Taylor grew up in the town of Dryden in rural Lee County, in the westernmost sliver of Virginia between Kentucky and Tennessee. He had come to love the electrical courses he took in high school because there was always something new to learn, always a new way to challenge himself. 

Driving to Tennessee for work would likely mean two hours commuting each day.

Taylor, now 21, just wanted to work close to home. 

A summer apprenticeship learning how to install solar arrays helped him get on-the-job training and opened up connections to local work.

A regional partnership working to add solar panels to commercial buildings in the region aims to train young people as they go, developing workforce skills in anticipation of increasing demand for renewable energy-focused jobs in the heart of coal country, where skill sets and energy options are both changing. 

Virginia ranks eighth in the nation for installed solar capacity, according to the Solar Energies Industry Association, but so far, major renewable energy projects have been clustered in the eastern and southern regions of the state. Increasing the popularity of solar power in the far southwestern corner of the state depends in part on the availability of trained workers like Taylor.

Andy Hershberger, director of Virginia operations for Got Electric, said the electrical contractor firm has had an apprenticeship program nearly since the company’s founding. 

The company, which has about 100 employees total, with 40 in Virginia and an office in Maryland, has worked with Staunton-based Secure Solar Futures, a commercial and public-sector solar developer, as far back as 2012. 

More recently, the two companies began working to set up a training program that was more focused on solar. The catalyst was the former superintendent of Wise County schools, a school division that had signed up to put solar panels on its facilities. The superintendent saw the installation as an opportunity to get his students hands-on work on a renewable energy project.

Approximately three dozen apprentices have signed up for the program since 2022, including about 13 who are currently involved, Hershberger said. They work on a variety of solar projects, including on rooftops, carports, and ground-mounted installations. 

“We have been utilizing this program to train students coming out of high school and basically growing the workforce side of this thing, so we have the necessary personnel to build these solar projects long term,” Hershberger said.

On top of hourly pay, apprentices get free equipment and a transportation subsidy, along with nine community college credits at Mountain Empire Community College, which provides classroom training before students step onto the job site. 

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“I mean, pretty much everything you need to know to go out and do any electrical job, you pretty much learned in that apprenticeship program,” Taylor said.

He was in the first cohort of 10 students who installed solar panels on public schools in Lee and Wise counties in 2022. A grant from a regional economic development authority paid the students’ wages while they earned credit at Mountain Empire Community College, which serves residents of Dickenson, Lee, Scott, and Wise counties, plus the city of Norton.

He got a job offer from Got Electric at the end of that summer. 

This summer, Secure Solar Futures and Got Electric will join forces again to install more than 1,600 solar panels on the community college’s classroom buildings. The project was originally slated for 2024 but was delayed due in part to a separate project upgrading fire safety equipment in one of the buildings.

The 777-kilowatt solar power system will be connected to the electric grid, and Mountain Empire will receive credit for the power it generates.

Hershberger said he sees interest in solar growing.

“I think there’s always been folks that have adopted renewable projects, different types of energy sources. There’s always the standard interest in trying to save money for facilities and campuses and things like that,” he said.

Mountain Empire Community College offers solar training as a standalone career studies certificate or as part of its larger energy technology associate degree program.

In southwestern Virginia, a solar installation project is more likely to consist of adding panels to homes and businesses rather than building the large, utility-scale ground-based facilities more commonly seen in the Southside region of Virginia, said Matt Rose, the college’s dean of industrial technology.

On a larger project, a single worker might have a specialized role, performing the same task across a large number of panels. On a smaller project, a worker is more likely to be involved in more aspects of the job.

“Our students need to have that comprehensive understanding and ability to be able to do it all,” he said.

Last year, 10 students graduated Mountain Empire with the solar installer certification. Many students who earn the certification perform solar installation work as one part of a more comprehensive job, such as being an electrician.

Rose said the college’s students typically start out making $17 or $18 an hour but can earn more as they become journeymen and master electricians. 

Nationwide, the median salary for electricians is about $61,000. 

In Lee County, population 22,000, the median household income is about $42,000. 

The number of solar installers in southwest Virginia is unclear. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn’t collect data on employment by technology, so residential solar installation companies are labeled as electrical contractors, along with all other electrical businesses, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

Tony Smith, founder and CEO of Secure Solar Futures, measures the success of the company’s apprenticeship program person by person. At an April event to celebrate the completion of the first phase of solar panel installation for Roanoke schools, Smith asked about several of the students from the 2022 cohort from Lee and Wise counties by name. 

Smith said it’s tough to replicate the apprenticeship program at various school divisions. Doing so requires the work of individual school systems and the regional community colleges, instead of being able to pick up the curriculum from one area and apply it at the next project site.

And all the partners — Smith’s company, participating schools, and installation firms — face some uncertainty for each project. It’s challenging to pinpoint the timing of projects so that students have the time to participate during the summer months, he said.

Solar training can give students a ‘head start on everybody’

“The things I learned in the apprenticeship program I’m still doing day-to-day,” Anthony Hamilton, 21, said. He completed the eight-week apprenticeship in Lee and Wise counties in 2022 alongside Taylor. He didn’t think it would turn into a ful-time job. He doubted anyone really wanted to hire a kid just starting college. 

He’s been with Got Electric ever since, working as an electrician primarily on commercial jobs. Hamilton’s solar experience has come in handy on recent installation projects at a poultry farm and at a YMCA facility.  

Hamilton continued going to school at Mountain Empire and graduates this month with two associate degrees in energy technology and electrical. He’s also earned a handful of certificates in solar installation, air-conditioning and refrigeration, and electrical fabrication, among others. With the nine credits he earned in the summer apprenticeship, he “already had a head start on everybody in the program.” 

It wasn’t an easy journey, though.

He said he usually started his day around 6 a.m. and went to night classes after work that stretched until 9:30 p.m. Hamilton lives in Coeburn in Wise County, a 45-minute drive to the college campus. He’d get home late, then get up early and do it all over again. But his college was free through a local scholarship program that pays for up to three years of classes at Mountain Empire.

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He’d like to stay with Got Electric and start preparing to take his journeyman’s license, which requires at least four years of practical experience on top of vocational training, plus an exam. From there, he’s got designs on moving up in the company and eventually becoming a master electrician.

On April 14, he was in the town of Abingdon, a few weeks into a three-month project installing a solar array at a large poultry farm that says it produces more than 650,000 eggs a day. The work so far entailed digging trenches and laying PVC pipe for the ground-mount solar system that will span one section of the farm’s expansive fields.

Taylor uses similar skills at work each day. But his work site looks a lot different from Hamilton’s.

It has taken Taylor some time to figure out how to stick close to home while working in his trade. He spent a year working with Got Electric immediately after finishing his summer apprenticeship, then left the company to work as an electrician in a local school system. He eventually returned to Got Electric for a few months, working at Virginia Tech putting solar on three buildings on campus in Blacksburg, three hours from home. 

He discovered he didn’t like traveling for installation jobs that meant night after night in a motel room.

“That was the only complaint I had with it, about being away from home,” he said. 

Now he’s an electrician at a state prison in Big Stone Gap. He has the same shift every day, in the same place, and drives 10 minutes home from work at the end of the day. 

Taylor has also taken additional classes at Mountain Empire and wants to go back this fall to finish his associate degrees in HVAC and electrical. He eventually wants to open his own business as an electrician working locally. He’d like to be able to do small solar installation jobs. Solar hasn’t really caught on in far southwest Virginia, he said — at least, not yet. 

Rose, the dean at Mountain Empire, noted that once major solar projects are done, maintenance doesn’t require ongoing jobs, and most students who receive training in solar installation typically make it part of another job, such as being an electrician.

“We’re starting to see a lot more homeowners interested in [solar] locally as a way to offset increasing energy costs, but overall most of it is just a component of the job because there’s not enough demand,” Rose said. 

Rose predicts interest in solar will grow as more homeowners and business owners look for ways to offset rising electric bills.

“As we all look at increasing energy costs, it’s going to make a lot more economic sense,” he said.

Energy independence, he added, fits with the character of southwest Virginia.

“We’ve always been resilient people,” Rose said. “We’ve always been adapt-and-overcome people, and what better way than to basically control a little bit of your own power?”

This reporting is part of a collaboration between the Institute for Nonprofit News’ Rural News Network and Canary Media, South Dakota News Watch, Cardinal News, The Mendocino Voice, and The Maine Monitor. Support from Ascendium Education Group made the project possible.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Solar apprenticeships give Virginia students a head start on clean energy on May 25, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Matt Busse.

Duncan spent the next several days in and out of the emergency room. His doctors administered countless blood tests and ruled out the usual suspects for an octogenarian — heart disease, diabetes, pneumonia. Finally, on Stromdahl’s recommendation, Duncan’s wife, Nancy, asked his doctors to test him for babesiosis, a rare malaria-like disease caused by microscopic parasites carried by black-legged ticks. The test came back positive not just for babesiosis, but also for Lyme disease, another, far more common illness caused by the same type of tick. 

If Duncan’s doctors had caught the infections sooner they could have eradicated them with a combination of oral antibiotics and antiparasitic medications. But Duncan, weeks into his illness, needed a procedure called an exchange transfusion. Doctors pumped all of the infected blood out of his body and replaced it with donor blood. About two weeks after the garden party, he was well again.

Babesiosis is rare — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports around 2,000 cases in the United States every year. But what made Duncan’s case even more unusual is that he contracted  babesiosis in Virginia, a state that registered just 17 locally-acquired cases of the disease between 2016 and 2023. 

It got Stromdahl wondering if babesiosis could be becoming more common in Virginia and neighboring states. She spent the following two years working with a team of 21 tick researchers from across the eastern U.S. and South Africa to assess the prevalence of Babesia microti, the parasite that causes babesiosis, in ticks and humans in those states from 2009 to 2024. 

The results of the study, published in April in the Journal of Medical Entomology, reveal that the Babesia parasite is rapidly expanding through the mid-Atlantic. This shift, which has coincided with changing weather patterns, could pose a serious threat to people in communities where the disease has long been considered rare. 

“Wherever we found positive ticks, there were cases,” Stromdahl said. “They’re small numbers, but that’s why we want to give the early warning before more people get sick.” 

One in four cases of babesiosis are asymptomatic. People who do develop symptoms, especially older adults and immunocompromised people, can get quite sick with fever, chills, anemia, fatigue, and jaundice. Untreated, the parasites, which infect and destroy red blood cells, can lead to organ failure and death.

Babesiosis is typically found in the Northeast and the Upper Midwest. Between 2015 and 2022, case counts in the states that regularly report the disease — Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin — rose by 9 percent every year, a development researchers attribute in large part to warmer temperatures caused by climate change, which afford black-legged ticks more opportunities to bite people in a given year and more habitat to spread into.

Climatic conditions in the southern mid-Atlantic have always been welcoming for ticks, but warmer-than-average winters that have been occurring with grim regularity in recent years are turning some states in the region into year-round breeding sites for ticks and small rodents like mice, chipmunks, and shrews — the critters that carry Lyme bacteria and the Babesia parasite in their blood. Above-normal annual rainfall, which saturates the soil and adds to overall humidity in the region, also encourages the proliferation of ticks. The 2023 to 2024 winter season across much of the mid-Atlantic was 4 to 6 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal, and many states had some of their wettest Decembers and Januaries on record.

Stromdahl has been studying the movement of ticks and the diseases they carry for decades. She’s seen it all — including the northward spread of the Lone Star tick, which can impart a lifelong, sometimes deadly reaction to red meat. But even she was shocked to discover how far the Babesia parasite had spread. 

She and her co-authors collected 1,310 ticks in Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware and found the B. microti parasite in all three states, indicating that there is potential for more human cases across the southern mid-Atlantic. None of those states had ever found the parasite in ticks before. 

Many of the ticks the authors looked at were also infected with the bacteria that causes Lyme disease. The Lyme-babesiosis connection is an active area of research. Experts suspect ticks infected with one of the diseases are more predisposed to be infected with the other, but they still don’t know why, exactly. What they do know is that Lyme is a harbinger of babesiosis. Previous studies on tick-borne illness found that areas that saw rising cases of Lyme disease from the 1980s to the early 2000s reported more babesiosis cases one to two decades later. 

“The findings in the Stromdahl paper are consistent with what we’ve seen in the Northeast: Babesia infection seems to spread where Lyme infection is already present,” said Shannon LaDeau, a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies who was not involved in the study. 

The authors also examined where human cases of babesiosis were clustered. Of particular concern were two hotspots: the five counties surrounding and encompassing the city of Baltimore, and the Delmarva Peninsula — an 180-mile-long coastal landmass comprising parts of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. Fifty-five percent of Maryland’s cases were from the Baltimore area, and some 38 percent of cases from Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia combined were from the Delmarva Peninsula. 

Experts believe babesiosis cases are severely underreported due to lack of physician awareness. Stromdahl and her colleagues hope their findings will inspire health departments in the mid-Atlantic to recognize that babesiosis is a growing concern, conduct surveillance for infected ticks, and put out public health warnings. If doctors in the region know to test for babesiosis, severe cases like Duncan’s can be avoided.  

“Jurisdictions in the southern mid-Atlantic region should expect babesiosis cases,” the authors warn. “Tick range expansion is occurring at such a precipitous rate that public health guidance regarding tick-borne disease prevention and treatment can be rapidly rendered obsolete.” 

Climate change isn’t the only environmental factor driving the rising density and expansion of tick populations. Efforts over the past few decades to reforest barren areas have encouraged herds of whitetailed deer, animals that pick up ticks and carry them miles before the arachnids drop off into the leaf litter, to proliferate. Declining rates of recreational and subsistence hunting are adding to deer overpopulations. At the same time, an ongoing expansion of suburban development pushing into forested zones is putting more people into contact with ticks and the diseases they carry. 

“The most important take-home is that tick-borne disease is a growing risk,” LaDeau said. The big question as tick populations increase, she added, is to figure out where and when infected ticks overlap with people. “There is still a huge need for data to understand how often these infected ticks come into contact with humans.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A malaria-like disease spread by ticks is moving into Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia on May 7, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Zoya Teirstein.

Uuriintuya Dagvasambuu (Mongolia), Floating in the Wind, 2023.

In 1919, Winston Churchill wrote, ‘I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes’. Churchill, grappling at the time with the Kurdish rebellion in northern Iraq as Britain’s secretary of state for war and air, argued that such use of gas ‘would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected’.

Gas warfare had first been employed by France in August 1914 (during World War I) using tear gas, followed by Germany with the use of chlorine in April 1915 and phosgene (which enters the lungs and causes suffocation) in December 1915. In 1918, the man who developed the use of chlorine and phosgene as weapons, Dr Fritz Haber (1868–1934), won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. It is a sad fact that Dr Haber also developed the hydrocyanide insecticides Zyklon A and Zyklon B, the latter of which was used to kill six million Jews in the Holocaust – including some of his family members. In 1925, the Geneva Protocol prohibited the ‘use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous, or other gases, and of bacteriological methods of warfare’, disproving Churchill’s claim that such weapons ‘leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected’. His assessment was nothing more than war propaganda that disregards the lives of peoples such as the ‘uncivilised tribes’ against whom these gases were deployed. As an anonymous Indian soldier wrote in a letter home circa 1915 as he trudged through the mud and gas in Europe’s trenches: ‘Do not think that this is war. This is not war. It is the ending of the world’.

Maitha Abdalla (United Arab Emirates), Between the Floor and the Canopy, 2023.

In the aftermath of the war, Virginia Woolf wrote in her novel Mrs. Dalloway of a former soldier who, overcome by fear, uttered, ‘The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames’. This sentiment not only holds true of this former soldier’s post-traumatic stress disorder: it is how nearly everyone feels, besieged by fears of a world engulfed in flames and being unable to do anything to prevent it.

Those words resonate today, as NATO’s provocations in Ukraine put the possibility of nuclear winter on the table and the US and Israel commit genocide against the Palestinian people as the world watches in horror. Remembering these words today makes one wonder: can we awake from this century-long nightmare, rub our eyes, and realise that life can go on without war? Such a wonder comes from a fit of hope, not from any real evidence. We are tired of carnage and death. We want a permanent end to war.

Ismael Al-Sheikhly (Iraq), Watermelon Sellers, 1958.

At their sixteenth summit in October, the nine members of BRICS issued the Kazan Declaration, in which they expressed concern about ‘the rise of violence’ and ‘continuing armed conflicts in different parts of the world’. Dialogue, they concluded, is better than war. The tenor of this declaration echoes the 1961 negotiations between John McCloy, arms control advisor to US President John F. Kennedy, and Valerian A. Zorin, Soviet ambassador to the United Nations. The McCloy-Zorin Accords on the Agreed Principles for General and Complete Disarmament made two important points: first, that there should be ‘general and complete disarmament’ and, second, that war should no longer be ‘an instrument for settling international problems’. None of this is on the agenda today, as the Global North, with the US at its helm, breathes fire like an angry dragon, unwilling to negotiate with its adversary in good faith. The arrogance that set in after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 remains. At his press conference in Kazan, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin told the BBC’s Steve Rosenberg that the Global North leaders ‘always try to put [the Russians] in our place’ at their meetings and reduce ‘Russia to the status of a second-class state’. It is this attitude of superiority that defines the North’s relations with the South. The world wants peace, and for peace there must be negotiations in good faith and on equal terms.

Reem Al Jeally (Sudan), بحر العطاء (The Sea of Giving), 2016.

Peace can be understood in two different ways: as passive peace or as active peace. Passive peace is the peace that exists when there is a relative lack of ongoing warfare, yet countries around the world continue to build up their military arsenals. Military spending now overwhelms the budgets of many countries: even when guns are not fired, they are still being purchased. That is peace of a passive kind.

Active peace is a peace in which the precious wealth of society goes toward ending the dilemmas faced by humanity. An active peace is not just an end to gunfire and military expenditures, but a dramatic increase in social spending to end problems such as poverty, hunger, illiteracy, and despair. Development – in other words, overcoming the social problems that humanity has inherited from the past and reproduces in the present – relies on a condition of active peace. Wealth, which is produced by society, must not deepen the pockets of the rich and fuel the engines of war but fill the bellies of the many.

We want ceasefires, certainly, but we want more than that. We want a world of active peace and development.

We want a world where our grandchildren have to go to a museum to see what a gun looked like.

Hassan Hajjaj (Morocco), Henna Angels, 2010.

In 1968, the communist US poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote ‘Poem (I Lived in the First Century of World Wars)’. I often remember the line about newspapers publishing ‘careless stories’ and Rukeyser’s reflections on whether or not we can awaken from our amnesia:

I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.

I lived in the first century of these wars.

Can you reach beyond yourself?

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

As Cheney put it after a speech at Duke University: “Those of us who believe in the defense of our democracy and the defense of our Constitution and the survival of our Republic have a duty in this election cycle to come together and to put those things above politics.”

But even more mind-blowing to us (and Democratic leaders) was that father Dick Cheney , president George W. Bush’s powerful, two-term vice president, supported her decision and also endorsed Harris. Trump, he said: “can never be trusted with power again.”

Moreover, the Cheneys’ endorsements say something far, far deeper about human relations in this fractious election crisis. It might lead to millions of men changing their minds about voting for a woman president—or any woman seeking public office. Smart and strong women have existed elsewhere in the world for centuries from Cleopatra and Golda Meir to former House speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Or most men believing a vice presidency doesn’t qualify Harris for the White House, despite predecessors like Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson. They, like Harris, were U.S. Senators and experienced on how the White House operates in handling foreign and domestic affairs great and small.

At the heart of male prejudice about strong and smart women’s competence for any political office seems to be the ancient cultural fear of being stripped of power by those perceived as inferiors.

Perhaps the only two times fear of such women dissipates and true equality begins is either at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings or between proud fathers and those strong, smart daughters. For example, King Henry VIII and daughter Queen Elizabeth I and Pelosi’s father, Baltimore Mayor and House member Tommy D’Alesandro Jr., in wielding public power.  A true kinship of respect, political training, and love—and tough  decision-making—is the reality. It should overcome bias against women seeking public office.

Interestingly, Author Nathaniel Hawthorne, one of America’s greatest authors (1804-1864) focused largely on this subject of foolish fears about strong and smart women.

Brought up in penury with two sisters by a young widowed mother, he knew economic and social chauvinism and trivialization of women firsthand, doled out by men of every class. He married an intellectual and emotional peer, and fathered two outspoken daughters. In college, he also appears to have studied the revolutionary ideas by Jean-Jacques Rousseau about equality at all levels.

Moreover, as the descendant of a harsh judge in the Salem witchcraft trials  of 1692-93, he probably would have agreed with author Virginia Woolf. She believed such women were hanged or set ablaze not for religious error, but because they threatened men’s desperate need to control other men, but, most of all, powerful and defiant women. Then, by labeling them witches. Today, it’s “bitches”.

To Hawthorne, such women were equal companions, not threats to men. He never viewed them as unimportant or as threatening Delilahs, but, rather, as men’s vital emotional, intellectual, and spiritual partners. As a writer, his mission seemed to be overcoming most men’s deep-rooted fears of the strong and smart. Yet to carry such a message in the literature of his day was a monumental undertaking.

He laid the fundamental cause at ending men’s monopoly on control and power. His novels and short stories were the first in this country to focus on the rigid second-class roles assigned women for life. Initially, he disguised this view in allegorical short stories. He finally threw that cloak aside with his 1844 masterpiece “Rappaccini’s Daughter” about the usual tragic result of male fears. The allegory was poison.

Rappaccini is a brilliant and famed botanist with an experimental garden of toxic plants tended by daughter Beatrice, now immune to their poisons and up for a university post in that field. She is spotted by Giovanni, an older student, from his boarding house balcony who is struck by her beauty as she feeds and waters the deadly garden. It becomes love at first sight for both. He enters the garden despite her warnings. Soon, however, he becomes frightened of losing domination expected of men over all women, powerful and brilliant though they be. Made immune to all the poisons, he accuses her of killing him. There may be no finer breakup line than Beatrice’s heartbroken:  “Was there not, from the first, more poison in thy nature than in mine?”

That allegoric lesson applies to most biased and fearful men when it comes to women and seeking public office. Put the case another way:

If they had daughters running for any position in the upcoming elections, wouldn’t they proudly tout them to friends, neighbors, work cohorts, and the cashier and line-mates at the supermarket? Maybe help finance their campaigns? Or put up yard or window signs and paste bumper stickers on their cars? Do phone banking? Canvass the neighborhood? And with any action, wouldn’t they insist their daughters were as capable for office as male opponents?

In other words, if fathers—and mothers,too—don’t fear powerful daughters, why fear smart, strong women candidates on November 5? They’re somebody’s daughters, too, and just as worthy of fair consideration as any male on the ballot.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Barbara G. Ellis.

The post Idiocracy in Virginia appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Timothy Messer-Kruse.

Elevated Route 1 over Leeville

I’m familiar with your work as a photographer, but I notice you specifically call yourself an “artist and writer.” I’m wondering how you came to name yourself that?

It’s less of an intentional description of my own work versus wanting to be open to different mediums that I work with. I primarily work in photography, but I want to continue to pursue new projects and explore different ways of communicating and talking about the themes and issues that I’ve been exploring in my work for the past several years. My visual work blends with my writing a lot of the time, so for me, it’s more of an all encompassing type of practice that isn’t limited to photography.

How did the relationship to your art practice and the photography medium start?

I went to Bard, and I was studying their version of architecture. At the time they didn’t have a [formal] architecture program, so I was studying architectural theory and planning. All conceptual stuff, no actual studio, no hands on drawing or anything like that. I needed to fulfill an art requirement to graduate and I ended up enrolling into a photography class for non-majors.

The Bard photography department is just so spectacular, and world renowned, for good reason. An-My Lê taught my photo for non-majors course, who is one of the best photographers in the world. I loved the class so much that as a Senior, I petitioned to get into Stephen Shore’s 4x5 class. I was grateful to be able to find that medium, it was a perfect way of blending the way that I see the world and think about the built environment. I got into it just by chance. But once I found it, it was something that stuck with me. I think when you find the tool of understanding the world, it sticks with you. I was so fortunate to find that at a young age.

Chalmette Refinery, St. Bernard Parish

You’ve explicitly stated on your website that your work, “explore[s] the relationship between landscape, culture, and the built environment.” I know you grew up in New York and are currently based in Louisiana and your work really focuses on climate change and extraction, so I’m wondering how you came to focus on these topics and these regions?

[The Hudson River Valley] had a lasting impact in how I view landscape and our interactions with nature. I came from a place that was the beginnings of American nation building through landscape and where tourism in this country originally started. I think I had an early understanding and witness[ed] the ways the landscape is manipulated and marketed for a particular reason. I also grew up in a very blue collar working-class family. My whole family has worked in the building trades their whole lives. I have this deep respect for the hidden and invisible work that goes into architecture.

When I was at Bard I was in an organization that started after Hurricane Katrina by a student from New Orleans that would take groups down during the summer and winter break to intern and volunteer at different organizations in New Orleans. I was introduced to the city that way.

How am I gonna tie this back to the Hudson Valley…The Hudson Valley is extracted, not necessarily for its natural resources, but for leisure and there’s a tourism economy that fuels that place. Louisiana also has a tourism economy and [is extracted] for oil and gas. When I moved [to Louisiana] after college it was very apparent to me the connections between this place and where I grew up. And unfortunately, in Louisiana, that has to do with oil and the gas industry and the extraction of fossil fuels. Ultimately, this has led to this place being seen as somewhat of a sacrifice zone for the rest of the country, there is this thinking that what happens here doesn’t necessarily impact places like New York where I’m from or California or places 1000s of miles away when in actually, it certainly does because we all rely on these fossil fuels that are being extracted from here.

Power Lines Over Lake Pontchartrain

This is a tangent, but I was supposed to go to New Orleans from New York City in 2021 but I couldn’t fly into the city because Hurricane Ida had hit New Orleans. Then, I couldn’t even leave New York because the remnants of Hurricane Ida had traveled upstate and flooded the entire New York subway systems and streets.

Yeah absolutely. The extent of which the petrochemical industry has destroyed this state is very clear in terms of land loss, the cutting down of marshes to make canals, and the rising sea levels. But I think what’s important to me in my work is the connections between this place and places around the country that ultimately benefit from the exploitation that occurs here.

Our way of living and extracting fossil fuels ultimately has very severe consequences for the communities that live adjacent to the industry now and cannot be contained in the polluters paradise of Louisiana. I think we kind of lose sight of that because [Louisiana] is so far away. I didn’t grow up thinking about Louisiana except when I would see images of flooding from Hurricane Katrina.

There’s a visual culture about the way we talk about climate change that talks about it as these isolated events and not necessarily [about] the reasons that people suffer as much as they do. I think with my work it’s about the anti-disaster, or like not satisfying the carnage of the aftermath of hurricanes or storms or flooding as a way to describe the climate crisis. I think that I just started this work because I was genuinely curious about understanding why things look the way they do here or why the architecture and this place is so manipulated and engineered in a way that goes against the natural landscape, you know?

Abandoned Oil Infrastructure, Plaquemines Parish

What does the beginning of your artistic process look like? What happens before you actually pick up the camera and go out and decide to make an image?

A lot of architectural background and research based work. I’m much more on the analytical side of [making] art where the projects that I develop have a lot of context and material behind it before I actually go out and produce any of the images I end up making. I know pretty much where I’m going to be geographically.

When I first started photographing in Louisiana 10 years ago a lot of my [early] projects were exploratory in that I spent a lot of time orienting myself to the landscape because it was so new to me culturally, geographically, and topographically. Over time, and with a deeper understanding of the issues and ideas that I’ve been working on and trying to explore with my work, it’s become more focused with how I’m going to make the images.

I pretty much will know ahead of time what I want something to look like versus letting the creative spirit wash over me and [discovering] something I didn’t know was going to be there. There are some elements of that too, but I think with the type of work that I do that is so structural, I have a sense of how I want to capture something. The beauty of working in a visual medium is you have these elements of light and shadow that can influence the work in a way that you didn’t see ahead of time. That’s a really beautiful thing for me, being able to go to places over and over again and see the same structures or landscapes, literally, in a different light and how they’ve changed over time.

Into the Quiet and the Light: Water, Life, and Land Loss in South Louisiana is your fist book project. I’m curious if you had other ideas for book projects in the past and what it was about this particular one that stuck. What was the timeline from the initial idea to it finally coming to fruition?

It took a long time. The beginning of it was in 2019, early 2020. At the time I was talking with my publishers about doing a project in New York because I was living there for a short period of time. I like to call it my sabbatical because it was so short, it was about a year and a half. I was crafting a book proposal about the ways different boroughs are adapting to climate change. We were gonna do that for a while and we applied for grants and funding that didn’t really come through. Then, during the pandemic I moved back down to Louisiana and I think maybe a year later I had a discussion with my editors about what a collection of my work about Louisiana would look like.

It took a lot of conversations, but from the beginning we were all on the same page, that we didn’t want it to look or feel like a coffee table book of just pictures. It was important for me to find an outlet to contextualize and showcase all of these aspects of my work that you don’t necessarily get through just seeing one of my pictures. It was my way of thinking about Louisiana. I worked closely with my editors on how to incorporate different people into the project. I’ve been so fortunate to work with so many amazing people professionally and also just know personally in my time down here that have really shaped how I see the landscape and my experience living in it.

We invited 16 people to write. We initially proposed it as writing an extended caption for an image of their choosing. But ultimately it ended up being a collection of micro histories, personal essays, we have a recipe in there, we have song lyrics in there. It really was an opportunity to collaborate with these people who I admire so much in their respective fields. One of the main or most common criticisms or comments that I get about my work is that there aren’t people in any of my photos. And I think for me, just aesthetically, that’s a choice of mine. But it is important for me to bring in a select few people that had a really big influence on my way of seeing this landscape. There’s 16 contributions and I interviewed a gentleman who I’ve been talking to for a while who had a business raising houses in Terrebonne Parish, so there’s 17 contributors total.

New Construction, Grand Isle

I think that’s what surprised and delighted me about the book. That you were approaching the subject matter in a kind of holistic way and approaching it from different perspectives and points of view. What was the collaboration process like with 17 people, just from a logistical standpoint?

Most of them I had pretty long relationships with already, some of them I had just known professionally, in passing. I had narrowed down the selection of images to about 25 of the 60 images that are [in the book] and sent it to folks—obviously talking to them first to see if they would be interested—and posed the question: If you could choose one of these images to describe what you want to write about what would it be?

We had an amazing collection of stories that folks contributed that ranges in format. The themes and ideas they express really makes the book what it is. It deepens the experience in a way that just flipping through pictures I don’t think could have. I have no illusion that I’m a transplant from New York so it was important for me to bring in people who know this landscape so much better than I do and have different ties and perspectives on this land. There was an editing process back and forth that probably took about nine months or so, it was less than a year. I think their pieces are much more interesting to me than the photographs.

I’m curious about the tools you use to make your work. I think the obvious, common question is what kind of camera do you use. But I’d like to take it a little further and ask: How do you make the decision on what kind of machine you use? How do you switch between tools and what goes into that decision making process?

I’m really bare bones, I’m not a gear girl at all. That’s no shade to the people that love their gear, you should, it’s expensive as hell. But I think a part of it was me not really being trained in really technical photography. I just picked up a camera and rolled with it. I know where my weaknesses are, just in terms of primarily being self-taught outside of the two photography classes I took at school. I use my Nikon D810 full frame digital camera and she’s been treating me well for the past seven-eight years. The things I work with the most are elements of light and time of day. I don’t really think that much about what else I could be doing or using versus how I want to be able to capture the moment and convey an ethereal quality to the work. I’m not opposed to using other materials. I really really want to explore different mediums and modes of treating this work. But I really have just kind of been chugging along trying to also teach myself along the way.

Marsh Cows Near Venice

When I talk to young photographers there’s sometimes an interest in a really fancy camera. And I think it’s more about using what you have and honing your eye and honing how you arrange something within the viewfinder of the camera.

That’s how I feel. I’m not professionally trained, but the two classes I had had such an influence on me. And my class with Stephen [Shore], I didn’t take a digital class with him. The way that we treated film was thinking about the intentionality behind the work and the composition and treating it like it was finite. Versus, I think, with digital tools you naturally have the opportunity to create more and more and more—different angles, different everything that maybe you lose some aspects of intentionality with that. That certainly sticks with me.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Daniel Sanchez Torres.

This March, Loudoun County, a suburb of Washington, D.C. in northern Virginia that is home to the greatest concentration of data centers in the world, made an unexpected move: It rejected a proposal to let a company build a bigger data center than existing zoning automatically allowed. 

“At some point we have to say stop,” said Loudoun Supervisor Michael Turner during the meeting, as reported by news site LoudounNow. “We do not have enough power to power the data centers we have.”

County supervisors would later reverse the decision, approving a smaller version of the project. But the initial denial sent ripples throughout Virginia, where concern over the rapid growth of data centers and what that means for the state’s ambitious decarbonization goals is growing. 

“It is really a salient issue for climate right now,” said Tim Cywinski, a spokesperson for the Virginia chapter of the Sierra Club, which has been vocal about its desire to slow down data center development in the state. “The data center industry is about 2 percent of global carbon emissions. … In about two years, I think it will surpass the airline industry.”

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Dominion Energy, Virginia’s largest electric utility, has forecast that data centers will be the most significant driver of rising energy demand in the state over the next 15 years. And while the utility has pledged it will decarbonize its Virginia grid by 2045, in line with the Virginia Clean Economy Act passed by the state legislature in 2020, it has also indicated in its most recent long-range plan for utility regulators that new natural gas plants will be needed to meet demand. 

“We are 100 percent committed to achieving the goals of the VCEA. We are not taking our foot off the accelerator with renewables,” said Aaron Ruby, a spokesperson for Dominion. But, he added, “the clean energy transition is more challenging than it was a few years ago. The inescapable reality is we are experiencing unprecedented growth in electric demand.” 

While some environmentalists say the skyrocketing data center growth threatens Virginia’s ability to go zero-carbon, others say it can be done — but it will require new ways of managing the grid. 

