropriate for the hearing and they will not let her show it!

Maria Gunnoe contemplates the destruction of mountaintop removal on Kayford Mountain.                Photo by Vivian Stockman