“To me it’s not a question of data centers or clean energy,” said Nate Benforado, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center. “I think there is a path forward if we make some improvements.” 

‘They just continue to come’

Data centers and Virginia have been hand in glove for almost three decades, since companies like MAE-East, Equinix, and AOL built some of the earliest modern facilities in the Washington, D.C. suburbs. With close proximity to the federal government and the defense firms ringing it, Northern Virginia — and especially Ashburn in Loudoun County, known as “Data Center Alley” — quickly became the beating heart of the U.S. data center industry. 

“There are data centers located in other areas of Virginia, but roughly 80 percent of the industry is located in Loudoun County,” Dominion wrote in a recent long-term plan submitted to state regulators. “To put this in perspective, the aggregate of the next six largest data center markets in the U.S. is not as big as Loudoun County’s market.” 

Lawmakers have embraced the business. Beginning in 2010, Virginia exempted data centers from sales and use tax for many of the key components of their business as long as they met certain criteria: They had to invest at least $150 million in their facility, create 50 new jobs in the locality where it was sited and pay at least 150 percent of the prevailing annual average wage. The exemption remains Virginia’s largest economic development incentive. 

The gambit worked. A 2019 report by Virginia’s legislative watchdog, the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, found the exemption “has a sizable influence” in attracting data centers to the state. It also has a “moderate economic benefit” for the state, generating about $27 million in Virginia gross domestic product for every $1 million in foregone tax revenue, JLARC concluded.

But as data centers have continued to flock to Virginia, concerns have increased. In Loudoun and neighboring Prince William County, residents complain the facilities’ 24/7 operations produce a constant humming that never stops. Conservationists fear the centers’ expanding footprint is consuming too much land, while their heavy water use could strain local supplies. 

How to deal with the facilities’ power use is also an increasingly urgent question. Data centers are highly electricity-intensive, requiring a steady stream of power to operate around the clock. As the industry expands, more electricity is needed to meet their demand, triggering the construction of not only new sources of power but transmission lines to carry that power from where it’s generated to where it’s used. 

Data center representatives have pointed out many companies in the space have been active drivers of renewables development across the nation. In a statement, Data Center Coalition President Josh Levi noted two-thirds of the renewable power bought by U.S. corporations has been wind and solar contracted to data centers and their customers. Companies have also set their own goals: Google aims to operate its data centers on carbon-free energy by 2030, while Amazon is pushing for net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. 

“Data centers are highly efficient facilities that enable energy savings and efficiencies for homes, businesses, utilities, and other end users,” said Levi. Many, he added, are “on pace to achieve voluntary clean energy targets that predate and outpace many state mandates and targets.”  

‘Absolutely phenomenal’

Even with those commitments, the sheer magnitude of the facilities’ growth in Virginia poses a challenge for utilities, and particularly Dominion. While data centers’ peak energy usage in 2022 was almost 2.8 gigawatts — roughly one and a half times the power produced at Dominion’s largest Virginia plant, the North Anna nuclear facility in Louisa County — the company forecasts they will require roughly 13.3 gigawatts by 2038. Much of that may be due to Amazon Web Services, which Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin last year announced intends to invest $35 billion in data center campuses in the state by 2040, although Dominion does not disclose information about specific customers. 

“The amount of data center load growth we’re dealing with is absolutely phenomenal,” said Devi Glick, a principal at consultancy Synapse Energy Economics, who testified for the Sierra Club at hearings in Richmond this September on the utility’s Integrated Resource Plan, a nonbinding roadmap for how it intends to meet customer demand over the next 15 years. “Everything we’re dealing with is massive and kind of, like, novel.” 

Some environmental groups have challenged the accuracy of Dominion’s forecasts, arguing the utility is overestimating future growth as a way to justify keeping existing natural gas plants running and build new ones, including a proposed peaker plant in Chesterfield County. 

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Others, including the nonprofit Appalachian Voices, say the forecast is shakier than it appears because so much of the expected demand comes from a very small number of companies. According to figures from Dominion, two firms account for 62 percent of the demand the utility expects to see from data centers in 2030. Five account for 80 percent. 

“If even one of those five companies changes its growth plans, or if one or more counties in northern Virginia takes an aggressively hostile turn against data center expansion, the actual growth in Virginia could be radically different from what Dominion estimates now,” wrote Rachel James, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center representing Appalachian Voices, this October. 

Despite those disagreements, there’s little debate that in the near term, data centers’ electricity demand is skyrocketing. Dominion Vice President of Strategic Partnerships Alan Bradshaw told regulators this September that data centers have signed electric service agreements with Dominion that call for the utility to provide over 5.8 gigawatts to various new facilities by 2032. Bradshaw said he wasn’t aware of any data center customer in Dominion territory abandoning a project after such an agreement had been signed. Over 10 additional gigawatts are in earlier stages of development by companies working with Dominion to obtain power for future projects.

“This week we’ve had an executive meeting with a new entrant on the market, and they want to add two campuses that have 1.2 gigawatts of load,” Bradshaw said at the September 21 hearing. “Literally on the way to the courthouse today, we had another customer call us about a half-gigawatt campus they want to meet with us on. So they just continue to come.” 

Zero-carbon or the cloud? 

But while economic development boosters see the uptick in investment as a boon for state and local coffers, environmental groups say if left unchecked, the growth threatens Virginia’s ability to decarbonize its electric grid by 2050. 

“We have to make the hard choice about what data centers look like in Virginia now and if it’s worth the cost,” said Cywinski of the Sierra Club. “And right now, we think it’s not.” 

All of the long-range plans Dominion presented to regulators last year included new natural gas capacity, ranging anywhere from 970 to 2,900 megawatts of the fuel, an approach the company has defended as necessary to ensure reliability. 

“There is no realistic way that we can serve all this growth, keep our customers’ power on around the clock, and only do it with renewables,” said Ruby, the Dominion spokesman. “That is just not realistically possible.” 

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Ruby said the utility’s calculus isn’t just based on available megawatts. It’s also a matter, he said, of how quickly units can be brought online to meet demand in a crisis. Solar and wind can’t produce electricity around the clock, and while nuclear will remain a mainstay of Virginia power supply — it currently accounts for about a third of Dominion’s Virginia capacity — both the North Anna and Surry plants require hours to ramp up. 

In contrast, he said, with a natural gas plant like the new Chesterfield facility the utility has proposed, “we can ramp that up and dispatch 1,000 megawatts to the grid in 10 to 20 minutes.” 

Environmental groups, however, say Dominion shouldn’t be planning to expand its carbon resources in the long term given state law requiring the utility to stop emitting carbon by the middle of the century. 

“The transition to clean energy, that is the commonwealth’s policy. It is in the law. That is what we are working toward,” said Benforado, who along with James represented Appalachian Voices in the September case.

How data centers’ rising power demands may impact Virginia’s ability to transition from fossil fuels to renewables is one of the issues the state’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission is tasked with assessing this year. And although lawmakers put forward more than a dozen proposals related to data centers during the last legislative session, the General Assembly delayed consideration of most until the next session, after the state study’s release. Among the bills put forward were proposals to require data centers to meet certain energy efficiency targets to qualify for state tax incentives and have local governments study the regional grid impacts of potential facilities.

“The JLARC study really sucked the wind out of a lot of these,” said Benforado. 

In regulatory proceedings, Appalachian Voices and the Sierra Club have argued that rather than building new gas plants, Dominion should explore other ways to meet data centers’ power needs. Proposals include demand response programs that let energy consumers shift or reduce their power usage during times of high demand, such as extremely cold or hot weather. The environmental groups also argued for long-duration battery storage, an emerging but limited technology, and transmission upgrades.

“I think we need much more sophisticated planning that looks at lots of options, lots of tools,” said Benforado. “I do not accept this idea that we have to build gas. … To me, that’s not backed up by analysis.” 

With as many as 11 gigawatts of power needed over the next 15 years to supply data centers, he said, “I think this is the time we need to refocus our efforts.” 

“Clean energy aside, if you don’t have smart planning, optimized solutions, it’s going to be really expensive to supply 11 gigawatts,” he said. 

Levi of the Data Center Coalition noted that “grid planning and management is ultimately the role of utilities and grid operators.” However, he said the industry “is committed to leaning in as an engaged partner.” 

Rising tensions could complicate the search for solutions. Local conflicts over the industry have led to the ousting of at least one official in Prince William County, and in December 2023, 25 nonprofits and other groups, including the Virginia chapter of the Sierra Club, announced they were forming the Virginia Data Center Reform Coalition to seek more regulation of data centers. 

Still, Benforado said he believed “win-win solutions” could be found in partnership with the industry. 

“I think they’re motivated,” he said. “I hope they’re motivated.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Virginia has the biggest data center market in the world. Can it also decarbonize its grid? on Jun 9, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Sarah Vogelsong, Inside Climate News.

Journalist Evan Urquhart was arrested while covering a Virginia State Police operation to clear pro-Palestinian protesters from the University of Virginia’s campus in Charlottesville on May 4, 2024.

Students had set up an encampment on a university lawn April 30 to protest Israel’s war in Gaza and call for the school to divest its endowment from Israel, according to Virginia Public Media. After protesters erected tents to shelter from rain on the night of May 3, in violation of what the university said was school policy, state police in riot gear moved in the next day to clear the encampment. At least 25 protesters and onlookers were arrested.

Urquhart, a freelance journalist and founder of news website Assigned Media, told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker via email that he had visited the encampment for a potential story around five times, to “look around, looking for things like anti-semitic signs or chants, counter-protesters, and of course police activity.”

“I was very careful all of the times I went, including on May 4, to identify myself clearly as press and avoid anything that could be construed as participating in the protest or showing support for the protest,” he told the Tracker. “I told anyone who asked my name, my website's name, and some of the outlets where I'd freelanced in the past.”

When he arrived at the campus May 4 to cover the protest, the journalist said that police had already separated the encampment itself from a gathering crowd of onlookers and protesters.

Urquhart ended up at the front of the crowd, straining to see around the police line and taking photos. He said he was wearing a name tag with “PRESS” handwritten on it and told the police he was a journalist. “This not being my usual beat, I realize now my positioning was bad to avoid what happened after the encampment itself was cleared,” he added.

He went on to describe how the police line pushed forward, moving the crowd of onlookers back. “Near the start of that process I was pushed over by one of the police officers as he moved forward, and then arrested after I fell.” The journalist added that he had “no reason to think the officer intended to push me down,” saying, “I may have been distracted or I may have tripped as I tried to step back, maybe both.”

Urquhart said he was charged with misdemeanor trespassing and released five or six hours after his arrest. The charges were dropped May 15, after the district attorney said there wasn’t enough evidence to justify proceeding with the case.

He said he also received a no trespass order from the university May 4, denying him access to the campus grounds. “Until that moment I hadn't heard anything about trespassing from the police or through any sort of sign or alert,” Urquhart said.

He said he appealed the order May 9 and it was lifted May 15.

The Virginia State Police did not respond to a request for comment.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

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After a federal appeals court ruled this week that transgender people are legally entitled to the same access to medically necessary health care as everyone else, the immediate reaction of the states of North Carolina and West Virginia was to vow to appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The immediate reaction of Hann Henson, an employee of a North Carolina school district who’d spent years struggling to access gender-affirming care, was to break into tears. Last year, ProPublica wrote about his tumultuous journey seeking medical support in his gender transition while living in a state with a long history of discrimination against transgender people.

“Having something that you know is going to help you feel better, is going to help you feel whole, and having it constantly dangled above your head is just dehumanizing,” he said.

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Virginia, ruled that the two states violated federal law by banning coverage of certain treatments for transgender people but allowing it for others. These cases were the first of their kind to reach a federal appeals court and the decision could influence states and courts in other parts of the country.

For years, transgender people have argued in court that the North Carolina state employee health plan and West Virginia Medicaid program discriminated against them by refusing to cover certain treatments when they are prescribed for transgender people. The court’s majority agreed with this argument, in line with previous district court rulings, highlighting that West Virginia’s Medicaid program “covers mastectomies to treat cancer, but not to treat gender dysphoria.”

Henson found out about the lawsuit in 2022 soon after he started his job as a communications specialist for a North Carolina school district. He realized he was sprinting against a clock, with the state under a court order to cover gender-affirming care while the legal fight was underway. He scheduled what he hoped would be his last major surgery for November 2023, two months after the appeals court heard oral arguments on the case.

But as he got closer to the date, he realized he had to delay the surgery due to a stomach ulcer. He said the looming court decision was all he could think about for months. He even considered trying to go ahead with the procedure despite his poor health. He finally got the surgery in late March.

Dale Folwell, the state treasurer and a named defendant, used the lawsuit in his campaign for governor. (He lost the Republican primary in March.) He maintained in interviews and court documents that the state health plan should have the authority to determine which employee benefits are covered. He reiterated those comments in a statement this week: “Untethered to the reality of the Plan’s fiscal situation, the majority opinion opens the way for any dissatisfied individual to override the Plan’s reasoned and responsible decisions and drive the Plan towards collapse.”

Henson will need a follow-up surgery in five months, a common part of the process. He said he now feels a sense of relief knowing the appeals court decision ensures that he likely won’t lose access to his care at a critical time. But he worries about other transgender people seeking services and imagines them refreshing a court website compulsively just like he did.

For now, the ruling protects access to gender-affirming care for transgender people on both states’ health plans. The decision would apply to any federal court cases brought in other states in the 4th Circuit: South Carolina, Virginia and Maryland. The 11th Circuit is currently considering two similar cases out of Georgia and Florida.

All the active judges on the court heard oral arguments in the case in September. In their ruling Monday, eight of the 14, almost all of whom were appointed by Democratic presidents, ruled in favor of the transgender plaintiffs. “In addition to discriminating on the basis of gender identity, the exclusions discriminate on the basis of sex,” wrote Judge Roger Gregory, who was initially appointed by President Bill Clinton and confirmed under the George W. Bush administration.

The states argued that gender-affirming care cost too much and was medically ineffective, so they were justified in not covering it. The court’s majority opinion dismissed both arguments as lacking support. Evidence shows covering the care would likely cost states very little, and major medical associations support broad access to gender-affirming care, citing evidence that prohibiting it can harm transgender people’s mental and physical health.

The judges who signed the three dissenting opinions were all appointed by Republican presidents. “In the majority’s haste to champion plaintiffs’ cause, today’s result oversteps the bounds of the law,” Judge Julius Richardson, a President Donald Trump appointee, wrote in the principal dissent. “The majority asserts that the challenged exclusions use medical diagnosis as a proxy for transgender persons, despite the complete lack of evidence for this claim.”

North Carolina and West Virginia are planning to appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, according to press releases from each state. “We are confident in the merits of our case: that this is a flawed decision and states have wide discretion to determine what procedures their programs can cover based on cost and other concerns,” West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey said in a statement.

It remains to be seen how and whether other states and insurance companies with restrictive policies for covering gender-affirming care will act in response to the opinion.

“It should serve as a cautionary tale not just to states that implement state health plans and Medicaid programs but also to private insurers,” said Omar Gonzalez-Pagan with Lambda Legal, which represented the transgender plaintiffs in North Carolina and West Virginia. “I would hope that this serves as a determining factor in the adoption of any bad policies as an inspiration to get rid of policies that currently exist.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Aliyya Swaby.

“We are a married couple of 45 years. We are taking action together as elders deeply concerned about the future facing our 3-year-old grandson, all children, and all life on earth. That is why we have joined with many others to stop the destructive and abusive Mountain Valley Pipeline, as well as any new fossil fuel infrastructure. Three years ago, the International Energy Agency said that was needed even then, because of the seriousness of the climate emergency

“We need solar and wind right now, not destructive fossil fuels and a trillion dollar a year war economy.

“We are outraged that billions of our tax dollars are being used for military aid to Israel in its genocidal war on Gaza. War kills people and the environment.”

This is the statement that we wrote explaining why on April 10 we locked ourselves into a “trojan possum” wooden structure blocking the only access road to a major MVP construction site on Poor Mountain in Virginia. For seven hours, with the support of others, we were able to prevent work being done at this site. After extraction and arrest, we were each charged with three misdemeanors in Roanoke County, Va.

Many other people have taken actions like this going back to 2018. Indeed, an historic and heroic tree sit of 932 straight days between 2018 and 2021 in Elliston, Virginia, along the planned route of the pipeline, was a major reason why, six years later, the MVP has not been finished and is not yet operational.

Joe Manchin can’t be very happy about this situation. He and Republicans tried to squash resistance and fast track MVP construction last summer via an amendment to must-pass federal debt legislation. The amendment which was included required federal agencies to provide all needed permits within 30 days and for the federal courts to be stifled in their oversight role.

Some of those active in the movement to defeat the MVP were understandably deflated by this development, but others responded with outrage. Within a couple months of this Congressional action, young people connected to Appalachians Against Pipelines had begun engaging in nonviolent direct action to slow pipeline construction work. Hundreds of people in the last six months have risked arrest in these actions. Climate activist Jerome Wagner was released just last week after spending two months in a West Virginia prison for locking himself to an MVP drill.

The two of us have been active in movements for positive social change going back to the Black Freedom and Anti-Vietnam War movements 60 years ago. One of us is 83 and the other is 74. We are active in our town, in our state and nationally in a number of climate justice and progressive groups. We do so because we were raised by loving parents to live by the ethic that our role on this earth, for as long as we are alive and capable of doing so, is to do all we can to make the earth a better place for those coming after us.

We feel this responsibility even more so now because of the deepening climate emergency and the growing neo-fascist threat posed by Trump and the MAGA movement. We also feel it because, as of January, 2021, we are grandparents of a wonderful three-year old boy. Without question, a major reason we took this action was for him and all children.

We are heartened by many things we see within our progressive movement for positive social change. One of them is the emergence of new groups like Third Act and Radical Elders and the connections developing between them and youth organizations like the Sunrise Movement and Fridays for Future. We are also heartened to see growing numbers of elders stepping forward to take part in the direct action that young people have been taking for years in organized efforts like the fight to stop the Mountain Valley Pipeline.

Can we defeat Manchin and his MVP corporate cronies? Can we defeat Trump and MAGA? Can we overcome the criminal fossil fuel industry and create truly justice-based and nature-connected human societies? We don’t know, but we do know based on our decades of experience that taking part in the struggle for all of these things, despite all of the hardships and ups and downs, is without question a better way to live.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ted Glick and Jane Califf.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Virginia Center for Investigative Reporting at WHRO. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

The Virginia legislature has approved creating a statewide commission to investigate the role of public colleges and universities in displacing Black communities.

The legislature’s action represents a milestone for the budding national movement to seek compensation for families dispossessed by university expansion. It follows a 2023 series by ProPublica and the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO, which showed that universities nationwide have uprooted tens of thousands of families of color, contributing to Black land loss and lagging rates of Black home ownership. The series, which detailed how the creation and expansion of Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia, swallowed up a Black neighborhood, spurred city and university leaders there to create a similar task force in January.

The state budget passed by the legislature Saturday would establish a commission to determine whether any public institution of higher education in Virginia “has purchased, expropriated, or otherwise taken possession” of properties in Black neighborhoods to establish or expand a campus, and whether compensation would be “appropriate” for the property owners or their descendants, according to the bill. The commission will also research similar acquisitions in other states to provide context. The panel would report its findings annually to the legislature and submit final recommendations by July 2027. National higher education groups said they are unaware of any other statewide commissions studying the issue.

The Virginia commission would include 10 legislators, the state’s two top education officials and seven members of the public. Gov. Glenn Youngkin has until April 17 to sign the budget; he could also veto specific line items such as the commission’s funding, which consists of $28,760 per year for members’ expenses. Commission staff will be paid separately by the state Division of Legislative Services.

“My country has gone from uprooting Black communities violently to legally doing it,” the Rev. Robin D. Mines, a Richmond minister, testified at a legislative hearing last month in support of the provision. “It is far past due time to do something about this and bringing hope to our communities.”

By documenting the confiscation and destruction of Black neighborhoods for higher-education facilities, the ProPublica-VCIJ series added to the debate over how universities address the legacy of racial injustice — both on their campuses and in the country as a whole. Numerous universities are grappling with their racial histories, even as red states are restricting classroom discussion of critical race theory, which holds that racism is ingrained in America’s laws and power structures.

Del. Delores McQuinn, a Richmond Democrat, introduced legislation in January to create the commission. McQuinn originally proposed allocating $150,000 a year, which was reduced in the conference committee process after her bill was inserted into the budget. She said she would request more funding if needed.

McQuinn, who will be a member of the commission, said she will seek input from other legislators, historians and families affected by university expansion. She said the commission would address “how we repair some of the damage that has been done, whether it is through actual dollars, or scholarships or other kinds of ways.”

She declined to speculate on whether the governor would veto the commission. Youngkin, a Republican, issued an executive order in 2022 to end the use in K-12 schools of what he called “inherently divisive concepts,” including critical race theory, which is more commonly taught in colleges and graduate schools. In a statement Saturday after the legislative session ended, Youngkin said that the legislature “sent me more than a thousand bills plus backward budgets that need a lot of work,” and that he would review and decide on them in the next 30 days.

In the past two decades, prominent universities including Harvard, Yale, Brown and the University of Virginia have issued extensive mea culpas describing their historical involvement with the slave trade and slave owners. In Virginia, a 2021 law required UVA and four other universities that were established before the Civil War and used enslaved laborers to search for descendants and make reparations through scholarships or community-based economic development and memorial programs.

The 2020 protests over the murder of George Floyd prompted more institutions to reexamine their history of racial injustice. Still, only a few universities have reckoned with the impact of their growth on communities of color. In 2022, Colorado lawmakers allocated $2 million in scholarships for families and descendants of the Auraria community in Denver. The establishment of the University of Colorado at Denver campus in the early 1970s and its subsequent growth displaced 350 families and reduced the predominantly Hispanic neighborhood to just 13 cottages and a grocery store. The scholarship program eliminates fees and tuition for students and families who lived in the community between 1955 and 1973.

In Athens, Georgia, former residents of the Linnentown neighborhood have sought redress for the taking of their community by eminent domain to develop dormitories for the University of Georgia in the early 1960s. Researchers estimated the property seizures cost Black families $5 million in current dollars, mostly due to underpayment for the land.

Commissioners in Athens-Clarke County, where that university is located, passed a resolution in 2021 urging the state to compensate the roughly 50 displaced families and their descendants. They set aside $2.5 million to build affordable housing and a community center. The University of Georgia, citing a state constitutional ban on voluntary public funding for third parties, has rejected the concept of reparations.

Virginia legislators began discussing redress for uprooted families in response to the ProPublica-VCIJ series and an accompanying documentary film, which both explored how Newport News’ all-white city council seized the core of a thriving Black community in and around Shoe Lane by eminent domain in the early 1960s to build Christopher Newport’s campus. City leaders wanted to “erase the Black spot” near a segregated country club. In the ensuing decades, the school acquired almost all of the remaining homes.

Following the first article in the series, Christopher Newport University President William Kelly acknowledged in a message to faculty and staff that the university’s progress “has come at a human cost, and we must continue to learn about and understand our complicated history.” Kelly, who became president last year, has also said that incoming freshmen will be taught at orientation about the college’s origins and evolution. In January, the city of Newport News and CNU announced a task force to review decades of property acquisitions and consider possible redress for displaced families.

Christopher Newport University has declined to comment to ProPublica or VCIJ on the joint local task force or the possible state commission.

Other Virginia state universities that absorbed Black communities have tried to make amends for their history. Old Dominion University’s expansion since the early 1960s diminished a once-thriving Black community in Norfolk called Lamberts Point. In the 1990s, the university established scholarships and a jobs program for current neighborhood residents.

A memorial on UVA’s campus acknowledges its centuries of mistreatment of Black people both during and after slavery, including employees and local residents. In 2020, UVA President Jim Ryan announced a goal to build as many as 1,500 affordable homes and apartments on property owned by the school and its affiliates. The housing would be open to residents outside the university community.

While the Virginia measure focuses on public universities because they were established by the state, private institutions have their own fraught history. The University of Richmond, for example, acknowledged in 2019 that part of the campus was built on top of a cemetery for enslaved persons. The university is planning a memorial to honor the people buried there.

McQuinn, the legislation’s sponsor, said that she has long been aware of the displacement of Black neighborhoods by universities, but that the ProPublica-VCIJ series spurred her to act. Several supporters of the proposal, including the heads of the statewide and Richmond chapters of the NAACP, attended the Feb. 9 subcommittee hearing in person or online.

Others submitted comments via the General Assembly’s portal. “I see an opportunity to right the wrongs of the past,” wrote a Richmond resident identifying himself only as Antoine. He added that the “pushback” against studying the history of racial injustice, like the university expansions themselves, is “reminiscent once again of the erasure of a culture.”

Louis Hansen contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Brandi Kellam.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

The city of Newport News, Virginia, and Christopher Newport University are creating a joint task force to reexamine the destruction of a Black neighborhood to make way for the school’s campus starting in the 1960s, and recommend possible redress for uprooted families.

The new commission, announced Monday, will scrutinize four decades of the school’s property acquisitions, probing the decisions that led to locating and expanding its campus in the midst of a once-thriving Black community. It will also contact families displaced by Christopher Newport’s steady growth to ask what “restorative justice” would mean for them, and seek state assistance with potential relief for victims, according to a draft action plan.

The formation of the task force follows publication of a series by the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO and ProPublica, which revealed that Christopher Newport and other Virginia state universities grew by decimating thriving Black communities. It also documented race-based decision-making by the City Council by locating the school in a Black neighborhood despite having cheaper options and by seizing properties by eminent domain. CNU’s expansion has whittled down the Shoe Lane neighborhood in Newport News to just five houses.

In their announcement, Newport News Mayor Phillip Jones and Christopher Newport University President Bill Kelly said that the task force’s goals are to develop a “comprehensive understanding” of historical events and to ensure that residents are treated better in the future. “Understanding and acknowledging our past is important to moving forward in a transparent and thoughtful way. Christopher Newport is committed to this work,” Kelly said.

“I was deeply disturbed to know that this happened in our community,” Jones said. “I feel a personal obligation to ensure the city speaks to its role in displacing families and disrupting the sense of community in this historic area.”

The city will align itself with CNU’s plan to boost Black enrollment, according to the draft action plan obtained by VCIJ and ProPublica. Black people make up 44% of Newport News residents but only 8% of Christopher Newport students, down from 17% in 1996, VCIJ and ProPublica reported.

The announcement marks the latest and one of the broadest efforts in the country by a university and its host city to revisit their role in urban renewal and the disruption of once-stable Black communities. City and school reexamination of the historic displacement of marginalized communities has led to greater recognition of the plight of former residents near the University of Colorado Denver and the University of Georgia in Athens. The Denver university has also established a scholarship fund for descendants of families in the displaced Aurorian community.

Besides municipal and university action, the VCIJ-ProPublica series has also stirred a state legislative response. Delegate Delores McQuinn introduced legislation this month to create a commission to study how Virginia public colleges have uprooted Black communities and to explore routes of redress.

The first phase of the Newport News and CNU review will examine property records and assessments from 1958 to 1997 to determine whether property owners were properly paid for their land. The task force will also review city and university records, family archives and church documents to identify displaced families and calculate potential compensation, according to the draft action plan.

Additionally, the working group will survey affected families and consult with historians, lawyers and restorative justice experts. The task force will also suggest changes to the city’s policy for using eminent domain to seize properties.

The city has not released details about how many members would be appointed to the task force, when it would be expected to conclude its work or when findings would be released.

Newport News Vice Mayor Curtis Bethany and CNU Provost Quentin Kidd will co-chair the task force, which is expected to include representatives of the city, the university administration, alumni, students and the community, according to the action plan.

The ProPublica series detailed how universities have taken advantage of federal funding and court rulings to displace tens of thousands of families of color. A 1959 amendment to the Federal Housing Act gave colleges generous subsidies to join with cities to expand into stable neighborhoods, often by using eminent domain. While these efforts were promoted as ways to revitalize deteriorating neighborhoods, they frequently resulted in the destruction of Black middle-class communities. Christopher Newport and other Virginia state universities grew at the expense of Black neighborhoods.

Following the first story in the series, Kelly acknowledged in a message to faculty and staff that the university’s progress “has come at a human cost, and we must continue to learn about and understand our complicated history.”

Kelly also shared the series and a related documentary film with students, faculty and staff, and CNU hosted a panel discussion in November on its history. There, before an overflow crowd, panelists and audience members lashed out at the university. “A school that’s built on land that was taken from Black Americans should be more diverse,” said panelist Audrey Perry Williams, president of the Hampton Roads Association for the Study of African American Life and History.

Another panelist, professor Johnny Finn, chair of the Christopher Newport sociology department, floated the idea of reparations for affected families. “I think we need to think about materially, in addition to the symbolic and the representational, how we deal with this,” Finn said.

In 2019, Christopher Newport implemented the Community Captains program, designed to prepare students from Newport News high schools to enter the university and increase enrollment of Black students. Other Virginia universities have taken steps to rectify the historical displacement of marginalized communities caused by their campus expansions. Beginning in the 1960s, Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, took over part of the predominantly Black Lambert’s Point neighborhood. ODU has since worked to improve relations with remaining residents by increasing enrollment of students of color and awarding scholarships to residents of Lambert’s Point and nearby areas. The University of Virginia, which also dislodged Black residents, appointed two executive commissions to study its historical support for racist policies and has set a goal to create affordable housing for Charlottesville residents on university-owned properties.

Around 1960, the area bounded by Shoe Lane and three other streets was a growing Black middle-class neighborhood. Residents included teachers, dentists, a high school principal and a NASA engineer, and there were plans to develop farmland for additional housing. But an all-white Newport News City Council blocked those plans by seizing the core of the community in 1961 to establish a college. A former Christopher Newport University president said he was told that the goal was to “erase the Black spot,” in part because the area was near an all-white country club where city and business leaders gathered. The city paid the homeowners 20% less for the properties than the value set by an independent appraiser, council records show.

Even after the 1960s seizure, Black families continued to live around the perimeter of the college. However, Christopher Newport kept expanding. Between 1987 and 2019, it acquired at least 70 properties in the Shoe Lane area, according to an analysis of real estate records. Contending that the university’s expansion hurt their property values, because no one else would want to buy the property, homeowners unsuccessfully sued the university in federal court in 1989.

Paul Trible, CNU’s president from 1996 to 2022, said publicly he wouldn’t need to invoke eminent domain. But his administration used it as leverage to force at least one homeowner to sell in 2005, records show. That same year, the school’s governing board approved its use for three other properties that Christopher Newport said it ultimately acquired without resorting to eminent domain.

Dwayne Johnson, who grew up on Shoe Lane, urged the task force not only to compensate families for underpayments and loss of property value but also to pay them punitive damages. Johnson’s great-grandfather purchased 30 acres of land on Shoe Lane in the early 1900s.

“Do we want reparations? That would be nice,” Johnson said. “But do we think it will be meaningful in that it actually is reflective of our losses? I don’t know.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Brandi Kellam, Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO.

We look at the results of Tuesday’s U.S. elections with The Nation's Amy Littlefield and John Nichols, who say the results leave no doubt that protecting and expanding abortion rights is motivating voters across the country. Ohio approved a state constitutional amendment to protect reproductive access, overcoming numerous procedural hurdles from opponents, and Democrats won key races for the governor's mansion in Kentucky and the Virginia statehouse based on enduring voter anger over abortion restrictions. “This is one of the best nights for Democrats in an off-year election that we’ve seen in a very, very long time,” says Nichols, who adds that the results suggest the electorate is more progressive than pundits often claim. Littlefield notes that after decades of abortion being treated as a third rail in U.S. politics, Democrats now “need the abortion rights movement more than the movement needs them.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The Washington Post had a salacious tip on its hands, graciously gifted to the newspaper by an unnamed Republican operative ahead of a crucial Virginia legislative election. The paper also had a problem: The activity the tip exposed was between consenting adults. But it was also rather sensational — sex and voyeurism on the internet — so there had to be a way to get it into print. 

The map through that thicket was also provided, it appears, by the same operative. The paper framed the story around an allegation that was elegant if a little absurd: Democratic candidate Susanna Gibson, it was alleged, had violated the terms of service of the sex site Chaturbate by soliciting monetary tips for performing specific acts with her husband. According to a snippet of the terms of service quoted by the Post, Chaturbate’s policy states that “requesting or demanding specific acts for tips may result in a ban from the Platform for all parties involved.”

So it was that six of the resulting article’s first 10 paragraphs zeroed in on the claim that Chaturbate’s terms of service don’t allow performers to request tips for specific sex acts, followed by multiple examples of Gibson having done so. The message to Post readers was clear: What consenting adults do among themselves is their business, but if a candidate can’t be trusted with Chaturbate’s terms of service, how can she be trusted with public office?

The outcome of her race, meanwhile, could decide abortion policy for the state’s 8.7 million residents.

Gibson responded firmly to the article, calling it “an illegal invasion” of her privacy, “designed to humiliate” her and her family. The article, which was published on September 11, continues to reverberate within Virginia Democratic circles, with The Associated Press reporting last week that some Democrats have dismissed it as a distraction ahead of the November election, “while stopping short of fully championing her continued campaign.” The discourse, however, has neglected a crucial point: The Post’s way into the story — the claim that Gibson broke the site’s rules — was completely wrong. (The Washington Post and reporter Laura Vozzella did not respond to requests for comment.)

The write-up bore the signs of an opposition research dump. When oppo researchers of either party reach out to journalists with a pitch, the research is often contained in a slim packet, with relevant quotes from publicly available articles coupled with financial documents or other papers that form the building blocks of an article. 

The telltale sign that such a packet was provided to the Post comes in the article’s description of the moments where Gibson discusses tips. For one, it’s difficult to believe a reporter watched hours of video to find those clips. For another, the Post’s interpretation of the rules appears based on reading a clipped version of the website’s policies — the type that might be included in an opposition research file. 

A complete reading of the website’s terms of service, testimony from users of the site, and a Chaturbate official reveal that the policy applies not to performers like Gibson, but to users of the site, who are not allowed to demand performers do specific acts in exchange for a tip.

Addressing users of the website, the terms and conditions read:

You are prohibited from providing “tips” for the performance of specific acts. Requesting or demanding specific acts for tips may result in a ban from the Platform for all parties involved. Independent Broadcasters are prohibited from requesting any type of off-Platform payments; provided, however, the Platform may, from time to time, permit Independent Broadcasters to post links to wish lists. Your chosen payment method will only be billed as you specifically request.

In other words, Gibson was fully within her right to solicit tips. A spokesperson for Chaturbate declined to comment specifically on Gibson and asked that the company’s full response be treated as off the record. The Intercept did not agree to those terms. 

Asked whether the Post misrepresented Chaturbate’s rule, the company responded, “You are correct: the policy regarding tips being gratuities is for the protection of independent broadcasters and is not used against them.”

The company referred to a Twitter thread by sex worker advocate Ashley Lake, saying it had no connection to Lake and had not spoken with her, but that her characterization of the rules was accurate. 

The rule is aimed at rude and unruly users who make demands for tips, not performers accepting tips for things they themselves suggest. “You can tip but that doesn’t purchase or override consent,” Lake wrote. “If the sex worker says no and you demand otherwise, you can be banned.”

In this image taken from a video, Virginia legislative candidate Susanna Gibson addresses the Women’s Summit in Virginia Beach, Va., in September 2022.

When Gibson affirmed that she would stay in the race, she said, “My political opponents and their Republican allies have proven they’re willing to commit a sex crime to attack me and my family because there’s no line they won’t cross to silence women when they speak up.”

Progressive Virginia Democratic operative Kamran Fareedi agrees with the decision. “It is absolutely hilarious that Republicans want to make this election a referendum on the Chaturbate terms of service,” he told The Intercept. “Voters are going to see through the transparent laundry of opposition research from the Washington Post, which failed to issue a correction that no violation occurred in the first place.”

The Republican operative cited in the Post’s story claimed not to have any connection to the campaign of Gibson’s opponent, David Owen, or other groups active in Virginia elections this year, the Post reported. (Owen told the Post that he and his team found out about the story like everyone else.) Nonetheless, Republicans invested in the race will hope for some impact from the story. 

“Voters are going to see through the transparent laundry of opposition research from the Washington Post, which failed to issue a correction that no violation occurred in the first place.”

Gibson is running for delegate in Virginia’s 57th District, a competitive swing district that holds massive implications for the upcoming November off-year state elections. All 100 seats in the House of Delegates, as well as the 40 seats in the state Senate, are up for election. Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin won the district by 3 points in 2021, but in 2022, voters swung in the other direction, narrowly favoring Democrats.

Youngkin, meanwhile, has advanced whatever parts of his agenda he could, signing executive orders that banned schools from teaching critical race theory and loosening Covid-19 mask restrictions against the will of several school boards. His administration has pushed anti-trans education policy, and, upon being elected, he swiftly fired former Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam’s entire state parole board (the state now has the lowest parole rates in the country).

But the partisan split in the state legislature has staved off Youngkin from achieving the rest of his wishlist, including a 15-week ban on abortion or the repeal of carbon emission reduction laws. In the aftermath of Roe v. Wade’s overturning, and while unprecedented heat and disastrous storms leave no corner of the country untouched, Youngkin could accomplish these and more if Republicans take control of the state chambers in November.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Prem Thakker.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. This article was produced by Mountain State Spotlight, a member of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network.

A citizens’ group in West Virginia is suing the Environmental Protection Agency, alleging that federal regulators have failed to protect a majority-Black community in the state and residents of parts of Louisiana and Texas from cancer-causing chemicals.

A 2021 Mountain State Spotlight and ProPublica story detailed how largely Black communities across the country, like Institute in West Virginia, were saddled with a disproportionate health burden from industrial pollution. ProPublica’s analysis of emissions data found that on average, the level of cancer risk from industrial air pollution in majority-Black census tracts was more than double that for majority-white areas.

Earlier this year, the EPA proposed tougher air pollution rules for chemical plants and other industrial facilities, including placing stricter limits on ethylene oxide — the same chemical released by the plant in Institute. But the proposed rules wouldn’t cover the main ethylene oxide polluters in West Virginia because those plants fall under a different industry category in EPA regulation.

Pam Nixon, a former Institute resident and member of the Charleston, West Virginia-based People Concerned About Chemical Safety, which filed the lawsuit, said her community was often neglected by the EPA.

“There is no justice yet until all communities are treated the same and until people everywhere are breathing clean air and it doesn’t impact the health of their families,” said Nixon. While it can be difficult to link specific cases of disease to pollution exposure, she said she suffered from blisters and autoimmune problems after being exposed to a leak from the Institute plant in 1985.

The lawsuit filed Monday notes that the EPA missed a legally required deadline to update federal emissions standards for facilities that produce polyether polyols, a type of chemical that leads to the emission of carcinogens including ethylene oxide.

These facilities are major sources of pollution that disproportionately affect communities of color and lower-income areas, which are often already burdened by industrial development.

Institute, which is in one of West Virginia’s only two majority-Black census tracts, faces an excess cancer risk from industrial air pollution that is 36 times the level the EPA considers acceptable from the nearby Union Carbide plant — a facility that has helped define West Virginia’s “Chemical Valley.”

That Union Carbide facility makes ethylene oxide, which is used in various products, including antifreeze, pesticides and sterilizing agents for medical tools.

A 2021 ProPublica analysis found that of over 7,600 facilities across the country that increase the estimated cancer risk in nearby communities, the Institute plant ranked 17th.

Dow Chemical, which owns Union Carbide, did not respond to an emailed request for comment, or to multiple requests sent during research for the 2021 story.

Elevated cancer risks also affect an area known as “Cancer Alley” along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and New Orleans, as well as around Houston, Texas. Both of those regions also have clusters of polyether polyol production facilities, according to the lawsuit.

The Louisiana Environmental Action Network and the Sierra Club joined the West Virginia organization in its lawsuit against the EPA. Environmental groups commonly pursue legal action when the agency misses deadlines.

The EPA is required by the Clean Air Act to review and update emission standards for hazardous air pollutants every eight years, but the agency hasn’t made any substantive revisions to the emission standards for this source category since 1999, according to Adam Kron, an attorney for Earthjustice representing the environmental groups.

In 2014, the EPA made minor changes to how polyether polyol is monitored and measured but decided not to make any revisions to emissions rates after a review that looked at whether the current standards adequately protect communities against health risks.

In the lawsuit, the environmental groups argue that the EPA has failed to perform its required duties by missing its 2022 deadline.

Because regulators missed the deadline, the lawsuit is asking the court to find the EPA in violation of the Clean Air Act and to compel the agency to update the emissions standards by a swift deadline set by the court itself.

The EPA declined to comment because of the pending litigation.

The groups argue in the lawsuit that in addition to missing deadlines, EPA’s regulation has failed to keep up with science. In 2016 — two years after the EPA reviewed the standards — the agency determined that ethylene oxide’s cancer risk was nearly 60 times greater than previously thought.

But even after that finding, the agency didn’t update its standards. In 2021, the EPA’s Office of the Inspector General urged the agency to review polyether polyol production before its 2022 deadline after a report on ethylene oxide-emitting source categories found that the EPA was failing to meet required deadlines for conducting reviews.

The inspector general’s report also noted that the EPA couldn’t guarantee that the current emissions standards were adequately protecting public health because it had fallen behind on reviewing them, according to the lawsuit.

In response to the report, EPA regulators said they planned to complete a review of emissions standards for facilities like the one in Institute by late 2024 — more than two years after the deadline.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Sarah Elbeshbishi, Mountain State Spotlight.

• Terrell Starr of the Black Diplomats podcast will join Gaslit Nation Tuesday September 12th at 12pm ET for a live taping – get your ticket by subscribing at the Truth-teller level or higher and join the conversation in the chat! The access link will be sent exclusively to our Patreon community the morning of the show. Sign up at Patreon.com/Gaslit 

• Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of the bestselling book Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, and Russian mafia expert Olga Lautman of the Kremlin File podcast, will join Andrea at a special in person live taping of Gaslit Nation Monday September 18th at 7pm ET at P&T Knitwear on the Lower East Side. Patreon supporters can join Andrea for an exclusive early meet up at 6pm ET for signed Mr. Jones posters. Free N95 masks will be available at the event. 

In this super caffeinated episode, Andrea breaks down the recent news on the climate crisis exposing Burning Man and America’s Grover Norquist crisis; the classic authoritarian story of business elites fueling the rise of Nazis – this time by flocking to Florida for the tax breaks; how Twitter helped Saudi Arabia target and destroy the lives of activists; the apparent self-censorship on Twitter as people make moral compromises to try to game the Big Brother algorithm by avoiding issues Elon Musk works against like Ukraine and trans rights – Gaslit Nation sees you! 

J. Smith-Cameron, “Gerri” on Succession and the star of theater, film, and TV, shares an important call-to-action to protect quality of life and democracy in Virginia in the impending state elections there, which will help determine which party wins the electoral college in 2024. To join J. and Andrea at State Fair, their States Project giving circle, for events to reach voters in Virginia, sign up here. Our efforts helped a grassroots victory flip the Pennsylvania state House from Republican to Democratic control, helping protect the integrity of the vote there in 2024. 

Finally, Daniel Squadron, a former New York state Senator, and Melissa Walker, a novelist and activist, of the States Project join Gaslit Nation to expose the far-right machine fueling “Posh Trump” Glenn Youngkin, the Governor of Virginia and a potential presidential candidate who would bring a dog whistler-version of Trumpism to the White House. 

This week’s bonus episode will be a special Q&A answering questions from our Patreon community. To have your question answered and join the conversation, support the show by subscribing at the Truth-teller level or higher. Your subscription sends every episode ad free to your inbox and gives you full access to our archives, including all bonus episodes, and supports independent journalism during this critical time. Thank you to everyone who supports Gaslit Nation – we could not make the show without you! 

Gaslit Nation will remain on Twitter, but would like to expand to other platforms to break our dependency on Apartheid Barbie’s “authoritarian town square.” Follow us here and let’s continue the conversation – more platforms will be added and developed soon: 

Threads @GaslitNation 

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BlueSky  @GaslitNation (Jack Dorsey betrayed us before by selling us out to Elon Musk, he’ll do something like that again. Dorsey also let the Saudis use Twitter to hunt down dissidents according to a chilling lawsuit against Twitter). 

Show Notes:

Join Andrea and J Smith-Cameron at our giving circle State Fair to help protect democracy in Virginia this fall. More info here: https://www.grapevine.org/giving-circle/zjrhpjw/State-Fair

Americonned: Organize, Fight, Win https://www.gaslitnationpod.com/episodes-transcripts-20/2023/07/12/americonned?rq=Americonned

Twitter accused of helping Saudi Arabia commit human rights abuses https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/04/twitter-saudi-arabia-human-rights-abuses

Teen and mom plead guilty to abortion charges based on Facebook data  ttps://techcrunch.com/2023/07/11/teen-and-mom-plead-guilty-to-abortion-charges-based-on-facebook-data/

“We Didn’t Find Genocide in Ukraine,” UN Commissioner Erik Møse Says https://gwaramedia.com/en/we-didn-t-find-genocide-in-ukraine-un-commissioner-erik-mose-says/

Is Twitter Censoring LGBTQ+ Content? What We Know, What We Don't https://www.newsweek.com/twitter-lgbtq-censor-censorship-elon-musk-1792139

This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation with Andrea Chalupa and Sarah Kendzior and was authored by Andrea Chalupa & Sarah Kendzior.

To develop the proposal, the county tapped the Community Flood Preparedness Fund, a state program that makes hundreds of millions of dollars available for disaster risk analysis and mitigation. They were among the first to do so after money for such things became available in 2021 through proceeds from a carbon-offset program called the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI. But those plans, and the fund, are now in doubt because Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin wants to withdraw from the initiative despite the fact it has provided $657 million for flood preparedness and energy efficiency programs and reduced the state’s carbon emissions by almost 17 percent.

Critics of such a move say that, beyond curtailing the significant emissions reductions RGGI has already incurred, pulling out will reduce the funding available to help communities prepare for increasingly common extreme weather. It is, they say, a huge mistake and, what’s more, illegal. A group of four Southern environmental nonprofits, led by the Southern Environmental Law Center, filed suit on August 21 to stop it.  

“Repealing this regulation is just outside of their authority,” said Nate Belforado, a senior attorney with the center. “If they disagree with it, they have to take it to the General Assembly, and they’ve tried to do that and it hasn’t been successful.”

RGGI, often pronounced “Reggie,” is a collaborative cap-and-invest effort that links 12 states stretching from Maine to Virginia. Power plants in those states must acquire one carbon-emission allowance for every ton of CO2 emitted, with the permissible level of emissions declining over time. Ninety percent of the allowances are sold through quarterly auctions, generating money states can invest as they choose. The program reportedly has slashed power plant emissions in participating states by half and raised nearly $6 billion.  

Virginia joined the program two years ago, following the legislature’s 53-45 vote to require participation. Of the $657 million Old Dominion has raised, 45 percent has gone toward the Community Flood Preparedness Fund to help communities with resilience planning and municipal projects. (At least a quarter of the fund’s annual allocations go to low-income communities.) The remainder has financed home weatherization for low-income residents, reducing their utility bills through simple, but often expensive, home improvements.  

But Youngkin says the rate increases utilities instituted to cover the costs of participation in the initiative create a financial burden for low-income Virginians. “RGGI remains a regressive tax which does not do anything to incentivize the reduction of emissions in Virginia,” his office told 13th News NOW. (The governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.) “Virginians will see a lower energy bill in due time because we are withdrawing from RGGI through a regulatory process.”

The appointed Air Pollution Control Board, of which four of seven members were personally named by Youngkin, voted in June to withdraw from the program by repealing the Community Flood Preparedness Act that made Virginia a part of it in 2020. If the decision stands, the move would take effect Dec. 30. Environmental groups said the proper procedure would have been to introduce a legislative bill and have lawmakers decide. One poll found that 66 percent of Virginians support staying in RGGI; to go against them, Youngkin’s critics argue, is a fundamentally anti-democratic move. A comment period for the withdrawal remains open until Wednesday.

Beyond that criticism, Benforado calls Youngkin’s move frustrating given the progress made under the initiative. “Virginia’s monopoly utilities are required to zero out their carbon by 2050,” he said. “RGGI is the tool that will help us get there.”

Municipalities all over Virginia have used the flood resiliency funds to shore up infrastructure, draft evacuation plans, and restore blighted wetlands. “Local governments are on the frontlines of the climate crisis,” said Mary-Carson Stiff, the executive director of the nonprofit Wetlands Water Watch, which worked with Buchanan County on its flood resiliency plan. “And they are on their own, to come up with resources to come up with plans and to fund strategies to protect against losses.”

In a 2020 report, the organization noted that most of the state’s rural communities do not have any flooding or other climate resilience plans to speak of. Proponents of RGGI say that before Virginia joined, there was almost no money for disaster preparation and planning, which can be time- and labor-intensive, and requires hiring specialists and conducting environmental studies.

Stiff says Virginia’s use of funds raised through the initiative has been fairly forward-thinking. “We’re unique in the other participating RGGI states where our auction proceeds are being spent on grant programs that are actually reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” she said.  

Youngkin’s claim that Virginia ratepayers underwrite the cap-and-invest effort echoes an argument Dominion Energy, the state’s biggest utility, has made. It has said in public comments that the costs it had incurred under RGGI made it necessary to raise rates. It has proposed a rider of $2.29 on top of recent increases caused by fluctuating natural gas prices.

Mayor Justin Wilson of Alexandria, which has benefited from RGGI-funded flood resiliency projects such as a redesigned downtown waterfront and storm drain expansion, says people were already paying dearly for the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions, and that the Community Flood Preparedness Fund has been a godsend. Flooding costs Virginians $400 million per year, according to some estimates.

“I’ve stood in the homes of residents that have seen their livelihoods destroyed,” said Wilson. “The impacts of these storm events are a tax on the community.”

Youngkin has promised alternative sources of funding for flood preparedness and weatherization, and has proposed a $200 million revolving loan fund with a similar purpose. Wilson said he’ll believe there’s a contingency plan when he sees it. All the while, small floods that would have been unusual a couple of decades ago are happening with greater frequency, and the city struggles to keep up. “We have billions of dollars of investment we are gonna have to make,” the mayor said.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the state, Buchanan County’s flood resilience planning may be complete, but officials must find money for the improvements it outlines. On the anniversary of last summer’s inundation, flood survivors were still fixing up their homes, mourning the woman who had died, wondering where the next resources for them were going to come from, and nervously looking at silt-filled and waste-dammed creeks as summer rain began to fall. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Virginia is bailing on a carbon cap-and-invest program. Activists say that might be illegal. on Aug 28, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by kmyers.

A cutting-edge energy storage company is building its main manufacturing plant where a once-thriving West Virginia steel mill once stood in the city of Weirton. According to lawmakers, the much-lauded project was made possible by incentives from 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), signed by President Biden one year ago last week.

For supporters, it’s a sign that climate policies can also breathe life back into deindustrialized coal and steel communities with green jobs. The symbolism is compelling but how much those communities benefit will depend on a wide array of factors.

Form Energy, a Massachusetts-based company helmed by a former Tesla vice-president, broke ground on its iron-air battery manufacturing plant this past May. Workers will produce batteries capable of storing electricity for 100 hours, which will run on iron, water and air instead of the more common but less-abundant metal lithium. The $760 million project will create 750 well-paying permanent jobs, the company said.

The plant is being constructed on the ashes of the old Weirton steel mill, once the beating heart of the steel economy in the Ohio River valley. At its height in the 1940s, the mill was West Virginia’s number one taxpayer and its largest employer, boasting a 13,000-strong workforce.

“You could literally graduate one day from high school and be hired at the steel mill making very good money,” said Mark Glyptis, president of the United Steelworkers Local 2911 and a third-generation steelworker from Weirton.

But Weirton’s economy began to wither in the 1970s. Local industry slowly declined as the market began to prefer cheaper foreign steel – and, Glyptis said, stopped enforcing regulations on the material.

The company filed for bankruptcy protection in 2003. The fallout, said Glyptis, has been “heartbreaking.”

“It changed the landscape and the community has suffered significantly,” said Glyptis. “Our children, many of whom were planning on staying and living in the valley, have had to leave the valley to seek employment somewhere else.”

After the decline of domestic coal and steel, West Virginia transitioned from a production-based economy to a service-based one. This was a major blow to residents’ economic wellbeing, said Ted Boettner, senior researcher with the Ohio River Valley Institute.

The Weirton steel mill paid an average of roughly $16 an hour in the 1970s, which was a “decent wage,” said Boettner. By contrast, in 2013, he found that Walmart, then the state’s biggest employer, paid half of its employees less than $15 an hour – a comparison that does not account for inflation, he said.

Glyptis is optimistic that the new battery plant will help revitalize the community where he grew up. “There’ll be significant opportunities for our children to prosper,” he said.

The IRA’s carbon-cutting incentives were touted as a way to reduce the nation’s carbon emissions by 40 percent from 2003 levels while bringing manufacturing jobs back onshore. Since the law’s passage last year, manufacturers have announced 83 new or expanded major clean energy manufacturing facilities, including 14 battery manufacturing facilities, according to the American Clean Power Association.

“They’ve made the US the place for the private sector to invest in clean energy,” Samantha Smith, senior adviser for clean energy jobs at the AFL-CIO, said of the IRA’s incentives.

Form Energy has agreed to provide employees decent wages and working conditions. That is not merely a sign of the company’s altruism. The IRA incentivizes green energy developers to pay workers a prevailing wage and to have a certain share of labor done by workers in registered apprenticeship programs.

By meeting those requirements, companies can get a 30 percent tax credit on qualifying projects. If they fail to meet the standards, that percentage drops to 6 percent. “Those conditions … are great,” said Smith.

The landmark policy also sets aside a share of manufacturing tax credits specifically for facilities based in former coal communities, said Ben Beachy, industrial policy expert at the labor-climate group BlueGreen Alliance. “This law rightly recognizes that an energy transition that is fair for workers and communities will not automatically happen,” he said. “It needs to be a deliberate policy choice.”

Challenges to unionization

At the new battery plant’s well-attended groundbreaking ceremony in May, Form Energy also specifically committed to employing at least some unionized workers, said Glyptis.

But the IRA stops short of directly requiring companies to employ unionized labor. On the campaign trail, Biden indicated support for making union neutrality – wherein companies agree not to contest a union vote – a necessary condition for obtaining federal funding, but that requirement is not in the IRA.

Absent union representation, workers’ ability to protect their working conditions and advocate for better benefits and wages that exceed the federal prevailing wage would be severely muted, said Boettner of the Ohio River Valley Institute.

“I think in order for West Virginia to fully benefit from the clean energy economy, it has to be very focused on rebuilding the labor movement in the state and making it stronger,” he said.

Green industries are less unionized than fossil fuel sectors are. Changing that won’t be easy, said Smith of the AFL-CIO. The US labor movement has faced decades of attacks. And the majority of investment from the IRA has so far gone to states that, like West Virginia, are controlled by Republicans and have passed anti-union “right to work” policies.

“We’ve got some state governments that are determined to drive unions out of their state,” she said. “They even market themselves to employers on that basis.”

But she said the AFL-CIO and its affiliate unions are “pouring a lot of resources” into organizing green sectors. She feels optimistic that they’re up to the challenge.

One thing that could help: the US Department of Energy has issued guidance saying IRA investments for businesses that have a unionized workforce should sign binding legal agreements with unions.

“It’s critical that those rules be enforced,” Beachy of the BlueGreen Alliance said.

‘A pioneer’

The new battery plant alone likely cannot singlehandedly revive the Ohio River valley’s economy. While Weirton Steel employed thousands of workers, Form Energy’s plant will employ fewer than 1,000.

But Patrick Ford, a director at the Frontier Group, the firm that paid to remediate the former Weirton steel mill site and prepare it for new development with additional incentives from the IRA, said he expects the battery facility will spark further investment.

“You need a pioneer,” he said.

Seeing a developer break ground on a formerly contaminated site, he said, will encourage developers to come to the region, too. He noted that there are still more than 2,000 acres (810 hectares) of the old Weirton steel plant’s footprint available for new businesses. He estimated the site could support thousands of additional jobs and billions of dollars in further investment.

Boettner said the battery plant could lead to the creation of a cluster of battery plants in the Ohio River valley. However, the Biden administration has not required power grids to use batteries and absent such mandates, battery power will have to prove it can compete in the market, he said.

“That’s a question mark,” Boettner said.

Other battery developers have announced plans to locate plants in West Virginia, but there’s no guarantee they will all get built, said Boettner. Even if they do, the state won’t see the full benefits unless it taxes the new developments to pay for public services, he said.

Historically, West Virginia has not adequately taxed fossil fuel producers for extraction, Boettner said. “That’s the story of Appalachia: never fully benefiting from the rich natural resources that are there,” he said.

The state is at risk of repeating the same mistake, he said, noting that it has already poured more than $250m into the project and that Form Energy won’t have to pay any property taxes on it.

“I imagine at least for the first 10 years of this battery factory’s life, they’re not going to pay any state corporate income tax, very little state taxes at all,” he said.

Despite the many questions ahead, Glyptis of the United Steelworkers said he feels hopeful that the battery plant could help hard-hit Appalachian communities recover from years of disinvestment. He said the Weirton steel mill is an attractive site for developers, located close to highways, a river and an airport, and within a community of skilled tradespeople.

“I think we’ll see this community reinvent itself,” he said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A renewable energy battery plant will rise in West Virginia where a steel mill once stood on Aug 26, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Dharna Noor, the Guardian.

Photograph Source: Governor Glenn Youngkin – CC BY 2.0

Virginia’s plutocrat Republican governor Glenn Youngkin has not so far declared himself a candidate in the 2024 presidential election even as he goes out of state for appearances where, to all intents and purposes, he conducts himself as a presidential campaigner.

Youngkin campaigned in 15 states last year for Republican gubernatorial candidates– only 5 of his candidates won, and 4 of those were in solid red states. At least 2 of these candidates promulgated Trump’s fabrications about the 2020 “stolen election”. Youngkin’s PAC dispenses largesse to “stolen election” liars and supporters of the 1/6 insurrection.

At the same time Youngkin plays a delicate balancing act with Trump and his supporters. He accepted Trump’s endorsement for the governorship but did not invite Trump to his campaigns. Youngkin sucked-up to Trump by criticizing the FBI raid of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property in search of illegally removed classified documents, calling it “a stunning move by the DOJ and FBI”. Youngkin also refuses to say whether Trump should cease pushing the 2020 election lie, though he also accepts with some wavering here and there that Joe Biden won the presidency legitimately.

Fox News now touts Youngkin as a presidential candidate and has had him in at least 6 live interviews on FN in the period from this mid-June to mid-July — twice on Hannity, and once each on Fox & Friends, Fox & Friends Weekend, America’s Newsroom, and Fox News Tonight.

In these FN appearances Youngkin caters to right-wing Republicans by boasting about how he’s taking on “progressive liberals”, while in his in-state public appearances he confines himself to his more moderate-sounding pitch about raising standards in schools (while proposing budget cuts for public schools in order to fund vouchers for home-schooling and private education—thankfully the Democrats nixed this in the state legislature); giving parents more rights; and reducing people’s taxes (he’s proposed a package of $4bn tax cuts, which is easy to do because Virginia is currently running a large surplus).

Youngkin has a proclivity for gesture politics. He banned the teaching of Critical Race Theory in Virginia schools even though it is not taught there, and he set up a tip-line for people to rat on teachers who taught “divisive concepts”. The tip-line had to be discontinued after a few weeks when it was swamped by a large number of hoax calls.

Next month Youngkin will attend a fund-raising party on Long Island hosted by Wilbur Ross, Trump’s controversial commerce secretary, who appears to have switched his political allegiances away from his former boss.

Doubtless fat-cat Youngkin fans will be prodded by Wilbur to open their wallets for the Virginia governor who resembles  a Trumpster in more ways than one (albeit as someone who is always careful to lead Trump supporters from the back).

Youngkin, with his trademark tech bro fleece vests, but unlike the boorish Trump, gives the appearance of an affable and couth country-club Republican. However, this belies his 25-year-long career with the Carlyle Group—Youngkin ended up as co-CEO of this hardened and at times criminal corporate-raiding outfit from 2018 to 2020.

Forbes estimated his wealth to be about $440million in 2021, $165 million of which Youngkin loaned to his own gubernatorial campaign. Youngkin makes no reference to his enormous wealth and only says he was a “financier” before entering politics.

Youngkin, however, has continuing legal problems relating to his previous career as a “financier”. According to NBC News:

In January 2020, Glenn Youngkin… got some welcome news. A complex corporate transaction had gone through at the Carlyle Group, the powerful private equity company that Youngkin led as co-chief executive. Under the deal, approved by the Carlyle board and code-named “Project Phoenix,” he began receiving $8.5 million in cash and exchanged his almost $200 million stake in the company for an equal amount of tax-free shares, according to court documents.

The Project Phoenix payout came on top of $54 million in compensation Youngkin had received from Carlyle during the previous two years, regulatory records show….

NBC News says the lawsuit filed against Carlyle by the city of Pittsburgh Comprehensive Municipal Pension Trust Fund, a Carlyle stockholder, charges that

         the $344 million deal harmed Carlyle’s stockholders, who received nothing in return when they funded the payday….  the Carlyle insiders who received the payouts escaped a tax bill that would have exceeded $1 billion, according to the complaint, which accuses Rubenstein , Youngkin and other Carlyle officials of lining their own pockets at the expense of people like police officers and firefighters.

Youngkin clings to the typical Republican pose as a friend of law enforcement, and it will be interesting to see if this and other legal issues related to the “financier’s” complex employment past come to light should he be a candidate for the presidency. The Democrats would be fools if they did not focus on his chequered past if they have to campaign against the “financier”.

(I have detailed some of Carlyle’s legal problems when Youngkin was employed there in a previous CounterPunch piece.)

Youngkin, if he decides he wants to be president will probably campaign, in the Republican primaries at any rate, by rehashing his relentless preoccupation with wedge “culture wars” issues– albeit undertaken by him without Trump’s feverishly unhinged bombast and Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s snarling soullessness.

Youngkin uses the benign sounding notion of “parent’s rights” to enact an array of right-wing education policies.

Youngkin’s predecessor as governor, the Democrat Ralph Northam, implemented policies that permitted some Northern Virginia school districts to let students decide on the names and pronouns they wanted to use in class. Youngkin’s new policy hands back control of the way students express their gender identity to their parents. In addition, school activities are to be based on biological sex at birth, rather than gender or gender identity.

Youngkin’s attempted whitewashing of Virginia’s history curriculums turned out to be a fiasco. The templates for the new curriculums, created by shadowy right-wing think tanks, excluded lessons about Martin Luther King Jr. and the Juneteenth Holiday, as well as referring to indigenous people as America’s “first immigrants”. Ronald Reagan was referred to in numerous places, but there was no mention of Barack Obama; and the history of Algonquian chief Powhatan long featured in Virginia civics education was excised.

After a huge public outcry, the state Board of Education sent the templates back for revision before voting on February 23 this year to advance the revised syllabuses, though final adoption isn’t expected until later this year.

Youngkin nominated a former coal lobbyist and Trump administration Environmental Protection Agency chief, Andrew Wheeler, for a cabinet position overseeing Virginia environmental policy. When Wheeler did not receive confirmation from the Virginia legislature, Youngkin made him a senior adviser.

As Trump’s star starts to fade overall while his legal woes mount, and his appeal is confined increasingly to his cult-like base, and DeSantis plods on with his flatlining campaign, the Republican establishment may decide that Youngkin is the horse they want to ride to the White House (oh well– he owns a 30-acre luxury horse farm in Fairfax county, Virginia).

Youngkin will probably get a fairly easy ride in the early stages of the Republican primaries. Trump is a well-recognized crook who can’t challenge Youngkin on the latter’s legally volatile business career (though he could say Mr Fleece Vest is not up to the rough and tumble of a presidential campaign, a la his jibe against a “low energy” former governor of Florida in a previous presidential run), and the milque-toast DeSantis has confined himself so far to saying Trump’s legal issues do no more than distract Republicans in the run-up to the 2024 election.

DeSantis is miles behind Trump in the opinion polls, and his only hope, without saying so in public, is that the legal system will take care of his orange-hued opponent before the presidential race intensifies.

Meanwhile, Trump hopes a successful presidential bid will enable him to side-step his legal woes by getting his lawyers to invoke some kind of presidential immunity.

Youngkin could perhaps be sharing DeSantis’s hopes on this issue since—phew!– he will no longer have to tip-toe round Trump and his more feral supporters.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kenneth Surin.

The post Death on the Hospice Plan in Virginia: Regional Hospital Comes to the Rescue appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John Stanton.

An amendment to remove the MVP provisions was introduced by Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) in the Senate and Congresswoman Jennifer McClellan (D-VA) in the House of Representatives, and supported by the entire Virginia Democratic delegation, but neither effort was successful.

The Fiscal Responsibility Act, which now awaits the President’s signature, declares that completion of the MVP “is required in the national interest.” It requires the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to issue all permits within 21 days of the law’s enactment and hamstrings other government agencies, bypassing their long-established environmental review processes. Finally, it prohibits courts from reviewing all pending and future permits for MVP. The bill also undercuts the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), undermining decades of environmental protections, and requires the President to approve a laundry list of fossil fuel projects every year through 2030.

Victoria Higgins, Virginia Director for the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, stated:

“First, I want to express our heartfelt gratitude to Senator Kaine and Congresswoman McClellan for championing the effort to remove MVP from this bill. Today, we are grieving for the families in southwest Virginia who have fought this pipeline tooth and nail for eight years. Their home should not be sacrificed as a political favor. We are grieving for ourselves, and especially our young people, for whom this represents a huge step backwards in our urgent fight against climate change. Their future should not be a bargaining chip. And we are grieving for our lands and waters, cherished places which will now be less protected.

"But let us be clear: more than anything, we are furious. We feel betrayed by the Biden administration, who transparently traded the people and land of Southwest Virginia for a vote. The President’s commitment to climate and environmental justice is merely rhetoric if he continues to approve massive new fossil fuel infrastructure and reduce and sidestep community and judicial review. We’re equally furious at the Republicans who threatened to drive our economy off the cliff to pursue their political ends. We will not take this lying down. Our fight against the Mountain Valley Pipeline is not over.”

Chesapeake Climate Action Network has been involved in the fight to stop the Mountain Valley Pipeline since 2015 through organizing and legal action. With our partners, CCAN successfully defeated attempts to build the Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the Chickahominy Gas Plant and Pipeline in Virginia, as well as numerous other fossil fuel infrastructure projects.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Mountain State Spotlight. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Federal authorities sued West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice’s business empire on Wednesday, seeking $7.6 million in unpaid environmental fines and overdue fees. The move adds to Justice’s growing legal and debt problems and comes just a month into his campaign for the U.S. Senate.

Justice Department lawyers filed the suit to collect fines assessed by the Interior Department against 13 companies for strip mining violations that “pose health and safety risks or threaten environmental harm” to neighboring communities.

For years, Justice has been dogged by allegations that his family businesses haven’t paid their business and regulatory debts. In 2020, an investigation by ProPublica and Mountain State Spotlight found that the total judgments and settlements owed by Justice family businesses had reached $140 million. The review found hundreds of lawsuits that dated back more than 30 years, with many filed by workers, vendors, business partners and government agencies, alleging they hadn’t been paid.

This week’s lawsuit is the third time in the last two months that either federal agencies have pursued legal action against the Justice companies or a court has ruled against them over fines for environmental and worker safety violations. In April, a federal appeals court ruled that Justice companies must pay $2.5 million in fines assessed by the Environmental Protection Agency. In mid-May, the Labor Department sought a judge’s help in collecting millions of dollars in fines, alleging Justice companies are habitually late making payments related to violations that could have endangered the health and safety of coal miners.

The new suit cites more than 130 violations and more than 40 more serious enforcement orders issued between 2018 and 2022. The Justice companies previously argued that the government had reneged on a deal to resolve some of these violations for a $250,000 fine. But a federal judge threw out their case.

In response to this week’s suit, Justice sought to divert attention from the substance of the case by implying that the White House was using regulatory agencies for political purposes. “Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, and the Democrats have seen the polling that show me winning this U.S. Senate race. Now the Biden Administration has started their political games to beat me,” the governor said in a tweet.

Justice, a hugely popular Republican, is seeking the GOP nomination to challenge Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat who is often the swing vote on key legislation.

Government lawyers said the underlying violations included the failure to maintain and ensure the stability of a dam, violating pollution limits and not controlling erosion or sediment from mine sites.

Christopher R. Kavanaugh, the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Virginia, said in a statement that the companies “failed to remedy those violations and were ordered over 50 times to cease mining activities until their violations were abated.”

Kavanaugh continued, “The filing of this complaint continues the process of holding defendants accountable for jeopardizing the health and safety of the public and our environment.”

In addition to unpaid environmental penalties, the case also seeks nearly $200,000 in unpaid Abandoned Mine Land fees, which fund the federal cleanup of coal mines abandoned prior to 1977. West Virginia has more than 175,000 acres of abandoned mine sites awaiting cleanup, the second-highest total in the country. According to one estimate, the Interior Department program for cleanups is projected to have a shortfall of more than $25 billion nationwide by 2050.

As the mining industry continues a downward economic spiral, reclamation of abandoned mines is an increasing concern in coalfield communities, especially in the wake of corporate bankruptcies that threaten to shift the costs to taxpayers.

The total amount sought by the government also includes interest and administrative expenses.

Justice has said that he and his family’s companies always pay their debts. The governor was not named as a defendant in the Interior Department suit, but 12 of the 13 companies involved were listed among his business holdings on his most recent financial disclosure filed with the West Virginia Ethics Commission.

The new lawsuit does name the governor’s son, James C. “Jay” Justice III, as a defendant. The suit states that Jay Justice is a “controller” of 12 of the companies named in the complaint and that he was previously assessed fines as a corporate owner, as allowed by the federal strip mine law.

Representatives for Jim Justice’s businesses and for Jay Justice did not respond to requests for comment on the lawsuit.

Four years ago, Jay Justice issued a news release after the family’s coal firms sued the Interior Department over what was then $4.2 million in unpaid strip mining penalties and fees. The companies alleged that they had a verbal deal to resolve the matter for $250,000. But, they said, the agency backed out. Fearing a government collection action like this one, the Justices sued to try to enforce that verbal deal.

“We don’t want to have to go to court to get the government to do the right thing and live up to its end of the bargain,” Jay Justice said at the time, “but we can’t sit back and let the government take advantage of our good faith efforts to resolve this matter.”

Five months after that case was filed, a federal judge in Virginia dismissed it.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Ken Ward Jr., Mountain State Spotlight.

Two members of U.S. Congressman Gerry Connolly's staff were hospitalized Monday after a man armed with a baseball bat attacked them in the Virginia Democrat's district office in Fairfax.

"This morning, an individual entered my district office armed with a baseball bat and asked for me before committing an act of violence against two members of my staff. The individual is in police custody and both members of my team were transferred to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries," Connolly said in a statement.

"Right now, our focus is on ensuring they are receiving the care they need," the congressman continued. "We are incredibly thankful to the City of Fairfax Police Department and emergency medical professionals for their quick response."

"I have the best team in Congress. My district office staff make themselves available to constituents and members of the public every day," Connolly added. "The thought that someone would take advantage of my staff's accessibility to commit an act of violence is unconscionable and devastating."

While the motive of Monday's assault is not yet clear, it came amid increasingly violent rhetoric and threats targeting Democratic members of Congress and people close to them. Last October, a far-right conspiracy theorist broke into the San Francisco home of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and brutally attacked her octagenarian husband Paul Pelosi with a hammer.

That came after an armed man threatened to kill Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) at her Seattle home last July. In a Washington Post story about that incident, the congresswoman also shared the racist, misogynistic, and violent messages she receives on social media.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

A federal judge's ruling in Virginia on Thursday once again made clear the impact of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in the case of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, in which the right-wing majority ruled that laws and regulations pertaining to firearms must fall within the United States' so-called "historical tradition."

The ruling on Thursday was handed down by U.S. District Judge Robert E. Payne, a George H.W. Bush appointee, in the case of a 20-year-old who was turned away when he attempted to buy a Glock 19x handgun from a federally licensed dealer.

Under regulations put in place by the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco, and Explosives (ATF) and the Gun Control Act of 1968, federally licensed sellers have been prohibited from selling guns to 18-to-20-year-olds, who have had to make such purchases in private sales.

Payne ruled that "the statutes and regulations in question are not consistent with our nation's history and tradition," and that "therefore, they cannot stand."

The judge made clear in his decision that the ruling was underpinned by Bruen, in which Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the majority opinion that "constitutional rights are enshrined with the scope they were understood to have when the people adopted them."

According to Payne, the fact that 18-year-olds were permitted to join militias at the time of the nation's founding suggests that buyers should not have to reach age 21 before purchasing handguns from licensed sellers.

"The Second Amendment's protections apply to 18-to-20-year-olds. By adopting the Second Amendment, the people constrained both the hands of Congress and the courts to infringe upon this right by denying ordinary law-abiding citizens of this age the full enjoyment of the right to keep and bear arms unless the restriction is supported by the nation's history," said Payne. "That is what Bruen tells us."

Princeton University professor Eddie S. Glaude Jr. denounced the ruling as "madness," while New York University law professor Chris Sprigman said the decision is the latest result of "America's extremist form of constitutionalism."

Janet Carter, senior director of issues and appeals at gun control advocacy group Everytown Law, pointed to research that shows that "18- to 20-year-olds commit gun homicides at triple the rate of adults 21 years and older."

"The federal law prohibiting federally licensed firearms dealers from selling handguns to individuals under the age of 21 is not just an essential tool for preventing gun violence, it is also entirely constitutional," Carter told The Washington Post. "The court's ruling will undoubtedly put lives at risk. It must be reversed."

Attorneys on both sides of the case said they expected the Biden administration to appeal the ruling.

Numerous polls have shown that the majority of Americans favor stricter gun control measures, and a survey of gun owners taken last year by NPR/Ipsos found that 67% of respondents favored raising the age for any gun purchase from 18 to 21.

"At a moment when Americans are growing more unified and in favor of gun control," said historian Brian Rosenwald, "Clarence Thomas' grotesque, inane opinion in Bruen is going to make all of them illegal."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Mountain State Spotlight. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

For years, West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice has been dogged by allegations that his family businesses haven’t paid their debts, including fines for environmental violations at their coal plants. One bank is even seeking to garnish his salary as governor to cover an unpaid personal guarantee of a business loan, court documents show.

But these disputes are likely to resurface in what will be one of the most hotly contested races for control of the U.S. Senate in 2024. Last week, Justice, a Republican who is immensely popular in the state, announced that he will challenge U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat who is often the swing vote on key legislation.

A review by ProPublica in 2020 found that, over three decades, Justice’s constellation of mining, farming and hospitality companies were involved in over 600 lawsuits in more than two dozen states. Many were filed by workers, vendors, business partners and government agencies, alleging they weren’t paid. Often, similar cases were filed in multiple jurisdictions, as lawyers for plaintiffs tried to chase down a Justice company’s assets to settle debts.

By late 2020, the total in judgments and settlements for Justice family businesses had reached $140 million, ProPublica and Mountain State Spotlight found.

Since then, his family business empire has faced more turmoil. Lenders are trying to hold him personally responsible for hundreds of millions in debt. Courts are ordering payment of long-standing environmental penalties.

Neither representatives for Justice nor the family’s businesses responded to a request for comment. In the past, Justice has said that he and his family companies always pay what they owe. The governor has said that his businesses don’t create any conflicts of interest and that he didn’t run for office to get anything for himself.

Justice inherited a coal fortune from his father and expanded it to an empire of agricultural companies and resort hotels, including The Greenbrier, a posh, historic resort located in a valley where southern West Virginia’s mountains meet western Virginia’s rolling hills.

Last week, Justice used The Greenbrier as the backdrop for his announcement that he would seek the Republican nomination, facing U.S. Rep. Alex Mooney in the GOP primary. (Manchin has not announced a reelection bid yet, but in response to questions about Justice he said, “Make no mistake, I will win any race I enter.”)

As we documented, the resort has been at the heart of various conflicts of interest, as major trade associations that lobby state government for their industries have held meetings and conferences there.

And just two days before Justice’s Senate announcement, another of his resorts, Glade Springs, was the subject of state Supreme Court arguments in a case in which the resort homeowners’ association is seeking $6.6 million in property upkeep fees from one of Justice’s companies, which owns lots at the resort.

When he became governor in 2017, Justice said he was turning control of his family businesses over to his adult children. But our investigation found that, while governor, he continued to steer the empire.

In his political campaigns, Justice frequently touted his experience as a businessman and said that his long career in coal and other industries made him suited for the role of West Virginia’s chief executive.

Justice’s coal operations have also been repeatedly pressed to settle allegations of significant pollution problems in deals with regulators, yet the environmental violations have continued. Last month, a federal appeals court ruled that Justice companies must pay $2.5 million in environmental fines. Lawyers for the companies had argued the fines were the result of a misreading of an earlier settlement.

In December, an industrial plant owned by Justice’s family agreed to pay nearly $1 million in fines after releasing excessive air pollution into Black neighborhoods in Birmingham, Alabama. An attorney who works with the Justice family said the consent order would “provide the certainty that the company needs to complete its evaluation of the plant’s future.”

For years, Justice had been considered West Virginia’s richest man and listed by Forbes as a billionaire. But in 2021, Forbes removed that listing. The magazine cited a dispute over $850 million in debt to the now-defunct firm Greensill Capital.

The Justice companies settled that dispute with a payment plan. But last week a longtime banking partner of Justice’s, Carter Bank & Trust, filed documents seeking to collect on a separate $300 million debt. Justice’s son, Jay Justice, said in a statement that the bank had refused a reasonable repayment plan.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Ken Ward Jr., Mountain State Spotlight.

A coalition of climate groups this week called out the Biden administration's support for the partially completed Mountain Valley Pipeline, highlighting how its ongoing construction and potential operation threaten "the well-being of people, endangered species, streams, rivers, farms, national forests, and the planet."

The letter, led by Protect Our Water, Heritage, Rights (POWHR) and 7 Directions of Service and backed by 149 other organizations, is in response to U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm writing to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) last month to reiterate the administration's position on the contested 303-mile fracked gas pipeline across Virginia and West Virginia.

"We are incredibly disappointed with your recent actions to promote the destructive and unneeded Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP)," the climate coalition wrote to Granholm, noting that her letter to FERC coincided with President Joe Biden signing an executive order to implement "environmental justice policy across the federal government."

"You should be supporting environmental justice as the bedrock of every new policy and piece of infrastructure, advocating for climate reparations, and aggressively promoting distributed, decentralized renewable energy and energy democracy."

After condemning the administration's endorsement of the pipeline and recent approvals of the Willow oil and Alaska liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects as "hypocritical betrayals," given Biden's campaign trail pledges, the coalition laid out how the MVP impacts "livelihoods, drinking water sources, property values, and important cultural resources," pointing to Indigenous cultural sites as well as communities of "low-income, elderly, and medically underserved populations" dependent on private wells.

MVP construction has involved over 500 violations of permit conditions, laws, and regulations, the letter emphasizes, and almost 75% of the route "slices through 'moderate-high' or 'high' landslide risk terrain."

The pipeline developer's website states that "MVP's total project work is nearly 94% complete, which includes 55.8% of the right-of-way fully restored." While proponents of the project often cite the former figure, letter signatories are drawing attention to the latter—and that completion would require complex construction involving "incredibly complex and fragile" water crossings.

"The MVP, its greedy political backers, and some journalists continue to claim that the project is nearly complete despite the company's own repeated reports that it is just over half complete with some of the hardest construction yet to come, including hundreds of stream crossings," POWHR managing director Russell Chisholm told Common Dreams.

"This disinformation is not only an insult to frontline communities monitoring and enduring the unfinished pipeline's construction, but it furthers the risk of another planet-killing fossil fuel pipeline built during a climate crisis... on a planet that we all live on," Chrishold added. "Shame on all people in power who tout this falsehood."

Released as climate scientists continue to stress the need for a swift global transition to renewable energy, the letter argues that "this project is not inevitable, and is completely counter to the overwhelming evidence that we must stop creating new fossil fuel infrastructure immediately."

Taking aim at claims in the energy secretary's letter, the coalition wrote:

Asking the commission to proceed "expeditiously" with any further action on the project and misstating the project's relation to "national security" while providing no evidence undermines the administration's commitment to advancing environmental justice. An economy tied to fossil fuels during a climate crisis is unpredictable and makes us vulnerable to foreign governments and the greed of corporate CEOs. This country's energy independence can only come from a swift and just renewable energy transition. This will help protect us from foreign supply chain disruptions and conflicts, as well as deliver lower costs to consumers. The MVP will not assist our allies in Europe, and nor is it needed in the Southeast as you claim. No matter where MVP's gas is intended to be delivered, sacrificing communities to free up gas to export overseas for corporate profit is not "national security." Building this project prolongs fracked gas buildout, accelerates LNG infrastructure buildout and export, and sacrifices communities, all of which are counter to the just future we deserve.

Your letter contains open appeals for dangerous distractions that will prop up the fossil fuel industry for decades to come. The dangerous distractions of carbon capture and hydrogen propagate the untrue belief that we can continue wholesale destruction of the earth, continue creating sacrifice zones, release millions of tons of greenhouse gasses from fossil fuel projects, and continue massive corporate capture of regulatory agencies while embarking on a just transition off of fossil fuels. Instead, you should be supporting environmental justice as the bedrock of every new policy and piece of infrastructure, advocating for climate reparations, and aggressively promoting distributed, decentralized renewable energy and energy democracy.

"Your letter states that MVP is part of the clean energy transition. In reality, MVP would exacerbate the very climate crisis that is causing an increasing number of extreme weather events," the organizations continued, referencing expert estimates that its "lifecycle would be comparable to the operation of 26 to 37 new coal-fired power plants."

"We request that you immediately rescind your letter of support for the project," the coalition concluded, "and that you meet with directly impacted communities as soon as possible who live on the route of the project, so you can gain an increased understanding of the destruction and danger that you are promoting."

The groups' letter comes as U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.)—whose personal fortune and political campaigns are tied to fossil fuels—renews his push for a "dirty deal" on energy permitting reforms, despite three defeats last year. On Tuesday he introduced the Building American Energy Security Act, which calls for the completion of the MVP.

In a backroom deal with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) last summer, Manchin agreed to vote for the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) if Democrats—who then controlled both chambers of Congress—subquently pushed through his permitting measure. Progressive lawmakers and grassroots opposition have so far blocked such efforts, but the House is now narrowly held by Republicans willing to serve Big Oil, and Manchin expressed confidence this week that he can advance a bipartisan bill.

Despite Manchin's recent votes to gut some of Biden's climate and environmental policies, the White House is backing his bill. "We supported it last year, we'll support it this year," John Podesta, who directs IRA implementation for the president, toldReutersTuesday. "It's a high priority for us to try to find a path forward on bipartisan, permanent reform."

Meanwhile, "dirty deal" critics remain committed to killing it. According to Chisholm, "Sen. Manchin is desperate to complete the Mountain Valley Pipeline through federal shortcuts that circumvent normal regulatory and judicial processes because he knows our movement is growing stronger every day and we will stop the unnecessary, unwanted climate nightmare that is the MVP."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

Climate advocates on Monday denounced the "hypocrisy" of the Biden administration, which doubled down on the White House's push for the completion of the Mountain Valley Pipeline late last week, just as President Joe Biden was pledging a renewed commitment to environmental justice.

U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm sent a letter to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) on Friday, reiterating the administration's support for the 303-mile natural gas pipeline stretching across West Virginia and Virginia. The $6.6 billion project by Equitrans Midstream Corporation was first proposed in 2015 and approved by FERC in 2017, but a number of legal challenges have kept it from being completed.

The energy secretary wrote to the four FERC commissioners that while the panel has already "completed its regulatory authorizations for the MVP project," the White House requests that "if there is any further commission-related action on this project, it proceeds expeditiously."

"Natural gas—and the infrastructure, such as MVP, that supports its delivery and use—can play an important role as part of the clean energy transition," added Granholm. "As extreme weather events continue to strain the U.S. energy system, adequate pipeline and transmission capacity is critical to maintaining energy reliability, availability, and security."

"Secretary Granholm's letter is an environmental justice disgrace that arrived hand-in-hand with Biden's environmental justice executive order."

While Granholm presented the quick completion of the project as part of the solution to "extreme weather events" that scientists have linked to the climate crisis, advocates across the Appalachian region and the U.S. have for years warned that the MVP will only contribute to the climate emergency as it would likely cause leakage of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that can trap about 87 times more heat than carbon dioxide in its first two decades in the atmosphere.

The companies behind the pipeline construction have also committed "at least 46 narrative water quality standards violations," Bloomberg Law reported earlier this month, and have violated its construction permit at least 139 times in two years.

The local grassroots group Appalachian Voices has warned that in addition to exacerbating the climate emergency through methane emissions, the MVP would endanger nearby communities, as the "steep, unstable slopes" it's being built on make it susceptible to landslides and pipe ruptures.

"Explosions happened on two separate pipelines in similar terrain in 2018," said the group, adding, "The MVP would disproportionately impact low-income communities, elderly residents, and Indigenous sites."

Granholm sent the letter to FERC on the same day that Biden signed an executive order at the White House pledging to coordinate "the implementation of environmental justice policy across the federal government." He also opened the Office of Environmental Justice, tasked with ensuring the government recognizes and mitigates the disproportionate impacts that pollution and the climate emergency have on low-income communities, Indigenous tribes, and people of color.

The irony of Granholm's timing was not lost on environmental justice advocates, who had reacted to Friday's announcement with cautious optimism.

"The Biden administration is showing its two faces... and it's a bad look," Grace Tuttle, advocacy director of the Protect Our Water, Heritage, Rights Coalition said on Monday. "Secretary Granholm's letter is an environmental justice disgrace that arrived hand-in-hand with Biden's environmental justice executive order. This letter to FERC reinforces the myth that the MVP would bolster national security and snubs frontline communities calling for a just transition off of fossil fuels."

"Biden got his job by campaigning on climate but the bulk of his actions show a shocking failure to safeguard the future of the American people," Tuttle added.

Granholm's letter came weeks after the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously struck down a key water permit for the project, saying the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection's justification for issuing the permit was "deficient." The ruling is expected to delay the project's completion by at least a year.

Despite this finding, Granholm wrote on Friday that "while the [U.S. Department of Energy] takes no position regarding the outstanding agency actions required under federal or state law related to the construction of the MVP project, nor on any pending litigation, we submit the view that the MVP project will enhance the nation's critical infrastructure for energy and national security."

The White House has joined right-wing Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and the Republican Party in pushing for the completion of the MVP, despite the project's clean water violations and other threats to public health and safety.

Despite Biden's executive action on Friday, said Oil Change International, "if the Biden administration was listening to environmental justice communities and climate science, this project would already be dead."

"There is nothing natural about the fracked gas that would be transported through the Mountain Valley Pipeline, locking us and our communities into decades of reliance on risky fossil fuels," said Patrick Grenter, director of the Sierra Club's Beyond Dirty Fuels campaign. "What we should be focusing on is transitioning into clean sustainable energy that would maintain energy reliability and security."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

A U.S. appellate court panel on Monday unanimously struck down a key water permit for the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a nearly completed fracked gas project long opposed by people living along the over-300-mile route through Virginia and West Virginia.

Three judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit vacated a Clean Water Act certification from the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (WVDEP), without which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers cannot allow ongoing MVP construction at stream and wetland crossings.

"The certification reflected the department's conclusion that MVP's activities during the pipeline's construction would not violate the state's water quality standards," the panel said. "Disagreeing with that determination, landowners and members of various environmental organizations in the state have petitioned for this court's review of the department's certification. We find the department's justifications for its conclusions deficient and vacate the certification."

"West Virginia communities have endured Mountain Valley Pipeline's damage to their water resources and environment for far too long."

The MVP gained national attention last year because of efforts by U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) to force the completion of the pipeline as part of his thrice-defeated "dirty deal" on permitting reforms. House Republicans, who recently passed their own fossil fuel-friendly energy package, are also now pushing for legislation to finish the project.

While Manchin said Monday that "it is infuriating to see the same 4th Circuit Court panel deal yet another setback for the Mountain Valley Pipeline project and once again side with activists who seem hell-bent on killing any fossil energy that will make our country energy independent and secure," MVP opponents praised the decision.

"Today's ruling uplifts the tireless efforts of every single coalition member and volunteer fighting to protect land, water, and people," said Russell Chisholm, managing director for the Protect Our Water, Heritage, Rights (POWHR) Coalition. "MVP should abandon their ill-fated project because we will defend every stream and river crossing that can still be saved from permanent harm."

Several campaigners stressed that damage has already been done during the construction of the incomplete pipeline.

"MVP has already gone too far in damaging West Virginia's water resources, particularly in some of our most valuable mountain headwater systems. WVDEP clearly cannot make a good conscience argument that MVP will not further violate water quality standards," said West Virginia Rivers Coalition executive director Angie Rosser.

Similarly charging that "West Virginia communities have endured Mountain Valley Pipeline's damage to their water resources and environment for far too long," Jessica Sims, Virginia field coordinator for Appalachian Voices, agreed that "this ruinous project must be canceled."

Along with violating water standards, this "disastrous" project "is already more than three years behind schedule, and billions over budget," noted Sierra Club's Patrick Grente. "With continuous legal setbacks, it has never been more clear that investors should stop throwing money at this doomed project and walk away."

Bloombergreported that the ruling likely thwarts plans to put MVP into service in 2023 and delays the project by at least a year.

"People need investment in clean, fossil fuel-free, nonextractive energy—not the MVP—and developers should cancel the project," said Crystal Cavalier-Keck, co-founder of 7 Directions of Service, who was far from alone in pointing to the broader climate argument against continuing the pipeline, or any fossil fuel project, given scientists' warnings.

Chesapeake Climate Action Network general counsel Anne Havemann declared that "we're in a climate crisis and need to stop digging the hole deeper."

"It's time to move away from polluting fracked gas infrastructure projects such as MVP that harm our rivers and streams, rip through private property, and contribute to climate change," Havemann said, "and move towards clean, renewable energy."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

West Virginia and Kentucky on Wednesday joined the growing list of U.S. states where Republicans have banned gender-affirming healthcare for minors, denying them access to evidence-based treatments that advocates say have saved the lives of countless transgender youth.

Republican West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice signed legislation outlawing the prescription of hormone therapy and fully reversible puberty blockers to anyone under age 18. Minors are also now prohibited from undergoing gender-affirming surgeries, even though doctors say no such operations are performed in the state. The law contains an exception for minors who are deemed at risk of suicide or other self-harm, diagnosed with severe gender dysphoria by two doctors, and have parental consent.

According to UCLA's Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Law and Public Policy, West Virginia is the state with the highest per capita number of transgender youth in the country, by far.

"We are denying families, their physicians, and their therapists the right to make medically informed decisions for their families."

Following the lead of Tennessee—which recently banned public drag shows—Republican state lawmakers in West Virginia have also recently introduced a pair of bills ostensibly aimed at "protecting minors from exposure to indecent displays," in part by defining "obscene matter" as "included but not limited to transvestite and/or transgender exposure in performances or displays to minors."

One of the bills punishes violators with a year in prison; the other imposes a six-month sentence.

Meanwhile, Republican state lawmakers used their supermajority in both chambers of the Legislature to override Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear's veto of legislation described by Louisville Courier Journal reporter Olivia Krauth as "one of the nation's most extreme anti-trans bills."

Hundreds of LGBTQ+ youths and their allies rallied outside the Kentucky state Capitol, and 19 activists were arrested inside the building and charged with criminal trespassing after refusing orders to leave, the Courier Journal reported.

Hazel Hardesty, a transgender teen who spoke at the rally, said that without gender-affirming care, "my male puberty would continue" and "cause a lot of mental distress."

"People don't even understand how it feels," the 16-year-old said. "Going through the wrong puberty, every day your body is a little bit farther from what feels like you. And eventually, you don't even recognize yourself in the mirror."

Another trans teen, June Wagner, told the crowd that "my own government is working against me."

As Krauth noted, the Kentucky bill:

• Bans all gender-affirming medical care for trans youths;
• Requires doctors to de-transition minors in their care if they're using any of the restricted treatment options;
• Prohibits conversations around sexual orientation or gender identity in school for students of all grades;
• Requires school districts to forbid trans students from using the bathroom tied to their gender identities;
• Allows teachers to refuse to use the pronouns a student identifies with.

"We are denying families, their physicians, and their therapists the right to make medically informed decisions for their families," Kentucky state Sen. Karen Berg (D-26) said on the chamber's floor prior to the vote.

"To say this is a bill protecting children is completely disingenuous, and to call this a 'parents' rights' bill is an absolutely despicable affront to me, personally," Berg added, recounting how her transgender son killed himself in December. She also linked anti-trans legislation to violent attacks on transgender people.

The ACLU of Kentucky's new executive director, Amber Duke, called the veto override "another shameful attack on LGBTQ youth."

"Trans Kentuckians, medical and mental health professionals, and accredited professional associations pleaded with lawmakers to listen to the experts, not harmful rhetoric based in fear and hate," Duke continued. "Their pleas fell on deaf ears."

"To all the trans youth who may be affected by this legislation: We stand by you, and we will not stop fighting. You are cherished. You are loved. You belong," she added. "To the commonwealth: We will see you in court."

Trans youth can still obtain gender-affirming care in Kentucky, as the law won't take effect for 90 days.

The American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics are among the many medical groups supporting gender-affirming care for minors. A study published last year by the University of Washington found that youth who received such healthcare were 73% less likely to experience suicidality and 60% less likely to suffer from depression than minors who did not get care.

Yet GOP-led state legislatures in 2023 have already introduced more than 100 bills aimed at banning or severely limiting gender-affirming healthcare for minors, according to the ACLU.

As The Associated Press notes:

At least 11 states have now enacted laws restricting or banning gender-affirming care for minors: Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee, Utah, South Dakota, and West Virginia. Federal judges have blocked enforcement of laws in Alabama and Arkansas, and nearly two dozen states are considering bills this year to restrict or ban care.

Earlier this month, the Idaho House of Representatives passed a bill that would make providing gender-affirming care to transgender youths a felony, punishable by life imprisonment. The legislation also contains a provision making it a crime for parents or guardians to allow their children to travel out of the state for treatment.

According to the Williams Institute, more than 144,000 U.S. transgender youth lost or remain at risk of losing access to gender-affirming care due to bans.

Belying Republican claims that healthcare bans are for the protection of children, GOP-led states have also moved to ban or limit gender-affirming care for adults.

Speaking after the Kentucky veto override, Chris Hartman from the advocacy group Fairness Campaign said in a statement that "while we lost the battle in the legislature, our defeat is temporary."

"We will not lose in court," Hartman added. "And we are winning in so many other ways."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

As congressional Democrats launch new clean energy and environmental justice efforts, House Republicans outraged climate campaigners and frontline communities on Thursday with a move to fast-track a long-delayed fracked gas pipeline.

Congresswoman Carol Miller (R-W.Va.), backed by 10 other Republicans, introduced an amendment to the GOP-led Lower Energy Costs Act (H.R. 1) to ensure that the controversial Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) is "constructed expeditiously."

Russell Chisholm, managing director of the Protect Our Water, Heritage, Rights (POWHR) Coalition, highlighted that Miller's fresh push for the MVP came just a day after Democrats introduced the A. Donald McEachin Environmental Justice for All Act.

"As they watch the demise of the fossil fuel industry that lines their pockets, they are desperate to fast-track this unnecessary and disastrous pipeline."

"Hours after our environmental justice movement released a positive vision for a livable future, the Environmental Justice for All Act, these Republicans are throwing a tantrum," Chisholm said in a statement Thursday. "As they watch the demise of the fossil fuel industry that lines their pockets, they are desperate to fast-track this unnecessary and disastrous pipeline—to the point that they want to strip away judicial review and nullify bedrock environmental law."

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released Monday "makes clear that we must stop all new fossil fuel expansion immediately," he continued. "We demand our representatives to silence this ridiculous whining while our regulatory agencies and courts assess the science and evidence that mandates the MVP be stopped."

Jason Crazy Bear Keck, co-founder of 7 Directions of Service, said, "The fact that some of our elected representatives have been bending over backwards to fast track the MVP, a poster child pipeline for corruption and environmental injustices, is appalling to us as impacted community members, water protectors, and land defenders."

"Only a short-sighted, greed-driven person who stands to profit would go to such great lengths to attempt to revive a failing zombie project like the MVP," he asserted. "Time and time again the people have risen up against the backroom deals and slimy maneuverings at the federal level to push MVP through, and we will keep standing up until our basic rights and protections, like those granted by the EJ for All Act, are secured and upheld."

While residents living along the over 300 miles of pipeline route through Virginia and West Virginia have long fought against MVP, the project got national attention last year as Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) tried to force a "dirty deal" on permit reforms.

Though Manchin's proposals were thrice defeated, the right-wing Democrat and MVP supporter signaled in February that he would continue to work with the new House GOP majority to try to advance a fossil fuel-friendly measure.

E&E Newsreported Wednesday that "other politicians hailing from the mid-Atlantic are eager to see the pipeline operate. But Republicans have previously opposed the idea of singling out one project for special congressional treatment. And they might not want to hand Manchin a win at a time when the moderate Democrat mulls running for reelection."

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) last week introduced the Lower Energy Costs Act—which, while unlikely to make it through the divided Senate and reach President Joe Biden's desk, is intended to wipe out the administration's climate agenda.

As E&E detailed:

Republicans say the proposal, which will be debated and voted on next week, would allow the United States to produce more oil, gas, solar, and wind in a manner that is more environmentally sound than anywhere else on the planet.

The bill, the work of three committees, would require the federal government to hold quarterly oil lease sales in Western states. It would speed up environmental permitting that GOP lawmakers complain drags on years longer than it should. The package would also allow for more hardrock mining in mineral-rich states like Minnesota and Idaho.

Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Tuesday sent supporters of the GOP bill a clear message from the floor of the upper chamber: "You can do all the hoopla you want in the House, it ain't passing."

The IPCC this week put out "their most dire warnings to date: Unless the world swiftly transitions to clean energy and curbs emissions, our planet risks crossing a point of no return sometime in the next decade," Schumer said. "What awaits us on the other side could be severe and irreversible: droughts, storms, crop failures at a level we can scarcely imagine today."

"House Republicans seem to think the best solution for our energy needs is not to help America transition to clean energy... Unfortunately, they think doubling down on more giveaways to Big Oil is the way to go," he added. "Democrats want to see a bipartisan, commonsense energy proposal come together in Congress, but Republicans' H.R. 1 proposal is dead on arrival in the Senate."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

After Amazon on Friday confirmed plans to pause construction on its second headquarters near Washington, D.C., Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez expressed vindication over her 2018 opposition to the tech giant's initial plan to build part of HQ2 in New York City.

Following political leaders across the country engaging in what critics called "corporate bribery," offering Amazon tax breaks and other incentives to build in their communities, the company chose to split the project between Arlington, Virginia, and the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens. However, Amazon halted plans for the NYC campus in response to local backlash.

Among the opponents was Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who said in a series of tweets Friday, "In the end, we were right."

Slate politics writer Alexander Sammon on Friday expressed hope that Ocasio-Cortez, New York State Senate Deputy Leader Michael Gianaris (D-12), "and the small handful of Democratic politicians who had enough courage to stick their necks out and oppose this bullshit in 2018 take a nice, long victory lap today."

"This was not at all a safe position when they took it," Sammon said. "And it was thankless one—as is often the case, the consequences for the marks and corporate bootlickers who embraced [former CEO Jeff] Bezos and Amazon will be nonexistent."

In response to reporting by Bloomberg, which broke Friday's news, Gianaris tweeted that "maybe a multibillion-dollar subsidy for the biggest corporation in the world to build an office was a really bad idea after all."

Gianaris added in a statement that "Amazon's announcement shows once again that paying off a historically wealthy corporation with massive subsidies to make a single office siting decision is bad policy. It also demands we take a different approach to the use of public dollars that does not rely on providing scarce resources to those who actually need them least while continuing to shortchange the services that would actually help people's lives improve."

Amazon has nearly finished phase one of HQ2 construction, a pair of office towers, and plans to move employees into that development, Metropolitan Park, in June. However, phase two—PenPlace, set to be built across the street with three towers, a corporate conference center, and other features such as a garden—is now on hold indefinitely.

"We're always evaluating space plans to make sure they fit our business needs and to create a great experience for employees," John Schoettler, who leads Amazon's global real estate portfolio, told Bloomberg. "And since Met Park will have space to accommodate more than 14,000 employees, we've decided to shift the groundbreaking of PenPlace out a bit."

The move comes amid Amazon's biggest-ever wave of job cuts, impacting 18,000 people globally, and after CEO Andy Jassy last month announced the company would require most employees to return to the office at least three days per week come May.

"Our second headquarters has always been a multiyear project, and we remain committed to Arlington, Virginia, and the greater capital region—which includes investing in affordable housing, funding computer science education in schools across the region, and supporting dozens of local nonprofits," Schoettler added. "We appreciate the support of all our partners and neighbors, and look forward to continuing to work together in the years ahead."

Congressman Don Beyer (D-Va.) on Friday said that Amazon staff made similar assurances to him directly. He urged the Seattle-based company to "promptly update leaders and stakeholders about any new major changes in this project, which remains very important to the capital region."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

Activists with the Poor People's Campaign and relatives of some of the 13 inmates who died at West Virginia's Southern Regional Jail last year held a press conference Thursday to implore the Biden administration to investigate conditions at the notorious lockup, as well as the deaths of more than 100 prisoners in the state during the last 10 years.

"We're doing this on behalf of the 13 people who have died senselessly, we believe, at the Southern Regional Jail... and on behalf of over 100 more who have died within West Virginia regional jails over the last decade," Bishop William J. Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, said at the online conference.

Speaking to Common Dreams by phone after the press conference, Barber said that "we need a full, independent investigation by the Justice Department. We're talking about basic civil rights and human dignity. Give us the truth. Give us justice."

"We need a full, independent investigation by the Justice Department. We're talking about basic civil rights and human dignity. Give us the truth. Give us justice."

"There are too many unanswered questions here," he added. "We're talking about people dying in jail."

In one case, a man jailed at Southern Regional Jail (SRJ) for littering and missing a court date died 81 days after his arrest. In another, a woman died after she was brutally beaten and literally torn apart by inmates looking for drugs in her private parts.

Latasha Williams, whose 37-year-old fiancée Quantez Burks died a day after he was locked up at SRJ for alleged wanton endangerment and obstruction, said she only found out her partner was dead when she called to inquire about posting bond the day after his arrest.

"The magistrate said, 'I hate to tell you this, but he passed away last night at 9:00 pm,'" Williams recounted. "I threw the phone and started crying... and I [said] they lying, it's somebody else, 'cause I just talked to him."

After state officials said the cause of Burks' death was "natural," his loved ones raised $5,000 for an independent autopsy by Pittsburgh forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht, a former president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences.

"We just felt like there was probably some foul play in it, and that's really what made us decide to get that second autopsy," Burks explained.

"Findings were consistent with being handcuffed while being beaten," she said. "Both of his wrists were broken. He had an arm broken, nose broken, and a leg bone broken. He also had blunt force trauma to his whole body, including his head. He also had a heart attack, which they said was probably caused by the stress his body was put into."

Reacting to Burks' remarks, Barber asserted that "poverty or a prison sentence should not be a death sentence."

"We need an independent federal investigation. We need it now. We need the Justice Department to come in and meet with these families."

"Countless low-income West Virginians of all races... have died under the watch of the state prison and jail system," he continued. "We need an independent federal investigation. We need it now. We need the Justice Department to come in and meet with these families."

"The mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and family members of those who have died at the hands of our jail system in West Virginia need and deserve answers," Barber added. "We cannot allow our elected leaders to continue to ignore what is unfolding right in front of them."

Barber urged U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Republican Gov. Jim Justice to support an independent federal probe into the "dangerous, inhumane, and unconstitutional conditions in the Southern Regional Jail."

"You don't have video. You don't have body cameras," said Barber. "But you have real lives and real families and tremendous pain and death and people going in for... minor offenses and then family members finding out, sometimes in less than 24 hours, sometimes less than 24 days, that a loved one is dead, dead, dead. And all kinds of questions have gone unanswered."

While the U.S. Department of Homeland Security last year conducted an investigation of conditions at SRJ, critics including attorneys for inmates at the jail called the probe a "sham."

Barber told Common Dreams that "only a full federal investigation, with the DOJ and its power of the federal purse strings," would be sufficient to "give us the truth" and answer the questions of those whose loved ones died at SRJ.

"Systems that investigate themselves are not as thorough, and are prone to cover-ups," he added.

Thursday's press conference came as current and former prisoners filed a new class-action lawsuit this week over conditions at SRJ. The suit alleges that inmates are denied access to drinking water, that they face dangerous overcrowding, mold, human sewage, toilet water, rats, sexual assault, and other violence.

According toWVNS journalist Jessica Farrish, who has reported extensively on the jail:

The suit states that up to 16 mentally ill people are forced inside of an alleged "suicide cell" that measures 120 square feet, and that prison and medical staff allegedly leave them in the cell for days. Attorneys also say jail staff allegedly destroys legal mail sent to inmates, opens inmates' legal mail when they are not present, and photocopies legal mail sent to inmates.

A previous class-action lawsuit filed last year alleges abuse and mistreatment at SRJ.

"Hearing these stories, my heart is breaking," said Rev. Dr. Liz Theoris, co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign. "This drive to criminalize the poor is immoral and poverty and incarceration... should not be a death sentence."

"Enough is enough. This has to stop," she added. "We are calling... on our elected officials and on the DOJ to make a difference. We are calling on Sen. Manchin and Gov. Justice to hear the cries of the families seeking answers and to do what's right."

A state investigation into conditions at SRJ that concluded inmates were lying about abuse was widely dismissed as grossly inadequate.

As an October 2022 editorial in the Register-Herald, a Beckley, West Virginia-based paper, noted:

The state report on conditions at SRJ was produced lickety-split, in about 30 days, by West Virginia Homeland Security Secretary Jeff Sandy, who cooked the books to deny any problems whatsoever at the facility. A high school term paper would have been more revealing—and more credible. Sandy once served as chair of the Regional Jail Board from 2012 to 2016 and now serves in the governor's cabinet.

Yes, the governor directed an insider to conduct a fair and impartial investigation. Even a blind man could see that was never going to happen. As such, the problems at SRJ persist because they have not been meaningfully addressed—and inmates are dying because of it.

Kat Robles, an attorney at the advocacy group Forward Justice, specifically called on the U.S. Justice Department's Civil Rights Division to launch an investigation under the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act, which empowers the DOJ to probe abuse and neglect in prisons and jails, mental health facilities, and other institutions.

"This is an urgent crisis. This is an outrage," said Robles, who added that what's needed is "not just an investigation."

"We want them to meet with community leaders, to meet with families, and to remedy this urgent crisis," she said.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

On Wednesday, January 25, officers of Venezuela’s investigative police unit detained El Nacional news editor José Gregorio Meza and human resources manager Virginia Nuñez, according to news reports and Miguel Enrique Otero, the president and editor of El Nacional, who spoke to CPJ via messaging app.

Officers brought them to the attorney general’s office in Caracas, where they were questioned about a recent article and released.

Authorities also sent citations to appear at the attorney general’s office to Otero and El Nacional reporters Carola Briceño, Hilda Lugo, and Ramón Hernández, all of whom are based outside of the country and do not plan to comply with the summonses, Otero said.

“Venezuelan authorities’ latest attempt to intimidate journalists at El Nacional by threatening them with criminal investigations is completely unacceptable,” said Carlos Martínez de la Serna, CPJ’s program director, in New York. “Authorities must drop their criminal investigations into the two editors, three reporters, and the human resources manager of the outlet, and allow them to practice journalism freely.”

The citation sent to Otero, dated January 17 and which CPJ reviewed, said he was to be formally charged but did not specify what crime he was alleged to have committed. Otero added that the other journalists were cited the same day.

Otero told CPJ that authorities have threatened Briceño and Hernández’s relatives in Venezuela in retaliation for their journalism.

Police questioned Meza and Nuñez about an article alleging that President Nicolás Maduro’s son, Nicolás Maduro Guerra, who is also a politician, was connected to two Venezuelans sanctioned in 2020 by the U.S. Treasury Department for their alleged involvement in illegal gold mining.

CPJ’s calls and text messages to the attorney general’s office and President Maduro’s press office were not answered. CPJ could not find contact information for the president’s son.

The criminal investigation is the latest move by Venezuela’s authoritarian government against El Nacional, founded 80 years ago in Caracas, which used to be one of the country’s largest-circulation and most influential newspapers. However, a newsprint shortage and government harassment, including fines, defamation lawsuits, and the seizure of its building and printing presses in 2021, forced El Nacional to become a web-only news operation with many journalists and editors living in exile.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

A journalist at West Virginia Public Broadcasting, the state's public television and radio news network, was fired from her position after reporting on abuses taking place at state-run psychiatric facilities—reporting that allegedly sparked threats from state health officials and pressure on the network to change its coverage of the state government.

Amelia Knisely published a report on November 3 about abuses suffered by people with disabilities at William R. Sharpe, Jr. Hospital and other facilities run by the state Department of Health and Human Resources (DHHR), and a call by state Senate President Craig Blair, a Republican, for GOP Gov. Jim Justice's administration to investigate the hospital.

Allegations detailed in the reporting included that facility staff attempted to cover up their responsibility when a woman at the hospital died after being fed "an improper diet," that residents at a group home for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) were left without working plumbing for months, and that a man with IDD died "after three staff responsible for his care refused to provide CPR."

On December 6, Knisely told the Parkersburg News and Sentinel Wednesday, the station's news director informed her that she "could no longer write about DHHR" and that the order came "from WVPB executive director Butch Antolini," who days after her report had received a letter from DHHR Secretary Bill Crouch.

Crouch had demanded a retraction of the story, and as Knisely told the News and Sentinel, a DHHR spokesperson "contacted WVPB leadership and threatened to discredit WVPB if I continued reporting on the health department."

"It is crucial for the press to hold government agencies accountable," Knisely told the newspaper. "It must be emphasized that these events followed my reporting on the mistreatment of people with disabilities, who are in state care."

Knisely was told she should no longer report on DHHR on the same day that the state legislature's Joint Committee on Health held a meeting with Disability Rights of West Virginia (DRWV) regarding issues at Sharpe Hospital and other DHHR facilities.

The reporter filed a human resources complaint on December 15, and according to the News and Sentinel, WVPB officials interfered in the process of Knisely obtaining press credentials to cover to state legislature that same day, with Eddie Isom, the station's chief operating officer and director of programming, writing to communications officials at the legislature and copying Antolini, but leaving news director Eric Douglas—Knisely's supervisor—out of the communication.

"[Isom's email] came later this afternoon, and I noticed you're conspicuously absent from it, and, well, that's just not OK with me," wrote Jacque Bland, communications director for the state Senate. "You're the news director, and you are the person who is in charge of your newsroom, period, and it feels kind of gross and shady to me that someone else would dip in and say that one of your reporters won't have any assignments related to the session."

Other journalists pointed out that Knisely has reported extensively on vulnerable populations in West Virginia and elsewhere, including people with disabilities and children in the foster care system.

"It really sucks the vulnerable people Amelia Knisely was trying to help with her reporting likely won't get that help because WVPB didn't have her back," said Lauren Dake, a reporter for Oregon Public Broadcasting.

The threats DHHR allegedly lodged at the station following Knisely's reporting, and her firing, are the latest evidence that "a free and open press is not just something that's at risk overseas, but here at home, too," said Talley Sergent, a public affairs official at the U.S. State Department.

"A free press doesn't have to be fair and balanced as corporate marketing gurus make you believe," tweeted Sergent. "It MUST be accurate. When a reporter reports a story that shines a light on government wrongdoing, mismanagement, and criminal behavior, that's not a sign to twist arms and fire the reporter. It's a sign that someone in the government needs to be held accountable and the issue must be addressed and resolved."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

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Nobody working to bring a $346 million Microsoft project to rural Virginia expected to find graves in the woods. But in a cluster of yucca plants and cedar that needed to be cleared, surveyors happened upon a cemetery. The largest of the stones bore the name Stephen Moseley, “died December 3, 1930,” in a layer of cracking plaster. Another stone, in near perfect condition and engraved with a branch on the top, belonged to Stephen’s toddler son, Fred, who died in 1906.

“This is not as bad as it sounds,” an engineering consultant wrote in March 2014 to Microsoft and to an official in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, who was helping clear hurdles for the project — an expansion of a massive data center. “We should be able to relocate these graves.”

Mecklenburg County, along with Microsoft and a pair of consulting firms, immediately began a campaign to downplay the cemetery’s significance. Their most urgent task was to make sure the cemetery wouldn’t be deemed eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, the federal government’s list of sites worthy of protection. That designation would likely trigger an archaeological investigation overseen by the state and could force the developers to steer clear of the graves. Without such a designation, the graveyard could be moved with relative ease.

After the discovery of the cemetery, the county and its consultants turned to archaeologists, which federal law required they retain. But that didn’t go as they hoped. In a detailed report, the archaeologists determined that the cemetery “is eligible for inclusion” on the historic registry. The report stressed the cemetery’s significance to African American life and death in Southside Virginia, citing the fact that Stephen Moseley and his relatives were Black. “It is recommended that the area be avoided,” the report said.

To the county and its consultants, whose costs Microsoft covered, this was unacceptable. “We will challenge his recommendation,” wrote Alexis Jones, a consultant with a firm called Enviro-Utilities.

The firm and the county pressed the archaeologists to reverse their conclusion that the cemetery belongs on the National Register. And they asked the team to cast doubt on the central finding that made the cemetery historically significant: that all the people buried there — members of a community of landowners who farmed tobacco in the wake of the Civil War and Reconstruction — were Black.

The archaeologists would only comply with the latter request. They edited their report to say, “It cannot be ruled out that the burials are associated with white tenant farmers.” But when they sent Jones and her boss the revised report, they acknowledged that the new assertion was dubious: “All the evidence available at this stage suggests” the cemetery was the final resting place of an African American community, they wrote.

Asked about the addition of the white tenant farmer claim, one of the archaeologists, David Dutton, told ProPublica: “We hadn’t exhumed any bodies. We hadn’t done any DNA. We hadn’t done any analysis. So could we say 100%? I mean, look, this is archaeology, you don’t know until you actually know.”

Jones and her colleagues still wanted the eligibility for the historic registry designation nixed, so they sent the report to another archaeologist, seeking a second opinion. But the archaeologist didn’t go along, and in fact he rejected the notion that some of the people buried there might be white. “Jim Crow would not have had whites and blacks buried that closely together,” he wrote.

He suggested that the original firm conduct additional historical research. “More work needs to be done on Moseley family members to identify who’s in the graves,” he wrote in an email to Jones’ boss, who forwarded it to the county.

The county and its consultants ignored the advice.

What the county had to do, because Virginia law requires it, was run a legal notice tucked among the ads and classifieds in several weekly print editions of The Mecklenburg Sun. Even that, Jones had warned in an email to Microsoft and the county, would “risk” the “chance of a local family member coming forward.”

The second week the notice ran, in November of 2014, the paper published a front-page story about a controversy over new helmets for the high school football team following the death of a player from blunt force trauma. It appeared under the byline Mike Moseley. Moseley is a staff writer. He is also Stephen Moseley’s great-grandson.

“The Moseleys have been here a long time,” Mike Moseley said of his family’s roots in that part of Virginia.

When asked if he’d seen the notice in the pages of his own newspaper, he responded: “Do you read the classifieds and the ads? I do not.”

Mike Moseley would not have been hard to locate, had the county actually tried to find Stephen Moseley’s descendants. The tall, lanky 60-year-old went to high school in Mecklenburg County and played basketball on the school team. After high school, he moved away for a time — he wasn’t interested in following his father into the funeral home business — but he returned to Mecklenburg more than two decades ago. Since then, he’s worked a series of jobs at local papers, including at the Sun, where he is still a reporter.

“Everyone who works for the county knows me,” he said. “They know who we are. It’s hard to understand how they didn’t come talk to us.”

Mecklenburg County did not reply to detailed questions about the handling of the cemetery and the contents of the emails, which were obtained through state open records requests. But in a phone interview, County Administrator Wayne Carter said that the newspaper notice was sufficient to comply with the law. He added that he asked some people who hunted on the land if they’d noticed anyone visiting the cemetery. “They had not seen anyone down there,” Carter said.

Jones, the consultant, declined to answer questions, referring them to Microsoft. Enviro-Utilities did not respond to emailed questions and multiple calls and text messages. In response to questions, a Microsoft spokesperson said, “the County followed all applicable federal, state and local laws.”

Like his nephew, David Moseley heard nothing from the county about the threat to the cemetery. The soft-spoken retired schoolteacher and administrator, who is now 85, grew up on the land adjacent to where Microsoft was building its data center and currently lives outside of Lynchburg, Virginia. “Yes,” he said, when asked in August about his relatives’ resting place, “there’s a cemetery there.” He did not at first believe that the remains of his grandfather, Stephen Moseley, were somewhere else. “Somebody would have called me if they moved the cemetery,” he said.

In the months after the notice that ran in The Mecklenburg Sun, workers kept finding graves, ultimately 37 of them. Some of the plots were marked with pieces of quartz or with yucca plants, which were used by many Southern Black families who could not afford stones. Each burial site added days to the excavation, to the frustration of the county and its consultants. A crew dug up each of the graves, collecting bones, casket fragments, metal handles and hinges, etched epitaph plaques, a pair of eyeglasses, an ivory comb. The remains and other items were packed in plastic crates and stored in an office. Months later, all of it was reburied in four tightly packed, $500 cemetery plots one town to the north.

David Moseley’s grandparents, Stephen and Lucy Moseley, and great-grandparents, James and Ellen Walker, in 1899 purchased 169 acres in a fertile region near the North Carolina border. His father, Douglas Moseley, inherited the Moseley homestead, and as a teenager, David woke in the early mornings to work with an uncle harvesting their tobacco crop. As far back as David knew, his ancestors had been buried on that land. In one of his earliest memories, from when he was about 4, he joined his parents in the graveyard to bury his stillborn sibling. “I remember being out there and the open grave,” he said.

David, along with his last living sister, Christine Moseley, and their children, nieces and nephews, still own the eastern 83 acres of the property, which they call “the farm.” The family sold the adjacent tract, which Microsoft now owns, generations ago; David said his family entered a handshake agreement with the white people who bought the other half of the property that allowed the Moseleys to continue to visit the graves. Today, the farm is surrounded on nearly every side by land zoned for industrial use, including three of the 17 parcels that Microsoft has acquired in Mecklenburg County for the ongoing expansion of its data center there. Every so often, David Moseley or his niece who lives outside Washington, D.C., gets an offer to buy their remaining land. Sometimes the correspondence is signed by Wayne Carter, the county administrator who oversaw the permitting process for the Microsoft data center.

“If they can find us to buy the land,” David said, as he sat at his dining room table, beside a stack of papers about the family property, “why couldn’t they find us for the cemetery?”

The cemetery’s disappearance proceeded despite layers of federal and state regulations nominally intended to protect places like it and to facilitate consultation with people who might have an interest in what happens to historic sites.

But in Virginia, as in most of the country, the power over what ultimately happens to these sites often belongs to whoever owns the land. And the labor of investigating what could make the site historic is often outsourced to for-profit archaeological firms working for property owners who have a financial stake in finding as little as possible.

“We are among the only developed countries in the world that considers archaeological sites on private property to be private property themselves rather than cultural heritage,” said Fred McGhee, Ph.D., an African American archaeologist in an overwhelmingly white field.

“Black historic places are some of the first to get maligned,” he said.

African American cemeteries that are deemed abandoned or untended have routinely been treated as little more than a nuisance in the path to development. Historic preservation laws and regulations rarely protect them.

On the campus of the University of Georgia, builders discovered a cemetery of enslaved people, and in 2017 the remains were reportedly loaded onto a moving truck and reburied “in secret,” according to a faculty review. In Texas in 2018, the graveyard of dozens of men held as convict laborers, a site whose significance was long known to community members, was found by construction workers, and the remains were exhumed. In each case, the developers have said they treated the burials with dignity.

Earlier this year, an agricultural company called Greenfield LLC applied for a federal permit to build a Statue of Liberty-sized grain transfer facility on 248 acres along the Mississippi River in Louisiana. An archaeological firm had initially concluded that the development put several notable Black historic sites, including a restored plantation that serves as a memorial to enslaved people, in harm’s way. But in May, ProPublica revealed that the firm changed its report to back away from that conclusion after facing pressure from its client. The firm told ProPublica at the time that no one had forced it to make the revisions and that the report itself was a draft, noting that drafts often change “after clients review them.”

Without first consulting the communities that live beside the development site and trace their ancestry to the people enslaved on the same land, the Army Corps of Engineers, the agency considering the permit, allowed Greenfield to drive enormous metal beams into a sugar cane field — even before the Corps signed off on the project. That field, researchers and community members say, likely holds unmarked graves of people who were held as slaves. Greenfield has said that it considers the protection of historic sites a priority and that it would stop construction if any such sites were discovered.

For decades, the Army Corps has been criticized by other federal agencies, advocates and community and tribal organizations for failing to engage with affected groups about potential damage to cultural sites, as the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act requires.

“The way this is supposed to work is that the Army Corps, or whatever federal agency is issuing a permit, should have told the developers that the descendant community needs to be identified and interviewed and that their perspectives need to be taken into account,” said J.W. Joseph, an archaeologist with New South Associates, a cultural resources firm in Georgia that has done archaeological work in dozens of cemeteries, often as part of projects regulated by the federal law. “Far too often, that doesn’t really happen.”

In Mecklenburg County, before Microsoft took possession of the land — for free, with significant tax breaks, along with state development dollars earmarked for struggling tobacco farming regions — the Army Corps raised no concerns about the development’s compliance with the Preservation Act. Nor did the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, the agency tasked with enforcing state and federal preservation laws, make any effort to step in and protect the site. (The department said it has never denied a landowner application for a reburial permit and preservation experts said Virginia judges almost never do either.)

The Army Corps and the Department of Historic Resources facilitated the cemetery’s legal erasure. The graves were dug up in near silence.

“Although the Department’s position is that those laid to rest should be left undisturbed,” a Department of Historic Resources spokesperson said, “we also understand that this is not always possible.”

Once they had permission from the state Department of Historic Resources to excavate the remains, Microsoft, Mecklenburg County and its consultants showed little concern for anything other than speed and cost. It was a rainy spring in 2015, and the ground was soaked. The graves that an excavation crew dug open would sometimes fill with water. According to one crew member, Eric Mai, who had recently started a master’s program in archaeology, the already-fragile remains were further degraded — exposed, sometimes for days, to the wet muck.

Everyone knew it was the wrong time for the work. “The conditions on site are about as bad as they can be for exhumation,” Jones, the consultant, wrote to Microsoft and the county, explaining why the dig was taking longer than expected. “It’s a nasty sticky wet clay,” she said of the soil that had primed the land decades ago for prolific tobacco yields. But Jones pressed the gas. “THEY need [to] find additional help and work 7 days a week until it is done.”

The “remains were saturated and in very poor condition,” according to a report by the firm hired to do the excavation, Circa-Cultural Resource Management LLC. The Department of Historic Resources agreed with Circa that there wasn’t enough physical matter left to justify sending the bones to the Radford University forensic anthropologist they’d planned to hire to study markers of age, race and sex. It “would probably not add any new information to the record,” a Circa report said.

“WAYNE, this is a GOOD thing!” Jones, the consultant, wrote to Carter, the county administrator. “This would be a huge money and time savings for us.” (This year, Jones took a job with Microsoft, as an environmental permitting program manager, according to her LinkedIn profile.)

Mai said in an interview that he worried that in the rush to dig up the Moseley cemetery, the Circa team may have missed important artifacts and grave offerings. “I think it would probably be concerning for descendants to learn that the people out there doing the work, me included, did not really know what we were looking at,” said Mai. “Nobody on the team knew anything about African American burials.”

Circa CEO Carol Tyrer wrote in response to questions that the team members did have “knowledge of African American cemeteries and burial practices.” Tyrer referred other questions about the Moseley cemetery excavation to Microsoft.

In part because of his ethical concerns, Mai left the field of for-profit archaeological and historic survey work. “There is a disrespect in this process,” Mai said recently. “The people, the descendants, are not really part of what we do.”

Had the county or any of its consultants made more of an effort to determine who they were digging up, they might have learned from public death certificates and census records that in one of the graves lay the remains of Ellen Walker and likely her husband, James Walker, the parents of Lucy Walker, who married Stephen Moseley, a preacher’s son from one county away. They might also have found living relatives like Mary Taylor, who is now 83 and is one of Stephen and Lucy Moseley’s many great-grandchildren. She lives in Norfolk and keeps a worn folder full of records showing that one of her mother’s brothers was buried in the Moseley cemetery. They might have come upon the records of other cousins and aunts and uncles by marriage, who formed their own branches of the family tree, whose descendants still own other plots of land in Mecklenburg County, and who appear to have been laid to rest there, too.

In the final weeks of the dig, Microsoft began pushing harder, flying a drone over the Circa workers to monitor their progress. “There will be no hiding place!” a Microsoft project manager wrote in an email as crews prepared to cut down the trees still standing in a ring around the cemetery.

Once the dig was complete, the Army Corps told Mecklenburg County that it had met its obligations under federal law. Construction crews leveled the ground where the cemetery had been. Ownership of the land was transferred from the county to Microsoft.

In response to questions, the Corps wrote that it had consulted with the Department of Historic Resources and with Mecklenburg County before issuing the permit. A spokesperson also stated that the Corps had posted a notice on its own website around the same time the county ran its notice in the Sun “soliciting comments on the project.” Nobody responded.

Aerial photos of Mecklenburg County going back to the 1990s show rows of evergreen trees that wind across both of the old Moseley plots like the whorls and arches of a thumbprint. Then, in a 2016 satellite image of the terrain, the contours of trees and their center point have disappeared. A row of rectangles, the backfilled graves, appear in the tan earth. By 2020, an aerial view shows only an undeveloped dirt patch on the far eastern edge of the Microsoft site, just over the line from the land the Moseleys still own.

“Because the cemetery has been relocated from its original location,” the final archaeological record on file with the state said, “it is no longer eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places.”

In 2019, four years after the Moseley cemetery was dug up, Mecklenburg County began building a sorely needed new middle and high school. On the uncleared land, surveyors discovered a cluster of headstones inscribed with the last name Tunstall, a white family with a long history in the region. The graves would need to be moved for construction to proceed as planned, and the school board put a notice in the newspaper, like the one that had been placed about the Moseley cemetery. But in this case, the relocation was also discussed in open school board meetings. A construction firm that worked on the project trumpeted its effort to help find relatives.

A Mecklenburg County sheriff’s deputy named Dustyne Lett saw the news of the cemetery on Facebook. She is a descendant of the Tunstalls.

“By us being involved, we could have a say about where they would be moved,” Lett said recently.

A county judge issued an order giving the school board permission to disinter the remains. They were reburied in a family cemetery several towns away.

“Family members need to be buried with family members,” Lett said. “It’s not like they get together to have dinner. But for us living people, we want to have one spot where we can visit them, talk to them.”

David and Mike Moseley do not imagine that they would have won a fight against Microsoft or the county to keep the cemetery where it was, though they would have wanted the chance to wage one. They also were denied the chance to decide where their ancestors would be reburied.

“We would have wanted them to be moved here, where the rest of the family is,” David Moseley told me when we met in the Jerusalem Temple United Holy Church Cemetery, where the Moseleys have buried their relatives since the 1960s, after they moved off the farm. David’s sister Dorothy Tolbert, who passed away in New Jersey in May, is buried there, not far from Lucy Moseley’s grave — a grave that had been publicly logged online three years before the Microsoft project. “That would have been respectful, that would have allowed them to be together,” David said. In 1967, when Lucy Moseley died at the age of 96, relatives figured moving her husband’s grave to the Jerusalem Temple cemetery would have been too expensive. They would let their ancestors rest in peace.

At least, David Moseley said, Microsoft or the county could have placed a sign or historical marker on the land where the cemetery had been, noting the names of everyone who’d been buried in the old graveyard.

State and local officials have actively worked to honor and preserve white cemeteries in Mecklenburg County. In a 2003 book about the successful effort to have several historic town centers listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the view from a white cemetery is described as “bucolic.” That view has been protected by a Virginia historic preservation easement. Another cemetery, with only three visible stones, is noted for its impressive gateposts, which are inscribed with the words “Love Makes Memorial Eternal” and which were donated in 1941 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

In August, I met David and Mike Moseley to look for their relatives’ reburied graves in a cemetery in Chase City, 15 minutes north of the Microsoft data center. The final excavation report had said there would be a marker placed “indicating how many remains, where they were removed from, date, and known family names.”

We drove slowly through the cemetery, looking for a sign. We did not find one. Over lunch at a local restaurant, we called the Chase City municipal office. A clerk told us that she thought she knew what we were talking about; in the new section of the town cemetery, past the mausoleum, we’d find “the graves the county sent.”

“There are no names. It just says ‘assorted bones,’” she said, reading off a paper on file in the town office. She gave us directions, listing the names on several other stones in the vicinity of the reburial plots.

Past the mausoleum, we spotted a grave with one of those names and stopped the car. David peered out the window. “I know that stone,” he said quietly. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen it.”

Stephen Moseley’s gravestone had been set in the ground. Six feet to the right stood the stone of his toddler son, Fred D. Moseley. There is nothing noting the existence of any other remains, just an unmarked stretch of grass.

David and Mike Moseley placed their hands on the top of Stephen’s gravestone. “I would not have known where he was buried,” Mike Moseley said, repeatedly, and then sat down in front of the stone, his hand still resting on the top, and cried. Being here with them now, he said, “this connects us.”

Mollie Simon contributed research.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Seth Freed Wessler.

A gunman opened fire inside a Chesapeake, Virginia Walmart late Tuesday, killing at least six people and wounding others in the latest mass shooting in the United States, which has seen more than 600 this year alone.

Reuters reported that local police "have so far not provided any details about the suspected shooter, but several media outlets have identified him as a manager at the store." The shooter was found dead at the scene.

"The police were not clear whether the shooter died of self-inflicted injuries," Reuters added. "They believed that the shooting happened inside the store, but said that one body was found outside."

State Sen. L. Louise Lucas, the Democratic president pro tempore of the Virginia Senate, tweeted that she is "absolutely heartbroken that America's latest mass shooting took place in a Walmart in my district in Chesapeake, Virginia tonight."

"I will not rest until we find the solutions to end this gun violence epidemic in our country that has taken so many lives," Lucas wrote.

U.S. Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) said he is "sickened by reports of yet another mass shooting, this time at a Walmart in Chesapeake."

The Virginia shooting comes days after a gunman killed five people at an LGBTQ+ nightclub in Colorado Springs. The suspect is facing murder and hate crime charges.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

A gunman opened fire inside a Chesapeake, Virginia Walmart late Tuesday, killing at least six people and wounding others in the latest mass shooting in the United States, which has seen more than 600 this year alone.

Reuters reported that local police "have so far not provided any details about the suspected shooter, but several media outlets have identified him as a manager at the store." The shooter was found dead at the scene.

"The police were not clear whether the shooter died of self-inflicted injuries," Reuters added. "They believed that the shooting happened inside the store, but said that one body was found outside."

State Sen. L. Louise Lucas, the Democratic president pro tempore of the Virginia Senate, tweeted that she is "absolutely heartbroken that America's latest mass shooting took place in a Walmart in my district in Chesapeake, Virginia tonight."

"I will not rest until we find the solutions to end this gun violence epidemic in our country that has taken so many lives," Lucas wrote.

U.S. Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) said he is "sickened by reports of yet another mass shooting, this time at a Walmart in Chesapeake."

The Virginia shooting comes days after a gunman killed five people at an LGBTQ+ nightclub in Colorado Springs. The suspect is facing murder and hate crime charges.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

When four and a half feet of water engulfed the town of Fleming-Neon, Kentucky, in July, fire chief Carter Bevins found himself in an unfamiliar position.

“We were helpless,” he said. 

The volunteer firehouse, which sits on a small road directly in front of Wright Fork creek, was surrounded by a chest-high wall of water. The phone rang again and again, with residents begging for help. But Bevins and his team couldn’t open the door. All the firefighters could suggest to panicked residents was that they get as high as they could.

“We try to take any situation and neutralize it, make it for the better. How you gonna do that when you can’t even get out of your own building?” Bevins asked.

Fleming-Neon wasn’t the only community to find itself in this position: With vast portions of eastern Kentucky still reeling from the July flooding that ruined thousands of buildings, displaced hundreds and killed 39 people, elected officials are focusing on  disaster response. The same is true right across the border in West Virginia, where catastrophic flooding has become a regular occurrence for people in communities from McDowell to Kanawha. 

But for years, officials have ignored their own, completed plans for how to prevent these kinds of disasters from happening in the first place. West Virginia has had a comprehensive flood mitigation plan on the books since 2004, though officials have taken little concrete action to implement it. And in Kentucky, extensive regional plans spell out how communities could decrease the potential for flood damage.

In these cases, planning and taking action haven’t gone hand-in-hand.

The topography and residential patterns of eastern Kentucky and West Virginia naturally lend themselves to flooding. In these mountainous areas, where most people live on narrow strips of land next to creeks and surrounded by mountains, water runs down the mountains and overflows small tributaries.

But the past decades of logging and coal mining have made these flooding events worse, by stripping surface areas of their ability to absorb the water. And as the climate changes, major flooding events will happen even more frequently. 

Climate change makes the region more prone to sudden, intense storms that drop a lot of rain, as an increase in atmospheric temperature increases the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, making precipitation, and in particular flooding, more likely. 

Marshall University professor and State Climatologist Kevin Law says he’s seen an increase in precipitation in West Virginia and much of the region since he began his role in 2008. 

Part of a state climatologist’s job is to use this data to predict future climate trends.

But Law says that global warming is also making floods like the recent one in eastern Kentucky harder to pinpoint in advance. Due to temperature-driven changes in the jet stream, which steers storms, there have been more “training” events in the region: where very narrow yet intense storms line up like cars on a railroad track and follow each other. 

These storms are so narrow that it’s difficult for climatologists to accurately predict where they’re going to turn up until they actually happen, as if they were tornadoes, Law says. 

“You can kind of get an idea if it’s going to happen in Kentucky, but precisely where you just don’t know until you start to see that line up on the radar, and then you can put out the warning but oftentimes then it can be too late,” he said.

The increased frequency and severity of storms means that Kentuckians and West Virginians are facing more potential damage on a regular basis. That makes infrastructure projects like dams and floodwalls, as well as levees, updates to buildings, and emergency notification systems all the more important. 

West Virginia is very familiar with the type of planning required to protect residents from the worst impacts of floods. In 2004, a 20-agency task force produced a 365-page Statewide Flood Protection Plan, the result of generous federal and state contributions and four years of work. The plan was loaded with actionable suggestions on floodplain and wastewater management, ordinance enforcement, better flood warning systems, improved building codes, and a tougher approach to resource extraction. Yet it was never implemented by any of the state agencies that would have had jurisdiction over parts of the plan.

Here, the effects of this more frequent flooding were most recently obvious in 2016, when a catastrophic flood damaged or destroyed thousands of homes and businesses, and killed 23 people.

Weeks later, the Charleston Gazette-Mail reported how the state had taken no action on the earlier plan. The following year, the state Legislature established a joint Flood Committee and a State Resiliency Office, designed to orchestrate statewide responses to disasters and create a new flood mitigation plan that drew from the work done on the first one.

Five years after the committee and the state office were created to update the state’s mitigation plans, there is nothing in place.

“There’s not, unfortunately, a lot of instant gratification associated with mitigating flood risk,” said Mathew Sanders, the senior manager of flood-prepared communities for The Pew Charitable Trusts. Pew is currently working with the Resiliency Office to develop a new plan. He said that the more frequent and severe flood events that states like West Virginia are seeing mean that nobody is prepared to take flooding on properly.

State officials say they’re working on necessary updates to the 2004 plan, to account for modern technology. State Resiliency Office Director Robert Martin said one example is stream gauges: Today’s technology can last longer than those from twenty years ago and run on solar energy. Martin told legislators earlier this year that some of the old plan is obsolete and he has spent most of his time in the office since 2020 reviewing it.

The Resiliency Office, Pew and others held a symposium in May to talk about some of those necessary updates. 

Senator Chandler Swope, a republican from Mercer and co-chairman of the Joint Flooding Committee, said that symposium was a critical turning point. According to a blog post from Pew, the final day of the two-day event included reviewing the 2004 plan and deciding what elements should make it into an updated version: the same thing Martin says he’s been doing for the last two years. 

Even after all that work: “It’s a really fuzzy assignment,” Swope said when asked about the concrete steps the committee plans to take to make the plan a reality post-symposium. He said in the past funding has been an issue, though he said he’s arguing the Legislature should change its definition of “infrastructure” to include flood mitigation technology, so they can take advantage of federal funding. Then there’s also the challenge of working across so many different state and federal agencies. 

“I have no idea: It could be several years, I’d be surprised if it doesn’t take several years before you have a refined and completed plan,” Swope said.

But Delegate Caleb Hanna, R-Nicholas, who also sits on the committee, said the responsibility to implement flood mitigation plans doesn’t just lie with lawmakers. 

“While the Legislature can take some actions related to this, we are not the state’s panacea,” he said. Hanna noted that the Department of Environmental Protection has a cabinet secretary who is part of Gov. Jim Justice’s administration, which will ultimately be in charge of implementing mitigation recommendations.

In the meantime, as state officials debate what needs to change and who is responsible, more floods have devastated communities across the state. McDowell, Braxton, and Mingo counties, and most recently Kanawha, Greenbrier, and Fayette counties, are among the places overwhelmed with damage in the past couple of months. Residents were trapped, bridges were washed out, and property was swept away. 

Even if they didn’t run on solar, stream gauges might have been able to help.

Across the border in Kentucky, state officials also haven’t made much progress on mitigation, but for an entirely different reason. Kentucky delegates disaster mitigation planning to municipalities, which in theory allows communities to tailor their plans to their specific needs. In practice, most municipalities in turn delegate disaster planning to regional Area Development Districts.

While West Virginia continues to study what it already studied on mitigation, some best practice insights in Kentucky don’t get through to decision-makers at all. 

Bill Haneberg, state geologist and director of the Kentucky Geological Survey, said the state is lacking any kind of coordinated effort. 

“There are people in state government in our Division of Water, for example, who do work on flooding, but there’s no really highly concentrated intense statewide effort. And that is something that’s missing,” Haneberg said.

And without that statewide approach, many local officials say they’re in the dark about what the regional districts say needs to be done to prevent future flooding. 

“This is just the truth in Appalachia right here…we have never followed the rules in Appalachia,” said Letcher County Surveyor Richard Hall. He’s been in local government for 30 years and ensures structures built within the floodplain comply with local codes in his current role. But he had no knowledge of the county’s flood mitigation plan. Neither did the county’s flood coordinator nor the 911 director. 

Calls to dozens of emergency management officials for cities and counties in eastern Kentucky hit by the most recent flood revealed that most did not know what their local flood mitigation plan was, or that their Area Development District was the entity that had made it.

Michelle Allen, executive director of the Kentucky River Area Development District, said that once the plan is created, the district communicates regularly with local officials about progress and implementation. She also noted that the day before the flood devastated eastern Kentucky, the district had hired a regional disaster coordinator to in part assist municipalities with follow-up.

But ultimately, the municipalities themselves are responsible for implementing any flood mitigation efforts: a process that’s more difficult if they don’t know that a plan exists.

Nearly five years after the Kentucky River Area Development District made its five-year plan recommending two action items for the town of Fleming-Neon, officials hadn’t made any progress on one of them: moving City Hall out of the flood plain. Mayor Susan Polis said she didn’t recall it being something they planned to do. She and others noted, however, that the most recent flood was so massive that there was likely little that mitigation could have done to prevent the damage.

And now, in both Kentucky and West Virginia, officials have found themselves in an endless cycle of emergency response that takes priority over long-term planning. In West Virginia, the Legislature’s Joint Flood Committee will be spending their next meeting addressing the state’s most recent floods.

In response to a question about whether the committee would compel agencies to testify about a timetable for plan implementation, Delegate Hanna said that wasn’t imminent. 

“Figuring out what the state can do to aid and assist those affected is the top priority now,” Hanna said.

And in Fleming-Neon, the mayor  says they’re taking it one day at a time since the flood swallowed nearly every building in her town. 

“I haven’t had time to think about nothing more than taking care of my people getting water into their homes and that’s what we’ve done for — how many days? Today’s number 25, 24,” Polis said in August.

Ohio Valley ReSource reporter Katie Myers contributed to this story.

Correction: This story was updated on Sept. 12, 2022, to correctly identify Mathew Sanders, the senior manager of flood-prepared communities for The Pew Charitable Trusts.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline West Virginia, Kentucky officials ignored plans for catastrophic floods on Oct 10, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Alexa Beyer, Mountain State Spotlight.

Thousands of high school students walked out of classrooms across Virginia on Tuesday to protest a plan by Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin that critics say aims to repress transgender youth amid growing nationwide GOP-led attacks on LGBTQ+ rights.

"These policies are NOT about privacy, dignity, or respect. They are rooted in transphobia and seek to further harm trans and nonbinary kids."

Chanting "trans rights are human rights," "DOE, let us be," and other slogans, students at scores of schools took part in demonstrations calling for the rejection of model Virginia Department of Education policies proposed earlier this month by Youngkin that, if approved, would force schools to categorize pupils according to scientifically dubious notions of "biological sex."

The proposed changes would reverse existing trans-affirming guidelines that some students have credited with saving their lives. In what some opponents have called another attempt to erase trans people, the proposal limits the definition of "transgender student" to someone "whose parent has requested in writing, due to their child's persistent and sincere belief that his or her gender differs with his or her sex, that their child be so identified while at school."

"We're walking out today to make it clear to @GovernorVA that students can't learn if we're worried about abuse, harassment, depression, and our rights," the advocacy group Pride Liberation Project, which organized the walkouts, said on Twitter. "All we want is to be able to learn in an inclusive school that [lets] us thrive like every other student."

Pride Liberation Project organizer Nat Sanghvi told Teen Vogue that "as a minority student... I've found that schools can be some of the most safe places for people like me, and my initial reaction was just sheer shock" when she learned about Youngkin's proposal.

"It's harming students," the 17-year-old said of the model policies. "It's a clear attack at LGBTQI+ students across the state of Virginia. And if this does get [approved], it will impact every single student in Virginia."

Others expressed solidarity with the protesting students, with one parent tweeting, "Virginia is for lovers, not for haters," a riff on the commonwealth's longtime tourism and travel slogan.

The abortion rights group REPRO Rising Virginia tweeted that Tuesday's walkout "once again proves the collective power that young people have. They are a VITAL part of our movement and should be treated as such!"

Josh Throneburg, a self-described "Christian progressive" running as a Democrat to represent Virginia's 5th U.S. Congressional District, blasted "Youngkin's cruel and regressive policies targeting trans youth."

"It is shameful to pin your political hopes on your willingness to harm an already marginalized group of kids," he tweeted.

Although entitled 2022 Model Policies on the Privacy, Dignity, and Respect for All Students and Parents in Virginia's Public Schools, critics say the proposed changes are meant to prevent the commonwealth's roughly 4,000 transgender students from participating on sports teams or using restrooms, locker rooms, and other facilities that match their gender identity.

Under the proposal, any student name changes—including nicknames and even pronouns—must be approved by parents, while educators may refuse to call students by their preferred names if it violates their beliefs.

The model policies also suggest parents should be informed of a student's gender identity—even if the pupil does not consent—raising fears among some trans youth that they could be outed.

When asked in a recent interview what he would say to trans youth whose families who do not accept their gender identity, Youngkin replied, "I would say, trust your parents."

However, according to the latest survey conducted by the Trevor Project, an advocacy group, close to half of all LGBTQ+ youth considered ending their own lives, while 1 in 5 trans youth tried to kill themselves.

Legal experts say Youngkin's policies likely violate federal and state laws. In an interview last week with The Washington Post, employment and civil rights attorney Joshua Erlich said that the governor "is trying to pick a political fight by attacking trans students, but his model policies are in conflict with recent court rulings," which have determined that "discrimination against transgender individuals is illegal discrimination on the basis of sex."

In Bostock v. Clayton County, for example, conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, wrote for the majority that it is "clear" that the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits employer discrimination against  LGBTQ+ people.

In another decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit ruled that a transgender boy could use the boys' restrooms in his school—a case the Supreme Court declined to hear on appeal. 

University of Richmond School of Law professor Jack Preis told the Post that teachers might not even be aware of a student's "biological sex"—a term the directive does not define—due to ambiguous names or clothing.

"Privacy rights are going to prevent many teachers from even knowing whether or not they are teaching a trans student," said Preis, who also noted that the policies don't address intersex or nonbinary children. The latter may have U.S. passports or Virginia driver's licenses showing their gender identity.

Youngkin's model policies won't take effect until after a 30-day public comment period that began on Monday. As of early Tuesday afternoon, more than 20,000 public comments—most of them opposing the proposal—had been submitted.

Some school districts reached out to students and parents ahead of Tuesday's walkouts. WTOP reports Loudon County parents received an email assuring them that their public school is a "safe place for students to exercise their freedom of expression."

"Students who choose to demonstrate will not be penalized," the email added.

Tuesday's protests occurred as legislatures and governors in Republican-controlled states have in recent years passed or proposed dozens of laws eliminating or limiting the rights of LGBTQ+—and especially transgender—youth, including restroom and sports bans.

In Texas, GOP Gov. Greg Abbott stoked fear, outrage, and resistance earlier this year when he ordered state officials to investigate gender-affirming healthcare as possible "child abuse."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

West Virginia on Friday became the second state in the U.S. to pass an abortion ban into law following the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade, one day after Indiana's new ban went into effect.

Republican Gov. Jim Justice abruptly announced at a press conference that he had privately signed House Bill 302, which passed in the legislature earlier this week.

"Is it 'logical' to make patients wait until they're on the brink of death to get a lifesaving abortion?"

"It is absolutely done," Justice told reporters.

The bill will go into effect immediately, and the state's only abortion clinic, Women's Health Center of West Virginia in Charleson, started canceling dozens of abortion care appointments earlier this week following the passage of H.B. 302.

The law bans abortions at any stage of pregnancy and is written to permit abortion care in cases of a fetus that is not medically viable, an ectopic pregnancy, or a medical emergency—exceptions that Justice said qualified as "reasonable and logical."

Recent cases in Texas and Louisiana have demonstrated that in practice, such exceptions can result in hospitals and doctors waiting until a pregnant person's life is in danger before providing care, or forcing them to carry a nonviable pregnancy for weeks.

"Is it 'logical' to make patients wait until they're on the brink of death to get a lifesaving abortion?" asked Alexis McGill Johnson, president of Planned Parenthood Action Fund.

The law also imposes restrictions on people whose pregnancies are the result of rape or incest. Adult survivors cannot obtain abortion care after eight weeks of pregnancy and must report their assault to the police, while minors have until 14 weeks of pregnancy and must either file a police report or be treated for their assault in a hospital—or else they will be forced to continue the pregnancy.

"Most people don't come forward to law enforcement to report rape and incest because, frankly, victims are not believed," Katie Quiñonez, executive director of the Women's Health Center of West Virginia, told West Virginia Metro News. "The reporting process is incredibly traumatic, and most people don't want to be re-traumatized after they have just experienced assault."

Planned Parenthood of South Atlantic West Virginia warned that the ban will be "deadly" for West Virginians and condemned Justice for unexpectedly announcing that residents no longer have access to care after signing the bill behind closed doors.

"Banning abortion behind closed doors, days after a nationwide abortion ban was introduced equals being scared of your constituents," said Planned Parenthood Action Fund.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Julia Conley.

Anti-choice Republicans continued their crusade against reproductive freedom on Tuesday by sending a near-total ban on abortion to the desk of GOP West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, who is expected to sign House Bill 302.

"Our state lawmakers have shamefully forced this despicable bill down our throats, behind closed doors in a matter of hours."

While the governor called lawmakers to Charleston in July for his proposal to cut West Virginia's personal income tax by 10%, "he added consideration of the state's abortion laws moments after the session got underway," noted WVNews.

The bill, which passed the state Senate and House of Delegates by huge margins, "bars abortion from implantation with narrow exceptions to save the pregnant person's life or in cases of rape or incest so long as the victim reports the crime," reported The Washington Post. "The exceptions for victims of rape or incest limit the procedure to before eight weeks of pregnancy, or 14 weeks for minor victims."

"Doctors who violate the law may lose their medical licenses, but will not face criminal penalties. Anyone other than a licensed physician with hospital admitting privileges who performs an abortion faces felony charges and up to five years in prison," the newspaper continued, added that patients who receive abortions don't face any penalties.

According to Mountain State Spotlight: "The bill also limits where abortions can be provided, restricting them to medical facilities licensed by the state Office of Health Facility Licensure and Certification. That would end abortions at the state's only elective abortion provider, the Women's Health Center of West Virginia in Charleston."

H.B. 302 comes in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade and was passed on the same day that U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) proposed a 15-week nationwide abortion ban, framing his legislation as a reason voters should support Republicans in the midterms that are now just eight weeks away.

Speaking to pro-choice activists after the votes, House Delegate Danielle Walker (D-51) said that abortion rights supporters are going to "strategize" and "mobilize." Pointing to the November elections, she said that "we're gonna stroll to the polls with confidence, knowing that democracy will exist in West Virginia."

"We won't go back!" Walker added on Twitter. "We will see y'all at the polls! Mountaineers, it's time to fight for freedom. It's time to be uncomfortable! It's time to break silence! Register everyone to vote! Educate! Engage! Support candidate debates! Stroll to the polls!"

Campaigners opposed to the West Virginia measure and other GOP attacks on reproductive rights vowed to keep fighting—and urged state residents to pressure Justice to veto the rapidly passed bill.

"There is nothing more extreme than a law that strips people of the freedom to govern their own bodies, and our state lawmakers have shamefully forced this despicable bill down our throats, behind closed doors in a matter of hours," said Alisa Clements, director of public affairs for Planned Parenthood South Atlantic.

"This cruel ban insults West Virginia doctors, endangering their patients' lives while subjecting them to appalling government surveillance, and threatens to put other medical providers in prison simply for providing healthcare," she declared. "To add salt to the wound, this bill will prevent many survivors of sexual assault from being able to obtain an abortion by subjecting them to mandatory and onerous reporting requirements to law enforcement."

Clements warned that "abortion bans are deadly, and people will be denied lifesaving care as a result of this government-mandated trauma."

Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, similarly called out the state's legislators for "shamefully" passing "an unpopular abortion ban that will have dangerous consequences."

"Just hours after congressional Republicans introduced a national abortion ban, West Virginia lawmakers subverted the democratic process to ram through this extreme bill, and no amount of narrow exceptions make it any less cruel or harmful," she said.

Research published in late June, just after the Roe reversal and as trigger bans began to take effect, found that outlawing abortion nationwide would increase maternal mortality in the United States by 24%.

West Virginia's new ban, said McGill Johnson, "puts out-of-touch politicians who don't even understand pregnancy in charge of people's personal medical decisions."

"We cannot and will not stand by as they manipulate the legislative process to vote away their constituents' fundamental rights and plunge us deeper into a nationwide public health crisis," she stressed. "West Virginians deserve better."

If Justice signs H.B. 302, West Virginia will be the second state to enact a post-Roe ban, after Indiana last month. West Virginia was among the states with a pre-Roe ban, but a judge blocked that 19th-century law in July, meaning abortion has been legal until 20 weeks of pregnancy.

West Virginia is the home state of the key barrier to passing pro-abortion rights legislation at the federal level. U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) not only opposes abolishing the filibuster but also has twice joined with Republicans this year to block a House-approved bill that world codify Roe nationwide.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

As in other states and territories, privately-operated charter schools in West Virginia will be riddled with corruption and will undermine public schools and the public interest. These “innovative” and “flexible” “schools of choice” will funnel millions of public dollars from public schools into private hands, foster more segregation, dodge accountability, thwart unions, increase competition, intensify a consumerist approach to education, and lower the quality of teaching. More West Virginia families will be subjected to a fend-for-yourself ethos when it comes to securing an education for their children, which is bound to happen when education is commodified and treated as a business.

Further, in a major departure from long-standing public school arrangements in the U.S., practically any private person will be able to start a deregulated charter school in West Virginia. In addition, while privately-operated charter schools are ostensibly tuition-free and open to all, “attending one [in West Virginia] may be challenging for students who don’t have transportation or internet access (for virtual charter schools).” This is on top of the fact that privately-operated charter schools are notorious for selective enrollment practices despite being called “public” schools. It is important to remember that privatized education has never paved the way for education for all. Private by definition means exclusive, not inclusive.

The people of West Virginia can expect anarchy and chaos to increase in the sphere of education very soon. The dismantling of public education through privatization is a major violation of the right to education and will do nothing to advance the educational needs of all. Charter schools mainly enrich a handful of major owners of capital and create redundancies in the sphere of education. More privatization means more retrogression.

For a searchable archive of thousands of news articles exposing a broad range of crimes and corruption in the crisis-prone charter school sector, see here.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Shawgi Tell.

President Joe Biden on Friday faced calls to respond forcefully to Sen. Joe Manchin's latest climate obstruction by canceling a fracked gas pipeline in the right-wing Democrat's home state of West Virginia, a move that would prevent around 90 million metric tons of new greenhouse gas emissions from being spewed into the atmosphere each year.

"West Virginians would be better served by pursuing clean energy projects than climate-polluting pipelines."

Manchin, a close ally of the fossil fuel industry and a coal profiteer in his own right, has been a vocal proponent of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a project that—if completed—would carry gas along a 300-mile course spanning from northwestern West Virginia to southern Virginia.

In an April statement, Manchin called the pipeline "a strategically important project" and pushed the administration to ensure its "full approval."

Dana Nuccitelli, research coordinator for the Citizens' Climate Lobby, tweeted Thursday that the Biden administration should instead "immediately terminate the Mountain Valley Pipeline and curtail offshore drilling," something Manchin also favors.

The demand came after Manchin—who has received more campaign donations from the oil and gas industry than any other member of Congress this election cycle—reportedly informed Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) during a closed-door meeting Thursday that he would not support any renewable energy spending or tax increases targeting the wealthy.

The West Virginia Democrat, an essential swing vote who has been dragging out and sabotaging negotiations for more than a year, claimed Friday that he wants to wait until after July inflation figures are released next month to decide whether to back legislation that includes new climate funding.

"Manchin has proven once again that he doesn't care about the planetary destruction that will cause immeasurable death."

In a statement to Common Dreams, Nuccitelli said that "with the Supreme Court having limited EPA's ability to regulate climate pollutants and Sen. Manchin having prevented the current session of Congress from passing meaningful climate legislation, there are few remaining pathways for the Biden administration to come close to meeting America's 2030 Paris commitment."

"As Sen. Whitehouse put it, 'it's now time for executive Beast Mode' on climate," said Nuccitelli. "That includes curtailing new fossil fuel projects like the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which would not only create adverse local environmental impacts, including to the Appalachian Trail, but would lock in decades of additional climate pollution, including in the form of methane leakage. West Virginians would be better served by pursuing clean energy projects than climate-polluting pipelines."

The multibillion-dollar Mountain Valley project has been bogged down in regulatory and court battles for years as advocates and Indigenous groups warn it would endanger key waterways and forest land.

Oil Change International and Bold Alliance estimated in a 2017 analysis that the completed pipeline would produce 89,526,651 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions annually, the equivalent of 26 coal plants or 19 million passenger vehicles.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has nevertheless granted permission for construction of the pipeline to move forward even as it awaits key government authorizations. Mountain Valley Pipeline, LLC recently asked FERC for a four-year permit extension to complete the fracked gas project.

Earlier this week, The Washington Post reported that the Biden administration was exploring a potential arrangement under which federal officials would grant approval to the Mountain Valley pipeline and other fossil fuel projects in exchange for Manchin's support for limited renewable energy investments.

Climate advocates were highly critical of such a trade-off, warning it would ultimately harm the planet. After Thursday's meeting between Manchin and Schumer, environmentalists said Biden should shift his focus to what he can do unilaterally to slash carbon emissions and stave off climate catastrophe.

"It is time for President Biden to declare a national climate emergency and deploy his executive powers to dawn the renewable and just energy future," Jean Su, director of the Energy Justice Program at the Center for Biological Diversity, told Common Dreams in an email.

"The Biden administration has shown the promise of bold executive action through the president's recent use of the Defense Production Act to galvanize domestic solar power manufacturing," Su noted. "There is a vast menu of powers he has to enact bold climate action, like banning crude oil exports, stopping fossil fuel extraction, and leveraging federal programs to speedily deploy renewable, affordable, and resilient energy systems."

Ashley Thomson, senior climate campaigner at Greenpeace USA, stressed that given the intensifying impacts of the climate emergency in the present, the Biden administration doesn't have time to cater to Manchin's preferred schedule.

"Manchin has proven once again that he doesn't care about the planetary destruction that will cause immeasurable death. When the floods come, I hope they carry away his yacht first," said Thomson. "President Biden has no more excuses. He must start using his executive powers to full effect if we're going to make any progress in preventing the worst climate disasters in our country."

"Right now he's letting Big Oil-funded politicians kill the planet when he has the power to get us on track," Thomson added. "We cannot continue to wait around for a bunch of corporate shills in Congress to do nothing while people are dying."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

Walk leads the way past his parents’ house, a shaggy behemoth of a dog barking gruffly in the yard. (“He’s half wolf,” he explains. “My sister’s ex-boyfriend paid thousands of dollars for him.”) On through a grove of trees, branches still bare in early spring, thick with bramble bushes. The air is damp with light rain spitting from a sudden cloud, but grainy in a way that you can feel in the back of your throat. From the muddy riverbank you can see an enormous chute protruding from one of the mountainsides that frames the valley, black coal pouring out of it to be carted off by a constant parade of trucks. Clouds of taupe dust billow off the trucks as they pull in and out of the mine entrance, and swirl in eddies over the ragged asphalt.

Not much more than the length of a city block stretches between the coal chute and the Walks’ front door. Coal has been mined in the valley for the past two hundred-odd years — and the Walks and their kin have been here almost as long. But the Black Eagle mine is new, having opened in 2018, and a stream of anthracite, dust, and rock pours out of the mountain and more or less directly onto the front doorstep. Walk’s grandfather already has black lung from years spent working in another mine up the road; his mother Shelia wakes up and wipes a layer of silica dust that collects on the kitchen counters overnight, even with every window shut. Natasha’s baby was born premature.

Walk is 32 years old and has been fighting against coal companies in the valley his entire adult life. There was a time when he was traveling around to every state in the lower 48 (by his own count) to speak on behalf of Coal River Mountain Watch, the tiny grassroots organization where he works. He would go to summits and conferences and university halls and talk about mountaintop removal mining and contaminated creeks and poisonous air and sky-high rates of cancer, and the power of real, on-the-ground, flesh-and-blood activism to fight back against all that. 

But today, if you suggest that Walk is a homegrown hero of the “youth climate movement,” he bristles. For two reasons: One, he’s been paying his own bills for half his life, which he’d argue places him squarely outside of the “youth” category. And two, he’s tired of being lauded as a savior in the war on coal, especially because he’s seen the way that war goes when the environmental movement’s attention turns elsewhere.

At the start of this millennium, the Coal River Valley that runs through southern West Virginia’s Boone and Raleigh counties was the site of a vibrant anti-coal movement. A few ambitious and adventurous environmental activists decided that if they wanted to put a sword in the heart of the looming climate crisis, there was no better place to start than deep inside the dragon’s lair.

The legend pretty much writes itself. Coal companies were tearing down biodiverse forests and blowing up mountains to excavate many millions of tons of climate-warming black gold, leaving impoverished and sickened communities and destroyed ecosystems in their wake. To fight back against them, hundreds of activists traveled from all over the world to West Virginia, forming blockades, camping out in trees, and chaining themselves to equipment.

And somewhere along the way, the movement lost its momentum. Over the course of a decade, the spotlight on West Virginia’s coal country faded, even as new surface mines continued to grow like a fungus. A new threat had appeared: fracking, and all the frenzied new fossil fuel development that came with it. The activists slowly packed up and trickled back home or joined protests against oil and gas pipelines. The coal industry remained, its grip weakened by lawsuits, bankruptcies, and the growth of cheap natural gas, but very much alive. 

This is an American environmental story for the 21st century, with all the trappings — the fickle attentions of fame and the media, the seemingly never-ending battle between humans and corporations — all tied up in the tale of a man trying to protect his home. The battle against coal expansion and mountaintop mining continues, but without the media attention or the funding that came with it back when the well-known climate scientist James Hansen came to town. But it’s hard for someone like Walk to abandon his fight against the coal company, when the stakes are no less than the home he hopes to live in forever.

To learn how civil disobedience in the name of climate change made its way to Walk’s hometown, I found Mike Roselle, the 68-year-old veteran activist who co-founded the eco-activist collective Earth First! and orchestrated Greenpeace’s first American ventures into organized civil disobedience in the latter half of the 1980s. He organized his way across most of the Mountain West to land in the hollowed-out mining town of Rock Creek, West Virginia, down the road from the Family Dollar and the Exxon and over a clattering wooden bridge, on a plot of land with three cabins tucked between the Coal River and a grove of trees.

Roselle has been fixing up the property himself for about 15 years. He first started working on it when he rented it to house the young anarchists and activists who had migrated up to the valley to join the anti-mountaintop removal cause. 

The middle cabin where he and his roommate Cat Dees, another transplant brought here by the movement, reside is humbly decorated, with a wood-burning stove and rows of mason jars lining the kitchen walls. He has grown old here; when I meet him he is tall and thin, with bone-white hair and ice-blue eyes, and he steps slowly and carefully around the cabins to describe the work he’s done: an entire rebuild of this wall of this one, full rewiring, installation of the warm, gold-hued kitchen. 

Earth First!, when it got started in the 1980s, operated by the motto “No Compromise in Defense of Mother Earth.” It garnered the attention of environmentalists and loggers alike for protests in which activists locked themselves to trees and logging equipment, occupying forest lands they sought to protect for months at a time. But in 2005, Hurricane Katrina, and all the urgency it portended for climate change, turned Roselle’s attention from forests to coal. He started Climate Ground Zero in Montana, where he struggled to organize direct actions against coal development; he couldn’t get a dozen people to show up to block a coal train. It was in 2005 that he met Julia Bonds, known as Judy, the Goldman Prize-winning founder of Coal River Mountain Watch. 

The legend — if you believe Roselle himself, who loves to spin a yarn — is that Bonds caught him and his friends sneaking off into the woods to smoke a joint at a conference for forest conservation activists, they invited her to join them, and the rest is history. That was how Roselle first learned about how all across southern West Virginia, coal companies were using explosives to blow the tops off mountains to lay bare the coal underneath, turning lush forest to surface mines. Over a million acres of forest had been lost, countless biodiverse ecosystems destroyed, any number of streams polluted with the resulting waste and rubble bulldozed into valleys, and, of course, the coal played a key role in pushing carbon emissions to the limits of livable levels. Bonds insisted that it had to be seen to be believed, and invited Roselle to the Coal River Valley that very spring.

“They organized a trip to pick ramps, which I learned was kind of a traditional spring outing for many families, and everybody gets together and has a good time,” he recalled. “So we went up to Cherry Pond Mountain, which was everybody’s favorite gathering spot, and picked ramps. And then Judy says, ‘Well, I hope you like this place because next time you come here, it won’t be here. Massey Energy is committed to blow it up.’”

Bonds wanted him to take the Redwood Summer model pioneered in California by Earth First! leader Judy Barri, and replicate it to block mountaintop removal mining in West Virginia. In June 1990, Barri had organized a training camp for young activists, largely college students, to teach them how to use their bodies to protect the redwood forest in Humboldt County, California. They took part in tree sits, where they’d camp out in the canopy, or chain themselves to the enormous trunks. They would lie spread-eagled on the ground in front of logging equipment and gather en masse to blockade the dock in Eureka, California, where timber would be loaded for export. 

Roselle started spending more and more time in Appalachia, collaborating on actions and blockades with the Tennessee-based anti-mountaintop removal organization Mountain Justice. He eventually made Rock Creek the home of Climate Ground Zero in 2008, in large part to support the efforts of Coal River Mountain Watch. That year, Bonds and the rest of the Coal River Mountain Watch cohort learned that Massey Energy had acquired a permit to construct a road up to Coal River Mountain to start mining. The moment had come. Roselle pulled up a few YouTube videos of footage from Redwood Summer, and everyone agreed: We want to do this. They organized a blockade of the road, and then another, and then another.

That was the year Junior Walk turned 18 years old, and his life began to change.

When Walk graduated from high school in 2008, he had been accepted to the Art Institute up in Pittsburgh. He quickly realized that neither he nor his family had any chance of pulling together the tuition money, so he abandoned all college plans and got a job at the Elk Run Coal Processing Plant in Sylvester, another town in the valley, alongside his dad. 

Elk Run is notable for two reasons: It was the first non-union mine established by the coal baron A.T. Massey, a cannon fired in the United Mine Workers of America conflict in the 1980s. Supporters of the union set fire to the plant more than once. 

It’s also the site of one of three massive coal waste impoundments in the Big Coal River watershed. The liquid slurry left over from treated coal, after it’s processed into its lightest form for shipment, gets poured into a hollow that’s dammed up by the solid waste. These black lakes of toxic sludge, hundreds of feet deep and contained by not much more than a wall of mud and rock, are a looming threat to the communities that lie beneath them, nestled at the foot of the mountain.

Walk performed odd maintenance jobs at Elk Run. One of them entailed wading thigh-deep through the coal waste slurry as it got pumped out into the impoundment. He couldn’t avoid the thought that he might die either from drowning in slurry or chemical exposure-induced cancer, so he quit only to find that there weren’t a whole lot of options: Dairy Queen, Dollar General, and that was about it. Within the year, he’d taken another job working security on a strip mine, where he’d sit for hours every day and watch bulldozers and excavators rip chunks out of the mountain, hungry for the coal beneath.

“Within the first week of me working up there, I just started feeling miserable about it, watching that machinery tear down that mountain,” Walk says, recalling the dust and noise that plagued his own childhood. 

Walk had known Judy Bonds his whole life; he went to school with her grandson, and she worked at the gas station with his grandma. After a few weeks on his security job, he went down to the Coal River Mountain Watch office and had a heart-to-heart with Bonds about what he was seeing. Soon after, he started volunteering for Coal River Mountain Watch, writing their newsletter on a clunky desktop computer he’d built himself.

“I would load that into the passenger seat of my car and drive it to work with me, and I’d run an extension cord out to the box on the power pole,” he recalls, gleefully. “And I’d sit there getting paid as a security guard while popping out articles for the Mountain Watch newsletter.”

By the start of 2010, Bonds had given Walk a staff job at Coal River Mountain Watch, where he took on a wide variety of roles to suit a tiny organization with intermittent funding and a fairly daunting mission. That meant scouting sites for blockades and protests, recruiting and training activists, and planning and participating in the actions. He traveled around the country — frequently with Larry Gibson, a prominent local anti-mountaintop removal activist — giving talks at college campuses and environmental conferences: “I would try to convince everybody that I could that it was a good idea to chain themselves to some big yellow piece of equipment.”

At the time, a growing slate of celebrities was making the trek down to the valley. Grammy-award-winning country singer Kathy Mattea, a native of Charleston, the state capital, met with Judy Bonds and marched up Blair Mountain to protest its likely destruction. The actress Daryl Hannah published a rambling op-ed about her experience getting arrested with James Hansen while protesting mountaintop removal around the Coal River. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. narrated a documentary on the subject. 

Walk, meanwhile, played a part in recruiting the valley’s cadre of foot soldiers. Members of other groups, like Mountain Justice and Climate Ground Zero, lent a hand in organizing and manpower. The population of the entire Coal River Valley numbers in the low thousands, and at the peak of the movement around 2009 there were a couple hundred activists from out of town who had come to join the cause. 

Some culture clash was inevitable. Shelia Walk, Junior’s mother, says that the fact that the Coal River Valley is so secluded makes an influx of anything new and different all the more noticeable: “Anyone that’s coming around with pink hair, everybody’s like — gasp!” Early on in Climate Ground Zero’s tenure in Rock Creek, one organizer’s dog killed a local’s prize fighting chicken.

There were moments of more peaceful integration. In the late 1990s, Gibson had gotten a few dozen acres on top of Kayford Mountain put into a land trust, and he’d built cabins and set up a gathering area where activists could get together to socialize, plan actions, or just enjoy nature. Shelia Walk and a few other women in the community regularly came up to the mountain to cook for them, including for a Fourth of July event well-attended by both locals and activists. John Paul Webber, the 6-foot-5-inch Gadsden-flag-tattooed proprietor of the gun-and-pawn shop in Whitesville, got shit-faced one night and rode his four-wheeler up Kayford. Walk initially thought that Webber had shown up just to wreak havoc, but they hit it off and today are “first-tier” friends.

Webber’s was one of the friendlier drunken ambushes of Kayford. Many residents of the Coal River Valley have bought their homes and fed their children thanks to the only real industry within 100 miles, and if you ask them about the anti-mountaintop removal movement you might hear a very different perspective: God put coal in the mountain so we could take it out. The way many locals saw it, the anti-mountaintop-removal movement posed a threat to their livelihoods — a belief eagerly fueled by the coal companies. Early in his activist career, Walk was never seen with his father because of the risk that would pose to his job at the coal processing plant. 

The activists’ victories mounted. They demonstrated at then-Governor Joe Manchin’s office and mansion in Charleston as well as in Washington, D.C., securing more and more national attention. They successfully blocked or delayed numerous permits to fill streams with mountaintop removal waste. Activists thwarted blasting on the Bee Tree mine site with the then-longest tree-sit in West Virginia history. In 2010, Coal River Mountain Watch scored a huge coup in a years-long battle to get Marsh Fork Elementary moved outside of the danger zone of the coal silo and the slurry impoundment, and rallied together the money to construct a new school several miles up the road, including a long-disputed donation from Massey Energy. Walk calls this the greatest victory of his activist career.

The coal companies started to pay more attention, and their employees and the families of their employees did too. Sneers in the grocery store grew to hollered threats out of truck windows and worse. Walk has had a gun pulled on him more times than he can count. 

Many locals still see the activists as an invasion of outsiders, even though the movement’s leaders were almost entirely born and bred in the valley, describing them as paid by outside organizations to come in to cause trouble. Cliff Lester, a retired coal miner at the Catenary mine who now runs a pay lake stocked with trout and catfish at the south end of the valley, recalled that the activists “made life a living hell” for those who worked in the coal industry at the time. 

“I don’t know if they didn’t understand or if they just didn’t really care,” he says. “They just look at it as destroying mountains, but in reality, we took the coal out that was needed for electricity, for building buildings. And over the years, I’ve seen the coal industry go down extremely. We couldn’t get permits. A lot of people lost their homes, lost their jobs, their vehicles, everything.” 

Those lost jobs, however, have less to do with the effectiveness of the activists and more to do with the economic realities. The mechanization of coal removal and processing had eliminated the need for thousands of human jobs, and looming competition from cheap natural gas in fueling power plants made coal a less desirable commodity. 

But the strength of the anti-mountaintop removal movement in the Coal River Valley was the fact that it was spearheaded by people who had deep roots in the community, who love their home so much that they will be shunned by their own neighbors to defend it. “You get a handful of very committed people, people who something inside of them just snaps one day and they decide, you know, screw it, I’m going to devote my life to being a nemesis to the coal industry,” Walk says. “I mean, that’s what happened to me.” 

It also happened to Judy Bonds, whose coal miner father died of black lung, and who then co-founded Coal River Mountain Watch to fight back against the coal dust pollution in the creeks her grandson played in and the coal waste impoundments that threatened to drown the only community she’d ever known. It happened to Debbie Jarrell, co-director of Coal River Mountain Watch today, whose family name is sprinkled all up and down Route 3: Charles B. Jarrell General Store, Jarrell Backwoods Towing, Perry Jarrell Road, Jarrell’s Ridge. Jarrell first joined the cause around 2005 because her granddaughter was a student at Marsh Fork Elementary, and she kept getting sick. It happened to Larry Gibson, who was so sickened by how mountaintop removal mining had transformed the home that he and his ancestors had grown up in that he walked the length of West Virginia north-to-south to warn fellow mountaineers about the threat.

In January 2011, when Junior Walk had been working as a full-time organizer for just about a year, Judy Bonds died of cancer, her disease believed to be brought about by airborne dust from mountaintop removal in the region. By the end of 2012, Larry Gibson would be felled by a heart attack. 

It was around that time that a hydraulic fracturing boom in the Marcellus Shale birthed a crop of new gas wells all across northern West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Natural gas-powered electricity was a cheaper and ostensibly cleaner alternative to coal-fired, but the magnitude of the threat it posed to the climate and the environment became clear: explosions and flares on wells and pipelines, methane leaks, the mysterious cocktail of fracking chemicals that seeped into water tables and tributaries. 

In 2014, oil production in the United States jumped by 16 percent to 8.7 million barrels per day, the largest single-year increase in a century, largely due to the fracking boom in the Bakken shale region of North Dakota and Montana. The dangers of oil infrastructure seized public attention in 2010, with the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and continued to make headlines throughout the decade: the Enbridge pipeline leak into the Kalamazoo River, the largest inland oil spill in history; the deadly derailment of an oil train in Lac-Mégantic, Québec; the Refugio oil spill on California’s Gaviota coast. Meanwhile, coal production in West Virginia had been in steep decline pretty much since 2009.

Back in Raleigh County, things had started to fall apart within the activist community. The deaths of Bonds and Gibson had been a huge blow. Mike Roselle and the younger activists were increasingly at odds over the organization’s hierarchical structure and the ostensible need for increasingly radical tactics, which eventually lead to the youth contingent storming the house in Rock Creek and announcing that they were forming their own movement: RAMPS, Radical Action for Mountains’ and Peoples’ Survival. (Walk is a co-founder of this organization, but no longer involved.) Plans to lobby for a wind farm on top of Coal River Mountain, already a bit of a pipe dream, faded to an increasingly small likelihood.

If you ask Vernon Haltom, the executive director of Coal River Mountain Watch, when the anti-mountaintop removal movement in the Coal River Valley started to lose steam, he’d pin it to 2015. “Some of the big coal companies declared bankruptcy that year,” he explained over the phone. “And then a lot of the press, even some of our allied groups, declared victory, that mountaintop removal was essentially over. And they don’t really get involved with us anymore because we kept saying, ‘No, it’s not, it’s still ongoing.’”

Walk watched as most of his friends trickled off to new battles, primarily against projects such as the Mountain Valley Pipeline. “I can’t really be mad about it,” he says, “because they did what they could, and some of them gave years out of their lives and so much effort to invest in this fight here to help my community, you know what I mean? And so I can’t really feel any other way except grateful for the time that they did spend here.”

But he isn’t interested in joining the pipeline fight. “As long as they want to work against the coal industry and make that their main effort, I’ll be right there working shoulder to shoulder with them,” he says. “But if they’re doing all this other stuff against natural gas and all that, yeah, that’s great. But that’s not where I’m going to put my effort because this is my fight, this is my community and it’s what I do.”

I first met Walk at the Coal River Mountain Watch office, which occupies a simple brick building that used to house a diner on the main street of Naoma, roughly halfway between his parents’ home and Mike Roselle’s. It’s filled with relics of the organization’s 24 years: Bonds’ Goldman Prize, framed newspaper cutouts, photos of protests on the steps of the state capitol in Charleston. Walk is the organization’s only current employee outside of its directors. The office is unheated on this cool April morning. I ask Walk to tell me about what he does these days.

His mission: to catch coal companies in the act of breaking environmental laws, no easy feat. He has spent years intimately learning the land that he’s committed to protect. He’s memorized a whole network of old logging roads, forged back trails on foot up thistle-thick slopes. He’ll go out there with a camera and a drone and take pictures of damaged hillsides or a digging site’s spread onto unpermitted land, and take his findings back to try to goad the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection into doing something about it, also no easy task. Haltom will make use of a small plane from Southwings, another conservation organization, to fly over mountaintop removal projects and document new developments. 

On May 15, for example, Haltom and Walk got word that the Little Marsh Fork, which runs into the Coal River, was running pitch-black. Heavy rains had overflowed a stockpile at the processing plant. Haltom had to call the DEP inspector out of church, and Walk ran out to capture the inky water via drone.

“The whole point of it is to make them spend as much money as we possibly can to make it less economically feasible for them to keep mining that coal,” Walk says. “Paying fines, going back on to the site to fix stuff like slips in the hillside or whatever. It’s death by a thousand paper cuts.” 

It may surprise those involved in the climate movement today to learn that mountaintop removal mining is not only legal but active. Walk describes new blasts into the mountain as a near-daily occurrence. Later that day he drives me up to a surface mine in a rattling Subaru — a professor he met through his activism traded it to him for a hunting rifle — with the patient resignation of someone who has given the same tour a thousand times. 

The Subaru climbs up a dirt road through budding forest, all umber and olive with splashes of violet and sun-yellow. Then suddenly, under a brilliant sky streaked with fast-moving clouds, everything is gray. A surface mine is just coal and rock as far as the eye can see, small heaps of it graduating into foothills. You can see the soft round heads of the surrounding mountains several miles off. We can’t stop the car and get out to walk around because Walk’s vehicle is well-known to any employees of the coal company that might be on site.

He smokes a cigarette on the drive home, and we go to talk to his mother, Shelia.

The nightmare of the Black Eagle mine, next to the Walk family home in Eunice, both mother and son agree, started with the noise. In 2020, Alpha Natural Resources put in an exhaust fan so loud that you couldn’t talk to someone standing two feet away without yelling.

“I’d call the DEP and I’d be like, hold on, let me open the back door and you’ll hear what my problem is,” Shelia recalls. “And they would say, ‘Oh man.’ Yeah, imagine me sitting here!”

It took months of filing reports to the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, but eventually Alpha Natural Resources moved the exhaust fan. That still left the dust — not just coal dust, which Shelia’s lived with all her life on Route 3, but silica dust. One morning this past February, Shelia went to make coffee and found every surface of the kitchen coated in a light white powder. She initially assumed her husband had somehow exploded a bottle of baby powder while taking care of their grandson, but gradually realized what she was looking at. “And if it’s sitting in our kitchen like this, we have breathed it. Oh, my Lord. And it’s scary because that’s what causes cancer.”

Alpha Natural Resources had bought out the couple dozen residents of the village of Pettus, immediately next to Eunice, to knock down their homes and make more space for the Black Eagle mine. Shelia had expected the residents of Eunice would be offered a buyout, too, but it never happened. When she first learned that the mine would be put in, she had no intention of ever leaving her lifelong home. But she’s had enough; living next to an operating coal mine makes her miserable. In June, she and her husband bought a new home with a big garden on a hillside in Horse Creek, about 10 miles away.

Shelia’s neighbors are fed up too, and have joined her in community meetings to demand action from the Department of Environmental Protection against Alpha Natural Resources, which might include a buyout, although that’s an uphill battle. Walk and Vernon Haltom have helped her and other people in Eunice by getting their documentations of dust and noise and other offenses filed with the DEP. I ask Shelia if she thought the anti-coal activist movement of the prior decade had influenced the town’s apparent disillusionment with the coal industry at all.

“A lot of the older people had already realized what the coal company has done,” she says. “And I think that’s where my eyes were starting to open, when I was a young mother, from my grandparents and my dad and just listening to their stories. And once the so-called tree huggers come in, I think it started to open eyes for more people my age. After you hear it a couple times, you’re like, you know, that makes sense. 

“And when the company decides they don’t need you no more, you ain’t gonna have nowhere to go hunting, nowhere to go fishing, nowhere to go swimming. And they just leave an empty, flattened place that nothing can grow or live on.”

A couple of weeks before my trip to the Coal River Valley, an unaffiliated group of organizers announced something called the Coal Baron Blockade. It was a planned protest at the Grant Town Power Plant in Marion County, which burns gob — coal waste — bought from West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin’s family’s company, to the tune of a few hundred thousand in profit for Manchin himself every year. Prior to the event, I found it impossible to ascertain the protest’s lead organizer or its specific goals. 

I asked Walk if he knew anything about the Coal Baron Blockade. He said it was clear it was organized by out-of-staters, and they had reached out to him and a bunch of other West Virginia activists and asked him to be part of it. He didn’t see reason enough to make the time. 

“If the weather’s nice, I need to be out with the drone and catching the coal companies doing illegal things, so that doesn’t leave a lot of time to drive plumb to Morgantown for a weekend when I’m not even on the clock.” He gestured to his Subaru. “You see what I’m driving? I’m not putting more miles on that thing.”

If you ask Walk why he still does this, his answer is simple: He feels he owes it to his predecessors — Judy Bonds, Larry Gibson, Chuck Nelson — because they gave him a purpose, told him they were proud of him, gassed him up.

“Not that I’m self-important enough to feel like I shoulder their legacy or anything like that, because that would be impossible for anybody,” Walk is quick to add. “But somebody’s got to be the voice out here saying, ‘No, that’s wrong, what the coal industry does is bad.’ And that’s just kind of my lot in life.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What happened to the “war on coal” in West Virginia? on Jul 13, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Eve Andrews.

It’s no secret that the US Supreme Court has issued a number of rulings this year that will hurt working families today and in the future. As a registered nurse living in Miami, the court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA—which undermines the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate power plants under the Clean Air Act—is yet another ruling that has me worried about my patients and my coworkers.

Make no mistake: climate change is a public health emergency. Climate change is linked to conditions as diverse as mosquito-borne illnesses like Zika, water-related conditions such as cholera, and mental health problems like post-traumatic stress disorder. A critical tool in fighting air pollution and climate change, the Clean Air Act has saved millions of lives and spared millions of people a trip to the emergency room. 

If Covid-19 has shown us anything, it is that public health is necessary for us to lead full lives and have a functioning economy.

At work, I take care of patients who receive kidney transplants. When they leave the hospital, we gift them with a water bottle emblazoned with the hospital logo. We tell them to take care of themselves not only by taking their medications, but by staying hydrated. Heat and dehydration stress the kidneys and could put their new organ at risk of failing. Doctors and researchers around the world have observed epidemics of heat-related kidney disease, a phenomenon known as “climate-sensitive disease.”  As carbon emissions continue to warm the planet and cause extreme heat waves, simply taking a walk outdoors will be increasingly dangerous for my patients and many others.

In sunny South Florida where many people work outside in construction or agriculture, climate change will bring growing numbers of people to our hospital with heat illness. We’re not alone. Although the most vulnerable among us will feel the greatest impact, everyone—regardless of their race, zip code, occupation, or political party—is affected by harmful pollution, global warming, and climate disasters.

The last two and a half years of life in a pandemic have brought health care workers and the institutions we work for to the brink. Are we prepared for more emergencies—floods, wildfires, Category 5 hurricanes? Can we handle a dramatic increase of people walking through our doors daily with climate-sensitive diseases such as asthma flare-ups, heart failure exacerbations, and heat stroke? Dealing with one crisis has been disruptive enough, but climate change promises to bring dozens of health crises simultaneously, and I fear it will put us over the edge. 

Fighting climate change is a form of preventative health care. Although the Supreme Court ruling will hamper the federal government’s ability to protect our wellbeing, Congress and the White House can take life-saving action by making bold investments in green infrastructure and programs that will decarbonize our economy.  They should also take immediate action to reduce pollution and other causes of climate change. If Covid-19 has shown us anything, it is that public health is necessary for us to lead full lives and have a functioning economy. Our elected leaders must act now to safeguard our future before it’s too late.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Caitlin MacLaren.

A community in West Virginia is planning to appeal a ruling handed down Monday by a federal judge who concluded that three pharmaceutical companies are not liable for the vast damage done to the area by their shipments of millions of opioids.

Cabell County and the city of Huntington argued in court last year that AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health, and McKesson had created a "public nuisance" by distributing more than 81 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills in the area over an eight-year period, saying the companies made no effort to ensure the pills were fulfilling legitimate prescriptions and wouldn't be sold on the black market.

"We are deeply disappointed personally and for the citizens of Cabell County and the City of Huntington."

The volume of pills shipped to the county was enough to distribute 94 pills to every resident per year.

The county and city sought $2.6 billion from the three companies, saying the money was needed to help recover from the opioid epidemic.

An estimated 7,882 people in Cabell County are currently living with opioid use disorder, according to the Williamson Daily News, and communities have been strained by thousands of overdose deaths in recent years. Nearly half of students attending Cabell County schools are being raised by someone other than a parent, and the number of children personally affected by the opioid epidemic as of 2017 was nearly twice the national average.

Emergency workers responded to 1,067 suspected overdoses in the county last year, and 158 overdose deaths were reported.

The county was planning to use $1.7 billion to treat people who currently have opioid use disorders.

Harvard health economics professor Thomas McGuire testified that the companies had actually cost the county $3.3 billion in damages.

Judge David A. Faber, who was appointed by President George H.W. Bush, ruled that the communities did not prove the three companies acted unreasonably when they distributed the pills or that their conduct was connected to the suffering of people throughout Cabell County.

Joel Rainey, a pastor at Covenant Baptist Church in Shephardstown, West Virginia, called the decision "a grave injustice."

Cardinal Health has previously admitted wrongdoing in West Virginia, where the company shipped millions of pills to many small towns over an eight-year period ending in 2014.

McKesson and Cardinal Health sent 12.3 million pills to a small pharmacy in Mt. Gay-Shamrock and nine million pills over just two years to the town of Kermit, home to just 400 people.

In the Cabell County case, the pharmaceutical giants argued they were simply helping fill prescriptions that were written by licensed doctors and said they were providing "a secure channel to deliver medications of all kinds."

"We are deeply disappointed personally and for the citizens of Cabell County and the City of Huntington," attorneys for the plaintiffs said in a statement. "We felt the evidence that emerged from witness statements, company documents, and extensive datasets showed these defendants were responsible for creating and overseeing the infrastructure that flooded West Virginia with opioids."

Public nuisance claims against opioid manufacturers have been successful in New York and Ohio, where juries ruled that drugmakers used misleading marketing practices and allowed major pharmacies including CVS and Walgreens to flood communities through the black market.

Cabell County and Huntington's lawsuit was the first such claim to be argued in a federal trial. More than 3,000 lawsuits have been filed by state and local governments, Native American tribes, and other groups over the damage done by rampant opioid distribution in recent decades.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Julia Conley.

For decades, Sen. Joe Manchin has presided over West Virginia’s Democratic Party, crowning candidates and throwing cushy appointments to allies while the state’s jobs, wages, and environment have gradually been ground to dust. But earlier this month, a grassroots slate of over 50 Democrats took control of the West Virginia Democratic Party after winning a majority of seats on the executive committee and ousting party leadership, thus ending Manchin’s de facto control of the state party apparatus.

Now, after a six-year organizing push, every old guard party apparatchik — save for the treasurer — is out of office, replaced with activists from across the Democratic spectrum set on revitalizing the state and forcing renewed support from the national party. The June 18 victories mark the beginning of the end for an era defined by atrophy, nose-diving voter rolls, and just a single Democratic statewide representative: Manchin.

“After years of having to fight our own party to get a seat at the table, I look forward to fighting Republicans at the ballot box instead of useless Democrats at committee meetings.”

Democratic Del. Danielle Walker, a former abortion patient, speaks about a bill she proposed that would lift restrictions on the procedure in West Virginia, at the state Capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on Jan. 31, 2022.

Photo: Leah Willingham/AP

“It’s about changing the party we have so that West Virginia has an actual chance. … It doesn’t matter if you’re a progressive or a moderate or an independent, there’s a seat at the table if we can unrig the system.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Daniel Boguslaw.

Pro-democracy campaigners in West Virginia and Arizona on Monday risked arrest at sit-ins in downtown Charleston and Tucson, demanding that Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema end obstruction of their party's agenda and allow the Senate to pass reproductive rights, climate action, and voting rights measures.

Campaigners representing a coalition of groups including West Virginia Rising, For All, Democracy Initiative, and Progress Arizona blocked traffic in central areas of the two cities, accusing the two senators of "laying waste to our future."

The campaign, called the "Sit-in for the Soul of America," was organized as President Joe Biden's Build Back Better Act is stalled in the Senate. The package included ambitious climate action provisions, an extension of the expanded Child Tax Credit, and other measures to narrow the wealth gap in the United States.

Manchin pressured the Democratic Party last year to remove several key provisions from the legislation last year before announcing in December that he would not support the agenda.

Manchin and Sinema's refusal to back filibuster reform has also stood in the way of the Democrats' goals of passing the Women's Health Protection Act, which would protect the right to abortion care, and voting rights legislation.

"Senator Manchin, you have failed West Virginia," said one protester named Rylee, who according to West Virginia Rising recently staged a hunger strike to pressure Manchin to meet with her. "You have blood on your hands."

Several campaigners were arrested in Charleston after blocking traffic.

As the arrests were happening, West Virginia Rising wrote on social media that the group stood "in lockstep solidarity with our sisters-in-struggle in Arizona who just SHUT DOWN the roads there to protest Kyrsten Sinema."

"Our democracy is on life support," said the group. "Women's rights are on the chopping block. An ice shelf the size of NYC just broke off of Antarctica and scientists are warning that if emissions don't peak within three years we'll pass the point of no return."

"There's no time to ask nicely," West Virginia Rising added.

A mobile billboard was also displayed at the protest in Arizona, reading, "Senator Sinema is holding reproductive rights hostage in all 50 states."

"Bans off our bodies!" the sign read. "End the filibuster!"

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Julia Conley.

They gave her a metal spoon. It was the first mistake her guards made. It would prove to be just enough to set her free.

For more than 40 days, Sara Miran had been held hostage by an Iranian-backed militia that operated with almost total impunity in post-Saddam Iraq. Miran, a real estate developer who lived in Virginia, was kidnapped while she was working in Iraq in September 2014. She was imprisoned in a locked, third-floor room of a house in a Baghdad neighborhood that served as one of the militia’s strongholds. The room had wood paneling and a marble floor; this had once been an elegant home, transformed into the militia’s prison.

Miran was certain the militia was going to kill her. Her captors forced her to wear a prison uniform, like the clothes the Islamic State group made its hostages wear just before they were executed. They had whipped her for five straight days with wire cables, trying to make her falsely confess to being a CIA spy. Her guards never showed their faces, and when she asked why, one of them said they would reveal themselves when she was about to be released. “Once I heard him say that, I knew they were going to kill me,” Miran told The Intercept. She knew they would never let her go if she could identify them.

She was desperate to escape. There were at least two guards in the house at all times, and they searched her room each day to make certain that she wasn’t plotting a breakout. They installed a surveillance camera in the room so they could monitor her movements 24 hours a day, watching even while she slept on a mattress on the floor.

Her captors fed her the bare minimum to keep her alive — a half piece of bread, some cheese, tea, a little soup — and she lost 30 pounds. With each meal, they brought her plastic spoons. But on a Sunday in October, her guards altered their routine. Instead of bread and cheese, they brought her a lunch of rice and curry. And along with the new meal came a metal spoon.

Miran hid the spoon in the tank of the toilet in the bathroom adjoining her room. Then she waited for the night.

At 9 p.m., she went into the bathroom and got the spoon. With years of experience as a manager of construction projects, she knew the weak points in building designs, and so she used the spoon to dig into the edges of the wall surrounding the small bathroom window. It took her 15 minutes to remove the frame and the window without breaking the glass. She said a silent prayer of thanks that the guards had not heard the noise she had made.

She went to her room’s closet and put on the clothes she had been wearing when she had been kidnapped, which her captors had incongruously left with her. She then put on her maroon prison uniform, topped with a hijab, so she wouldn’t rip her own clothes while escaping. Back in the bathroom, she leaned a chair against the wall and looked out the window. She was three stories aboveground, on the back side of the house. At 10 p.m., she squeezed through the window, grabbed onto a drain pipe anchored to the side of the house, and began to climb down. There was no turning back.

Left/Top: Sara Miran's side table containing beauty products, a jewelry box, and three handguns belonging to her, her husband, and her security guard. Right/Bottom: A view from Sara Miran's apartment complex in the Green Zone in Baghdad, Iraq, in 2022. Photos: Emily Garthwaite for The Intercept

Sara Miran poses for a portrait, reflected in a mirror at her apartment in Baghdad, Iraq.

Photo: Emily Garthwaite for The Intercept

Iraqis gather around a bombed car in the southern city of Basra, in Iraq, on Oct. 28, 2010.

Photo: AFP via Getty Images

Sara Miran leaving her apartment block.

Photo: Emily Garthwaite for The Intercept

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki shows his ink-stained finger as he casts his vote in Iraq’s first parliamentary election since U.S. troops withdrew at a polling station in Baghdad’s Green Zone on April 30, 2014.

Photo: Ali Al-Saadi/AFP via Getty Images

A view of Baghdad through Sara Miran’s apartment windows.

Photo: Emily Garthwaite for The Intercept

“When you have a family member kidnapped, you talk to a lot of people you never want to talk to.”

Sara Miran walking into the kitchen in her apartment.

Photo: Emily Garthwaite for The Intercept

Sara Miran arrives in Sulaymaniyah after home after escaping her captors in 2014.

Photo: Courtesy of Sara Miran

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by James Risen.

The nationwide wave of labor organizing by Starbucks workers continued to bear fruit Tuesday as employees at five of the coffee chain's Richmond, Virginia stores overwhelmingly voted to unionize.

"Within 48 hours we had 70% of the store signed up for union cards."

According to More Perfect Union, the votes at the five Richmond Starbucks were 17-1, 22-3, 11-2, 13-8, and 19-0. The stores are the company's first in Virginia to unionize; workers at a Springfield location narrowly rejected forming a union last week.

"The movement of workers demanding dignity on the job wins again," tweeted U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). "Congratulations to Starbucks workers in Richmond on your vote to unionize! I will see you Sunday!"

Sanders is scheduled to appear Sunday at Unity Fest, a free event "to support and celebrate the organizing efforts of Starbucks workers locally and across the country."

Starbucks Workers United, the group coordinating the nationwide organizing effort, now boasts a record of 21 unionizations in 23 attempts.

Inspired by the historic unionization of Starbucks workers in Buffalo, New York late last year, the global coffee chain's Richmond employees began their own organizing journey in February.

"It really came together fast for our store," said Tyler Hofmann, a barista at the North Boulevard Starbucks. "My store manager went on vacation, and I was like, this is the time, we have an opportunity to organize."

"My store was super supportive," he added, "and within 48 hours we had 70% of the store signed up for union cards."

Starbucks workers have defied what they say is a concerted union-busting campaign by the Seattle-based company. Last week, a group of 24 of the coffee giant's employees urged the U.S. House of Representatives' labor committee to compel billionaire Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz to testify about what they called an incessant and unlawful effort to thwart the nationwide unionization drive.

Last week, Bloomberg reported prosecutors at the National Labor Relations Board plan to formally accuse Starbucks of illegally firing a group of activists seeking to unionize their Memphis, Tennessee store.

Richmond Starbucks workers said the company utilized union-busting tactics as they sought to organize, including slashing employee hours.

"It's reached to a point where a lot of us have been, you know, discussing finding other jobs and stuff to be able to make ends meet," barista Iman Djehiche told More Perfect Union. "That's been something we've been experiencing since we got our ballot date."

Barista Cory Johnson said the union drive has boosted solidarity among his co-workers.

"In an industry that a lot of people, I think, write off and say can't be organized, Starbucks baristas have shown that you can organize these places and you can win," he said. "It just takes one victory to kind of spark a movement. And even someone like Howard Schultz isn't too big to organize against."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

The post The Scariest Couple in America: Clarence and Virginia Thomas appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by David Rosen.

The post The Scariest Couple in America: Clarence and Virginia Thomas appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by David Rosen.

(April 13, 2020 – Richmond, Virginia) Governor Ralph Northam signed legislation to strengthen Virginia’s writ of actual innocence law, representing the most significant improvements for overturning wrongful convictions in over a decade. The improvements hold promise for Virginians like Darnell Phillips, who has been unable to overturn his 1990 rape conviction despite compelling evidence of his innocence. 

House Bill 974/Senate Bill 511, sponsored by Delegate Charniele Herring (D-Arlington) and Senator John Edwards (D-Roanoke) and signed by the Governor, removes restrictions in the writ of actual innocence law that have made it nearly impossible for wrongfully convicted people to obtain relief. 

“This is a seismic shift for exonerating innocent Virginians,” said Shawn Armburst, Executive Director of the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project, which is dedicated to overturning wrongful convictions in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C. “Many of our clients have been denied justice for so long under these laws, and now they can finally live up to their potential to overturn wrongful convictions and reveal the truth.”

Darnell Phillips has been among those impacted by the previously restrictive writ of actual law. After spending 27 years in prison, Phillips was released on parole in 2018. He traveled to Richmond during the legislative session to ask lawmakers to fix the law. 

“After so many decades, testifying at the Capitol was the first time anyone from the Commonwealth of Virginia ever really listened to my side of the story. When I heard the law passed, I never felt so good. Now I have a fair shot at proving my innocence.”

In 1990, Phillips was convicted of raping a 10-year-old girl in Virginia Beach. In 2001, DNA testing of hair evidence excluded Phillips but his petition for relief was rejected on procedural grounds. Over a decade later, DNA testing on additional items recovered by the Virginia Beach Police Department also excluded Phillips, and the victim stated that she had not actually been able to identify her attacker and only identified Phillips because of lies told by the police. 

Despite this compelling new evidence, the Virginia Supreme Court rejected his writ of actual innocence in 2018. His petition was denied because the DNA testing was conducted at a private laboratory and the court did not believe the new information met the high standard of proving “clear and convincing” evidence of innocence.

“These legislative changes represent a major step in much-needed post-conviction criminal justice reform in Virginia. We are optimistic about increased access to justice for the wrongfully convicted in the Commonwealth,” said Deirdre M. Enright, Director of the Innocence Project Clinic at University of Virginia Law School.

Only four Virginians have been granted relief under the Writ of Actual Innocence law since it was created in 2004. The new law would remove hurdles to allow innocent people to overturn wrongful convictions by:

1. Removing the one-writ limit: Previously people were limited to filing one writ of actual innocence based on non-biological evidence, even if new exonerating evidence was discovered at a later date. The new law removes the one writ limit to allow courts to consider new non-biological evidence of innocence when it becomes available. 
2. Removing bar on guilty pleas: Despite the fact that 1 in 10 DNA exonerees in the United States pleaded guilty to crimes they did not commit, the writ of innocence excluded people who entered plea agreements. The new law removes this restriction to allow people to apply whether they pleaded guilty or were convicted at trial. 
3. Creating a more reasonable burden of proof. Previously, Virginians were required to prove by “clear and convincing evidence” that no juror would have found guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The new law changes the burden of proof to “preponderance of evidence” which is in line with the majority of other state laws regarding newly discovered evidence. 

In addition to Phillips’ advocacy efforts, the Innocence Project, the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project and the Innocence Project at the UVA School of Law partnered to pass these critical new measures. 

What follows is an original report by Jaisal Noor of The Real News Network. Read a transcript of their conversation below or watch the video at the bottom of the post.

JAISAL NOOR: Super Tuesday results are coming in. Voters in 14 states along with American Samoa went to the polls on March 3 to allocate over 1300 delegates, one third of all pledged delegates in the Democratic primary. Voters faced long lines and waited for hours to vote in both Texas and California, tantamount to voter suppression.

Not all the results are in, but as of 8:00 AM on Wednesday, March 4, former Vice President Joe Biden picked up 399 delegates; winning nine states including Virginia, North Carolina, former candidate Amy Klobuchar’s state of Minnesota, and Texas where he was boosted by an endorsement by former presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke. Biden’s campaign was boosted after a decisive win in South Carolina and endorsements from former rivals Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar.

JOE BIDEN: We won Minnesota because of Amy Klobuchar and we’re doing well in Texas because of Beto O’Rourke.

JAISAL NOOR: As projected, Senator Bernie Sanders won the state of California–the largest delegate count of the night–along with Utah, Colorado, and his home state of Vermont; adding 322 delegates to his total.

BERNIE SANDERS: And when we began this race for the presidency, everybody said it couldn’t be done. But tonight, I tell you with absolute confidence, we are going to win the Democratic nomination and we are going to defeat the most dangerous president in the history of this country.

JAISAL NOOR: 536 delegates are still to be awarded. Senator Elizabeth Warren placed third in Massachusetts, failing to win her home state and winning only 42 delegates for a total of 50.

ELIZABETH WARREN: My name is Elizabeth Warren. And I’m the woman who is going to beat Donald Trump.

JAISAL NOOR: The Warren Campaign was reportedly assessing the path forward on Wednesday. The former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg announced he’s dropping out of the race after spending over half a billion dollars on his campaign but failing to win a single state. After top finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire and Nevada vaulted Sanders into front runner status, the Democratic establishment coalesced around Biden, giving him momentum to exceed expectations on Super Tuesday.

But with half of the primary still ahead and seven states voting in primaries on March 10th, it’s unclear if that momentum will hold. The establishment argument against Sanders is that he’s not electable, he’s too extreme, and could cost Democrats control of the House. We got a response to those claims from some of the 10,000 Bernie Sanders rally attendees in Springfield, Virginia on February 29.

So his critics say he’s too radical, he’s a socialist; and they say he’s going to lose to Trump and the Democrats are going to lose the House. How do you respond to that?

SAMI ALAMIRI: Those people who are talking about socialism, they don’t know what socialism means. What does capitalism mean? This is United States of America for everybody. But we have the majority. The middle class people and lower class people have to have the right to have decent life too.

LIZ MUNSEY: I think we have a pretty wide variety of voters here for Sanders–some people who even used to be former Republicans. In 2016, we went with what the establishment Democrats wanted, and we ended up losing that election. So I think we need to put the power back in the people.

JOHN BENTRUP: I think his Democratic Socialism is far different than socialism. He’s definitely not a Communist. People will try to do that, but I think that they’ll be wrong and I think the American public for the most part will see beyond that.

MARQUIS LEWIS: I think that my biggest counterpoint to that is the only Democrats who have to worry about losing if Bernie is at the top of the ticket is if they themselves are not trying to align themselves with Bernie’s vision. If you’re for the Green New Deal, if you’re for Medicare for All, if you’re for the people, the people are going to come and support you.

But if you’re the kind of politician who is like, “Well, the people voted me in, but I’m not really going to do all the issues. I’m not going to take care of the issues that actually matter to them,” then yeah, the people aren’t going to show up for you. But if you have a commitment to people, if you have a commitment to the issues of justice, of love, of trying to create an actual equitable world, the people are going to come for you hands down.

ERIK ESCOBAR: Richard Ojeda in West Virginia was this close, very, very close to winning the congressional seat that he was running for, and he ran on progressive ideas. He didn’t run as a Democrat. He ran as a populist, right. And I think if you focus on ideas like that, if you just focus on the policy proposals, if you focus on anti-establishments, then you can run a campaign down-ballot, down-ticket or otherwise in which you can actually motivate people to go out to vote.

JAISAL NOOR: Bernie’s critics say he’s too far left, he’s a socialist, he has expressed sympathies with Castro in Cuba; and because of those reasons, he’s going to lose to Trump in the general election and they’re going to lose states like purple states like Virginia–he can’t win these states. That is the top argument against him right now. How do you respond to that?

OLIVIA BREWSTER: I respond that we’ve had people in the past that have similar beliefs and people are just labeling him without really knowing what his issues are about.

KATHRYN BREWSTER: My favorite president is FDR and Bernie says he’s the new FDR. And it’s worked before and it can work again, so don’t count it out this time.

JAISAL NOOR: In the past, he’s praised people like Fidel Castro, and because of that, he’s going to lose to Trump.

PUJAN BARAL: So, another news report asked me that today. She said, “Why does Bernie support all these dictators, like from Cuba?” You should have looked at the reaction from the crowd, because everyone started laughing. And she was like, “Why is everyone laughing?”

Because it’s so outrageous that you are saying that this righteous man and this man who is rational on all points of his record, the way he’s been consistent on all of his policies, that he would support such things like an authoritative dictator. As you said, in the South Carolina debate he had the same position as Obama in terms of saying that the education program in Cuba brought an increased literacy rate there.

JIM AMSTER: If somebody at this point in time knows that they’re going to vote for Trump, they’ve already made up their mind and facts won’t change their mind. That’s the America we’re sadly living in today.

Honestly, Bernie Sanders has done a lot to explain how he definitely is praising the literacy programs that were enacted in Cuba that helped literacy. That’s something that we should definitely strive for, better education. And if somebody can’t get on board with that idea and the idea that he wasn’t praising a dictatorship, but rather the positive aspects of an influx of money and effort into an education system, well then… I don’t like that. It’s sad.

JAISAL NOOR: Senator Warren also supports Medicare For All and she and her supporters say she’s got, she’s better in position to actually make it happen, to actually implement that plan. Why not support Senator Warren?

LIZ MUNSEY: So I actually do really like Senator Warren. I think if Bernie weren’t in the race, I’d be supporting her. But there is a level of just raw passion and a longer history of wanting to do the right thing.

LAYLA ALNOZAILY: I also like his stance on issues in the Middle East, like in Yemen and Palestine.

JAISAL NOOR: He is probably the first candidate ever on stage to take such a strong stance in defense of Palestinian rights; called Netanyahu are racist at the debate. How did that make you feel? What was your response?

LAYLA ALNOZAILY: It was so amazing. It was so amazing, especially because he is Jewish, and a lot of people would not expect that from somebody who is Jewish. I feel like he got a lot of Muslim support after doing that. It was very nice.

JAISAL NOOR: You mentioned Yemen. Why is that important to you? And you can talk about what’s happening there?

LAYLA ALNOZAILY: There has actually been a Civil War going on there. I have a lot of family that lives here. My whole dad’s side lives there. The people there, they live off a dollar a day and they’re starving. Half the population is supposed to die by the end of this year of starvation, something that’s so preventable. He was like, took a stand against and he was like, “We need to talk about what’s going on in Yemen.” He had my heart from there.

JAISAL NOOR: Yeah. And it’s funny because a lot of people say, “Bernie hasn’t gotten anything done,” but that was a bipartisan resolution they passed with the Republican Senator. People have called what’s happening in Yemen a genocide and it’s backed by Saudi Arabia.

LAYLA ALNOZAILY: It is. It’s definitely a genocide, and the people are suffering daily because of it. And I appreciate his stance on it and saying that it needs to be dealt with because it’s really important.

JAISAL NOOR: For The Real News, this is Jaisal Noor.

The national discussion about the movement to privatize America’s public schools has mostly focused on the issues of charter schools and school voucher schemes. But a growing number of parents, teachers, and public school advocates, as well as experts in academia, are increasingly warning about another form of school privatization.

You don’t hear very much about this form of privatization in national forums and mainstream news outlets, but it’s being talked about in places like Chesterfield County, Virginia, which borders state capital Richmond.

At a public assembly in Chesterfield in September 2019, an audience gathered to view the movie “Backpack Full of Cash,” a feature-length documentary narrated by actor Matt Damon that exposes how charters and vouchers financially endanger public schools and redistribute resources and students in inequitable ways.

Yet the panel discussion that followed the film quickly veered away from talking about charters and vouchers when one of the panelists, middle school teacher Emma Clark, called the audience’s attention to “a different offshoot of the privatization movement. The privatization we’re seeing here in Chesterfield is through CTE.”

CTE, Career and Technical Education, is a rebranding of what has been traditionally called vocational education or voc-ed, only in the souped-up version, course offerings emphasize science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).

But in communities like Chesterfield, STEM-related CTE curriculum is increasingly being created not by educators but by big businesses such as Amazon, Cisco, and Ford.

And Virginia’s embrace of a business-driven CTE goes beyond the rewriting of the curriculum. It’s about sorting children, schools, and whole communities into education destinies that are firmly welded to labor markets determined by industries.

Education or Class Sorting?

Melissa McKenney, a parent who lives in nearby Henrico County, is particularly wary of a new effort to carve up the state into regional labor markets, based on the needs of businesses in specific areas of the state, and align education opportunities in those regions with the needs of employers.

The effort, led by Growth & Opportunity (GO) Virginia, a highly influential business-led economic development initiative, sections the state into nine distinct regions, each with its own set of prioritized economic development clusters based on major employers located in the region.

For instance, Region Seven, where the new Amazon headquarters will be located, has for its “priority industry clusters”: computer services, cybersecurity, consulting services, financial services, engineering services, life sciences, and research organizations. Region One, in the southwestern part of the state, which has a much higher unemployment rate due in large part to the shutdown of coal mines and manufacturing businesses, has for its priority industry clusters advanced manufacturing, agriculture and food and beverage manufacturing, information and emerging technologies, and energy and minerals.

The intent, as McKenney sees it, is to align the public school curriculum in each region to industry priorities and then “track every student into some kind of education program based on the regional specifications,” she said. “So students in coal country, where Dominion Energy is big, will get tracked into energy career pathways” while students in the northern portion of the state are groomed for the IT industry, said McKenney.

Chesterfield parent Kathryn Flinn is concerned that the heavy footprint of business in each region will narrow the options for students. “When Dominion Energy needs line workers, they’ll push for a course on how to be a lineman for Dominion Energy,” she argued. Her preferences are that students have more course options, not fewer, and that people determining curricular offerings should have backgrounds in education, not just in business.

Even if the curriculum is of better quality than what these parents anticipate, the imposition of these labor market zones makes it clear to educators what the objective of their work is, Clark told me in a phone interview. “In a state like Virginia where privilege has long played a role in determining children’s futures, the expectation seems to be to steer students into programs that others have determined they are ‘suited’ for,” she said.

Traditional voc-ed in the U.S. has a notorious history of directing children from low-income households into education courses that are not in the college preparatory curriculum. That practice, known as tracking, has been “repeatedly found to be harmful to students enrolled in lower tracks and to provide no significant advantages for higher-tracked students,” according to a research review by the National Education Policy Center.

Parents I spoke with in Virginia are worried their state is reviving the practice of tracking—only with levels and pathways related to jobs and industry.

“Parents should be worried about having their children tracked for a specific kind of education starting in middle school,” McKenney said. “You could be putting them into a track that in a few years they aren’t interested in anymore.”

“Sure, some students may eventually want to work for Cisco,” said Chesterfield parent Sara Ward about a Cisco-specific networking course offered in her area. “But what if you want to learn about computer networking but don’t want to work for Cisco? Or what happens if you complete the program and get hired by Cisco, but Cisco fires you?”

McKenney also pointed out that children in regions that prioritize CTE programs who either decide not to enter or fail to get into a specific track early in their education could be shut out of opportunities down the road. “Children of color are often the ones not identified for certain tracks or discouraged from entering a track,” she noted.

Indeed, vocational academies in Loudon County that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos visited in February 2019 have been criticized for underrepresenting black students. And the tech workforce generally is overwhelmingly white and Asian, reports Wired magazine, noting that the racial diversity of Amazon employees is unknown because the company does not report the demographics of its tech workers.

‘One of the Biggest Problems Facing U.S. Education’

Virginians are also concerned about their state’s commitment to invest $1.1 billion into creating a “tech-talent pipeline,” a pledge the state made to seal a deal with Amazon for the company to build its new East Coast headquarters in Arlington. What concerns parents in Chesterfield and elsewhere in the state is not only the massive amount of public money that will be spent on training workers for the tech industry but also the intentions of the architect who is guiding the effort.

The consensus view is that the point person most responsible for the wooing of Amazon’s HQ2 to Virginia was Stephen Moret, the president and CEO of the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, an appointed policy body created by the Virginia General Assembly to support development and expansion of the state’s economy.

When Moret talks about education, he uses the term “talent development” for businesses. He writes in an article for Brookings that “Virginia has taken several big steps toward implementing” a “new learning/earning ecosystem… to better navigate the labor market” for both employers and workers.

A big part of that ecosystem is “aimed at supporting the growth of Amazon’s headquarters operations in Arlington as well as tech companies around Virginia,” reports Virginia Business.

Moret’s own career path may also be a concern to those who are familiar with the type of leadership that has dominated business-friendly education policy for decades.

According to Virginia Business, after attaining a graduate business degree from Harvard, Moret served a stint at McKinsey & Company, known for its profit-first and cost-cutting ethos. In an interview with Development Counsellors International, Moret explained that he also hired McKinsey to help with landing the Amazon HQ.

From McKinsey, Moret went to lead the Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Chamber of Commerce and then to working for the state as secretary of economic development under former Governor Bobby Jindal.

During Jindal’s tenure, Louisiana jumped wholesale into the school privatization agenda, expanding a school voucher program statewide and overseeing a doubling of student enrollments in charter schools.

Moret backed Jindal’s 2012 education budget that expanded school vouchers, and he successfully pushed for a bill that allowed companies that donate real estate or a building to a charter school to become a corporate partner of the school and thereby guarantee their employees’ children enrollment in the school, “saying it could be an important tool to recruit new businesses to Louisiana,” according to the Greater Baton Rouge Business Report.

The marriage of business interests with education policy has been “one of the biggest problems facing U.S. education,” according to Kenneth Saltman, a professor of educational leadership at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, who spoke with me in a phone call. He believes business-led efforts to remake schools have resulted in incentives and changes that are damaging and undermining to the purpose of education.

“At the very core of the issues,” he stated, “is the question over what public schools are for. There’s an old debate over the purpose of schools as preparation for work versus the purpose of schools as preparation for children to become adults who are capable of self-governance and full public participation.”

‘A Wall Between Schools and Business’

The problem with aligning business interests too closely with education, said Saltman, is that often the influence of business seeks to take education back to an agenda about teaching the basics rather than about more abstract goals of schooling.

As Clark sees it, the same people pushing the Virginia tech-talent pipeline are the same people who’ve been insisting that schools would improve if they operated more like businesses. “These are the same people who call my students ‘products,’” she told me. “The same people who forget that my students are human and are complicated.”

For these reasons and others, Saltman would prefer there was “a wall between schools and businesses.” Businesses don’t really pay a significant percentage of taxes that support schools, he argued. “They take a lot more out than they put in.”

Tech companies are notorious non-contributors to local schools. Microsoft has for years avoided paying taxes in Washington state, where it is based, by setting up a subsidiary in Reno, Nevada, which has no corporate tax, according to an investigation by Washington-based KNKX. That tax dodge may have shortchanged Washington schools by $8 billion, based on at least one estimate KNKX found.

In its successful bid for the Amazon headquarters, Virginia gave $750 million in tax incentives to the company over the next 15 years. New York was prepared to give the company even more—$1.2 billion in tax incentives. Local public outcry resulted in the New York deal falling through.

From these two cities plus Nashville, where the company also has a new facility, Amazon was standing to gain more than $2.2 billion in tax incentives—money that would be withheld from public coffers that pay for education and other services.

“There’s also a very long history of businesses looking for ways to have free worker training centers,” Saltman added, “and a history of looking at schools as places where the goals of commercialization can be realized, either by selling stuff to schools or making money off what schools provide to businesses.”

Examples of businesses acting more like predators than partners in their relationships with public schools have been numerous and well-publicized.

And Amazon’s relationship with Virginia is already walking a precariously fine line between partner and predator.

At the same time that its HQ deal was going down, Amazon debuted new partnerships with four Virginia school districts to adopt the company’s AWS Educate program. According to a local business news outlet, “participating school districts will incorporate AWS Educate resources into their dual enrollment programs, allowing high school students to enroll for college classes that include the curriculum, as well as provide cloud credentialing for teachers.”

AWS Educate is “Amazon’s global initiative to provide resources for educators and students and build skills in cloud technology,” according to Silicon Angle.

AWS stands for Amazon Web Services, which is a product that schools can buy. “The AWS Cloud frees schools and districts from the distractions of managing infrastructure … so they can focus on students,” the company’s marketing pitch goes. “From back-end data management to virtual desktops, AWS offers tools so that every student gets the attention they need to thrive.”

The AWS division “generated $25 billion in sales last year—roughly the size of Starbucks,” according to a 2019 New York Times article, “and is Amazon’s most profitable business” with contracts from huge companies in retail, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, real estate, and other industries.

With Amazon’s ability to use AWS Educate as an entrée into a school district’s curriculum and teacher professional development programs, the company can create a relationship with the schools to sell its lucrative data storage contracts, which are the company’s “main profit driver,” according to Investopedia. Loudoun County, one of the school districts that adopted AWS Educate, has also inked a deal with AWS cloud services to transfer student data to the cloud and virtualize student desktops. “All of the backend infrastructure and computer power is in AWS,” a Loudoun school official says in a blog post announcement on the AWS website.

Saltman and the Virginia parents I spoke with point out that pairing AWS Educate with its cloud services gives Amazon a business model in which, potentially, students and teachers learning how to work in the cloud would generate the data for the company’s for-profit operation. “When students are a captive audience and the curriculum is oriented to producing data… that’s [potentially] a form of child labor,” Saltman said.

Clark sees this development as a “step further” in the predatory relationship between the private sector and public schools. “People who have money and power have been able to manipulate the tax structure, so they don’t have to pay their fair share of taxes to support schools. Now they get to come into struggling schools and take more money out by selling them products.”

Priorities Are Out of Whack

In a state with a history of being fiscally conservative, it’s surprising that so little concern is being expressed by public officials about the costs of the new tech education infrastructure.

While most of that money is to be spent initially on higher education initiatives, the trickle-down effect of more than doubling the number of tech graduates in the state requires huge investments in K-12 as well. Of the $1.1 billion the state is putting into its tech-talent pipeline, $25 million is expected to flow to new K-12 computer science programs.

“Building the tech-talent pipeline starts with a public K-12 system that includes an integrated STEM and computer science curriculum at every grade for every student,” says a statement by NOVA, a public partnership of communities in the northern part of the Commonwealth. NOVA has also partnered with Amazon Web Services to roll out associate and bachelor degree programs in cloud computing in community colleges and universities across the state.

Fairfax County, the largest school district in the state, has already announced its intention to double its tech pipeline in 20 years. According to Virginia Business, the CEO of the county economic development office said, “That effort has to start in pre-K.” And GO Virginia is prepared to match up to $410,000 in funding for what the county can spend to “fill the tech-talent pipeline.”

Grants from GO Virginia totaling $2.4 million have gone to Chesapeake and Loudoun County schools to invest in computer education.

Virginia Is for Learners, another state-sponsored initiative, has put funding into a network of teams from school divisions in Virginia across the state who will work on aligning schools to workforce needs.

State legislators from both political parties have complied by passing tech pipeline-related bills including one that requires the state to develop an online dashboard showing state and regional labor market and workforce statistics and one eliminating the “stigma associated with” CTE. A new bill would allow individuals to use their 529 accounts, tax-free savings set aside for college, to cover the costs of workforce training and credentialing programs. And another new bill will require students in grades six, seven, and eight to complete at least one semester-long or year-long computer science elective course or introduction to technology course.

All this splurging on tech talent has left many Virginians thinking their state has its education priorities way out of whack.

In the Education Law Center’s annual report card on school funding, it gave Virginia a D on funding adequacy (the cost-adjusted, per-pupil revenue from state and local sources), C on the fairness of the distribution (how funds are spread to districts with high levels of student poverty), and D on the state’s effort in the context of its overall economy (the level of investment in K-12 public education as a percentage of state wealth).

A 2019 analysis by Davis Burroughs for the independent news outlet the Dogwood reported that state funding for Virginia K-12 schools in the 2018–2019 school year is 9.1 percent per student less than it was 10 years before that. Because Virginia schools “receive $430 million less for support staff” than they did 10 years ago, school social workers, custodians, and psychologists have been drastically reduced.

Due to an aging school infrastructure—60 percent of Virginia schools are more than 40 years old—many schools are now in deplorable condition, but the state is short of an estimated $18 billion it would cost to renovate older schools.

A 2018 report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that in 2016, Virginia was spending 33 percent less than in 2008 on “school capital” projects, such as building new schools or renovating existing ones.

Chesterfield schools have acute infrastructure needs including deteriorating, unhealthy conditions in some of the district’s schools and overcrowded classrooms that push students into temporary trailers. Five schools have tested positive for the bacteria that can cause Legionnaire’s disease. An outside consultant the district hired to conduct a facilities assessment concluded the school system “had about $50 million in ‘immediate’ major maintenance needs, which he defined as ‘failure is imminent, if it has not failed already.’”

Burroughs quoted findings from an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute that put the state at 48th on the list of most underpaid teachers—behind only Washington and Arizona. “In the last four years, the weekly pay of Virginia teachers has fallen 31 percent behind the pay of other college-educated workers in the state,” he wrote. Consequently, Burroughs continued, the Learning Policy Institute (LPI) found that “the turnover rate for Virginia K-12 educators is higher than 44 states and the District of Columbia.”

A December 2019 report from the Virginia board of education asserted schools were plagued by “teacher shortages, under-funding, and ‘persistent achievement gaps,’” according to a local CBS affiliate. The report counted 900 unfilled teaching positions in the state.

In September 2018, with classes already started, Chesterfield still found itself short 27 teaching positions.

A big problem with funding, LPI’s report found, is that more of the burden for financing schools—51 percent on average—falls on the shoulders of local communities, thereby making it much more difficult for lower-income districts to finance school improvements and address rising costs.

Funding from the state has fallen “8 percent per student for the 2018-2019 school year… compared to 2009-2010” according to the report from the Virginia board of education. Schools have had to do more with less by cutting nearly 379 staff even though about 55,000 more students are enrolled in the system. A greater proportion of those students are also the costliest to educate. In the last 10 years, Virginia schools have added 31 percent more economically disadvantaged students, 23 percent more English learners, 164 percent more students identified with autism, and 34 percent more students with another kind of health impairment.

Virginia parents I spoke with hailed a recent change in the direction of state education funding, especially since the election of Democratic Governor Ralph Northam and a resurgence in Democratic membership in the state assembly. But the state still has a long way to go.

Reinforcing Inequity

When faced with criticism of the expanded role of businesses in education and the culture of fiscal austerity that characterizes school funding, free-market advocates push back by calling the public education system inefficient. They also claim that those who point to inadequate public school funding and problems of educating more kids in poverty as “overwhelming barriers” are making “excuses” for incompetence.

Many free-market advocates point to stagnation in test scores and rising costs as proof that educators are poor managers of the public school enterprise, and they argue for a greater presence in the classroom because they are the “largest… consumer” of the “products” produced by schools—an unfortunate metaphor since the word “consume” literally means to “use up.”

In a manifesto-like document put out by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 2011, authors Frederick Hess and Whitney Downs (both of the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing advocacy group based in Washington, D.C.) liken school districts to “troubled firm[s],” and they argue that “as business leaders know, if you head into a troubled firm with the attitude that your most important job is to be nice, you may not get very far.”

In testosterone-laden prose—the word “tough” appears 14 times—Hess and Downs advise business leaders, “Working with school districts or policymakers doesn’t mean carrying their water,” and, “Be a partner, not a pawn.” Their framing of the relationship between business and education as a “partnership” and “two-way street” strikes educators as deeply hypocritical. How often do corporate executives invading the education sphere solicit the advice of teachers before pushing their demands on schools?

When educators say, as Clark did during her panel remarks, “Sometimes what’s good for companies and what’s good for kids overlap, but sometimes those things will be at odds,” they should be taken seriously.

And it’s entirely reasonable to suggest, as McKenney told me, that “because money is a strong motivator, it’s alright to frame the conversation about whether business involvement in schools is about profit.”

Not everyone is going to agree with Saltman’s call for a “wall” between business and education. But we should heed his counsel that when considering an education that prepares students for the economy, we should ask, “What kind of economy do we want? We live in a world in which economic inequality and marginalization… [are] getting worse. We don’t want schools that reinforce this. If we want schools that prepare students for work, what kind of work are we talking about? Are we talking about preparing them for whatever jobs businesses want to give to them? Or do we want to prepare them to operate in an economy that’s more democratic?”

And when Amazon announces, as it did in early 2018, that it has invested another $50 million to boost computer science education, taken steps to “grow its footprint in classrooms across all grade levels in America,” and rolled out a new comprehensive program to promote computer science from “kindergarten to career,” we should be wary.

“These are the very same companies that have structured our economy in ways that keep my students in poverty,” Clark explained. “And now they’re going to come into my school and tell me they want to sell me something that will create equal opportunity for my students? I find the whole idea of that disgusting.”

This article was produced by Our Schools, a project of the Independent Media Institute, and is the second of a two-part series on Career and Technical Education (CTE). Click here to read part one.

Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm.

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Jim Biden was in a bind. An investor had put up $1 million to help Jim and his nephew Hunter buy a hedge fund. Then it turned out that the fund’s assets were worth less than the Bidens had thought. Now the investor wanted its money back.

It was December 2006, not long before Jim’s older brother and Hunter’s father, Joe Biden, then a Delaware senator, would announce his second campaign for president.

Jim and Hunter Biden got a loan from a bank founded by one of Joe’s political backers — William Oldaker, an attorney for the senator’s presidential campaign and Hunter’s partner at a Washington law and lobbying firm.

Oldaker had strong ties to Joe Biden’s political operation, and at the time, the bank, WashingtonFirst, had nearly half a million dollars in deposits from a Joe Biden political committee Oldaker had helped set up.

But WashingtonFirst was less than three years old, and a $1 million loan was large for its size. The bank required that loans be well secured by borrowers’ assets. Jim Biden put up his house in Merion Station, Pennsylvania, as collateral, but he already had $1.5 million in three mortgages against the property, then roughly valued at just over $1.1 million. Hunter offered as security his recently purchased Washington home, for which he had borrowed almost the entire purchase price. Oldaker did not return phone calls, and a source close to Jim and Sara Biden said all of their loans were properly secured.

It was not the first time — or the last — during his long career that Jim Biden turned to Joe’s political network for the kind of assistance that would have been almost unimaginable for someone with a different last name. Campaign donors helped him face a series of financial problems, including a series of IRS liens totaling more than $1 million that made it harder to get bank financing. Jim Biden took out two more loans from WashingtonFirst before its sale in 2018.

These transactions illuminate the well-synchronized tango that the Biden brothers have danced for half a century. They have pursued overlapping careers — one a presidential aspirant with an expansive network of well-heeled Democratic donors; the other an entrepreneur who helped his brother raise political money and cultivated the same network to help finance his own business deals.

Jim Biden, 70, has cycled over the years from nightclub owner to insurance broker to political consultant and fundraiser to startup investor and construction company executive. But the through line of his resume was his bond with his brother, a Democratic Party stalwart in a position to push legislation or make government contracts happen.

“My sense is that Jim really has been trying to peddle himself on the Biden name for some time,” said Curtis Wilkie, who covered the Bidens as a Delaware political reporter.

Spokespeople for Jim Biden and Joe’s presidential campaign declined interview requests for the brothers. In response to questions, campaign spokesman Andrew Bates said that Joe Biden had no involvement in Jim Biden’s loans and did not arrange for supporters to help his brother. Bates also said that the former vice president knew “nothing” about his brother’s investments and was unaware that Jim had often been delinquent on his federal taxes or that the IRS had placed liens on his home. Bates said Oldaker is not involved in the 2020 campaign.

“The vice president and his brother have always understood and agreed that James’ business ventures are separate from and independent of Joe Biden’s career in public life,” Bates said.

A source with knowledge of Jim Biden’s finances said that he and his wife, Sara, have sometimes failed to pay their taxes on time because “they are largely self-employed and sometimes have an unclear picture of how their year will end financially,” but that they have always paid in full, including interest and penalties.

Recognizing a potential minefield, Joe has avoided responsibility for or financial involvement in his brother’s ventures, according to longtime advisers. Yet on occasion, as Jim pursued opportunities, Joe met with his potential clients or partners, at Jim’s request.

In 2002, Joe addressed a Washington conference of the National Association of State Treasurers, whom Jim was courting on behalf of lawyers who wanted to represent state pension funds. “Jim offered that his brother,” who usually took the train home to Delaware in the evening, “was just happening to be in town,” said Pamela Taylor, then the group’s executive director. “He said: ‘He’s going to spend the night in D.C. Would you like him?’”

Taylor reached out to Joe, who had previously been invited by Delaware’s state treasurer but hadn’t firmly committed. Joe spoke to the group over breakfast, analyzing the prospects for war in Iraq. “It was perfect,” Taylor recalled.

Jim Biden has been at his older brother’s side at nearly every critical juncture in Joe’s personal and political life. As fundraiser for his brother’s first Senate race in 1972, he helped launch Joe’s political career.

That same year, Jim broke the news to Joe that his wife, Neilia, and baby had died in a car accident, and he then watched over his brother day and night. When Joe was hospitalized with a brain aneurysm more than 15 years later, it was Jim who “was working the phone,” looking worldwide for the best neurosurgeon, according to Richard Ben Cramer’s book, “What It Takes,” which profiled the candidates for president in 1988.

But Jim has also been a political vulnerability. While a plagiarism scandal put pressure on Joe to drop out of the presidential race in 1987, protecting his brother from reporters asking about Jim’s shaky finances was the final impetus for Joe’s withdrawal, according to Cramer. “They were going after Jimmy; it wasn’t just Joe anymore,” Cramer wrote.

In the 2020 campaign, Joe’s family ties have again dogged him. President Donald Trump’s impeachment stemmed from allegations that he sought to damage Joe, a potential reelection opponent, by pushing Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden’s relationship with a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma. Joe promised to establish clear boundaries for family business ventures.

Those close to Joe Biden say his relationship with Jim illustrates his fierce family loyalty. In the 2020 race, one adviser said, Jim “is trying very hard to stay out of the limelight.”

“For all his — let me find a kind word for it — entrepreneurship, Jimmy understands that he needs to keep his business separate from Joe’s career. Whether his relationships with unions, treasurers, law firms are the result of people who want to be nice to Jimmy because he’s Joe’s brother, that’s a thankless position to be in,” the adviser said.

In his 2007 autobiography, “Promises to Keep,” Joe gave a sense of Jim’s priorities. In the 1972 Senate campaign, Joe wrote, he changed his position on a capital gains tax reduction that would benefit potential big donors. Jim, his chief fundraiser, stewed for hours and then warned him, “I sure in hell hope you feel that strongly about capital gains because you just lost the election.” (Joe Biden won the race.)

It wasn’t their only clash. During Joe’s abortive presidential campaign in 2007, a Biden aide said, Jim “raised almost no money. He came in at the end when we were the most desperate.” Asked why, the insider said, “Family tensions.” At the same time, “there were always questions around Jimmy’s business dealings — what kind of blowback would there be for the campaign?”

Their upbringing shaped the brothers differently. Their father, Joseph R. Biden Sr., known as Big Joe, was a Wilmington car salesman. Joe later wrote that “money was so tight … I had to put cardboard in an old shoe until Dad’s next payday.”

Hard times kept the family close. “We could fight among ourselves inside the house, but we were not allowed to say a single syllable against a sibling on the outside,” Joe continued. One family friend said the Bidens’ struggles “rubbed off on how each of the boys were wired. With Joe it translated into, ‘I want respect.’ With Jimmy it translated into, ‘I want money.’”

Joe won a scholarship to the elite Archmere Academy and became a football star and class president. In 1962, he was a pool lifeguard in a predominantly African American Wilmington neighborhood, an experience he credits with helping him to understand race relations. He graduated from the University of Delaware and Syracuse University Law School.

Jim, six and a half years younger, went to local public schools. He was “aloof and had, perhaps, a bit of an attitude,” said classmate Steven Bennett. “Good luck in Senior High,” Jim wrote in Bennett’s junior high yearbook. “You’ll need it.” Jim studied at the University of Delaware over four semesters but did not earn a degree there, according to a university spokesperson.

Jim went into the nightclub business soon after Joe’s first Senate victory. With funding from Wilmington’s Farmers Bank, Jim and four partners operated a restaurant-lounge, Seasons Change. Its formula of dance music and Top 40 hits caught on, and when a larger space became available, Jim opened another club called The Other Side.

“They had a helluva run for a couple of years,” recalled Bob Bowersox, a band booker for both clubs who now runs a theater company in Key West, Florida.

Jim reported a net worth of about $10,000, but he and a partner were able to borrow $300,000 from First Pennsylvania Bank of Philadelphia for the expansion. His brother then sat on the Senate Banking Committee.

The Other Side made a splash, but not a profit. “I was a naive kid is what it was,” Jim told the Sunday News Journal in Wilmington in 1977.

Seasons Change folded in 1978 with more than half a million dollars in debts. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which had assumed the Farmers Bank loans, sued Jim and his partners in 1980 for more than $168,000. (ProPublica could find no record of the lawsuit’s resolution.) By then, Jim had left the nightclub business, and Wilmington, for California.

“I remember as a banker thinking, ‘Thank God, I didn’t finance it,’” said Fred Sears, a retired Wilmington banker and Biden family friend. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, is this going to spill over to Joe?’”

Three former Farmers Bank officers told the Wilmington Morning News in 1977 that they had financed Seasons Change because they believed the Biden name “would help attract a trendy free-spending crowd.”

And Joe Biden had called Farmers chairman to complain about a bank vice president threatening Jim, telling him that failure to pay would embarrass Joe. “They were trying to use me as a bludgeon,” Joe told the newspaper.

William Oldaker was not the only Joe Biden ally to boost Jim’s career or lend him money.

In the mid-1980s, Jim worked for a consulting and actuarial firm for employee pension plans headed by Joel Boyarsky, national finance chairman for Joe’s unsuccessful 1987 presidential bid. He and Jim did fundraising together for Joe.

As a Biden, Jim “gave me credibility,” said Boyarsky, now 81.

Boyarsky not only taught Jim about pensions but also helped him financially when Jim and Sara, a former Government Printing Office general counsel, bought a $650,000 villa outside Philadelphia.

The sellers gave them a full mortgage. And on the 1997 purchase date, Boyarsky also loaned them as much as $200,000, records show. Boyarsky said he may have made the loan but doesn’t remember it.

The next year, the IRS filed its first lien against Jim’s home to recover about $145,000 for two years of his overdue federal taxes.

The Bidens finished repaying Boyarsky in 2000. They borrowed more than $350,000 that year from Leonard Barrack, a Philadelphia lawyer and former DNC finance chairman. Joe Biden, the Senate Judiciary chairman, had named Barrack, a campaign donor, to his honorary council of advisers. A few months after the Barrack loan, Jim paid off the IRS.

Instead, the firm alleged, Jim and Sara had used law firm resources to fuel their consulting company, the Lion Hall Group. The law firm said that it had paid Sara nearly $250,000, plus salary, for the couple to travel to Alaska, Hawaii, France and Italy.

Jim and Sara countersued and the parties reached a settlement in 2004, although its terms are unclear. Barrack did not respond to requests for comment.

The loan from Barrack was satisfied in May 2004, records show. A few months later, the couple borrowed $400,000 from businessman Thomas Knox, a Joe Biden donor and fundraiser who ran unsuccessfully for Philadelphia mayor in 2007. Jim Biden, a donor to Knox’s campaign, finished paying the loan in 2013.

Jim “has been a friend of mine for a while,” Knox said, adding that he may have met Joe through Jim. “There is nothing nefarious here.”

Roy Pinto was among those who discovered that Jim’s business ventures, like Joe’s campaigns, were a family affair.

In 2006, Pinto became vice chair of Corrections USA, an advocacy group for public prison guards. One of its members’ needs, he knew, was better insurance coverage. They worked dangerous jobs in buildings that were often antiquated and overcrowded. Disability insurance was limited to job injuries; if a stress-related condition flared up in retirement, they had to pay out of pocket.

So Pinto solicited bidders to supply comprehensive insurance for his then-8,000 members. A little-known brokerage, Biden & Caveney LLC, expressed interest. The firm had been established when Edward Caveney, who had negotiated insurance deals for dozens of Massachusetts cities and towns, hooked up with Jim Biden. They met through Boston connections, including Larry Rasky, a public relations consultant who had been communications director for both of Joe Biden’s presidential campaigns.

“Ed’s the guy with the feet on the street, (Jim) Biden would provide the name and contacts,” said one insurance executive who worked with Caveney.

Part of the brokerage’s strategy was to parlay the Biden name into access to law enforcement unions and organizations that admired Joe’s support for police. At one event, held in a luxury box at Fenway Park during a Boston Red Sox game, Jim courted representatives of police and firefighter organizations, with the help of James Machado, executive director of the Massachusetts Police Association.

Machado said in an interview that he was friendly with Caveney, who had pitched insurance products to law enforcement before. When Caveney asked for help and mentioned the Biden connection, Machado agreed. He had only met Jim once, but he’d known Joe “way back when,” and his police association had honored Joe.

“We provided an entree into some of the police departments for them to try and go in and pitch that product,” Machado recalled. “I was familiar with the Bidens. I felt comfortable with the Bidens.

Caveney also hoped that Jim Biden could help him grow business beyond Massachusetts, where he’d been entangled in a controversy. As insurance broker for Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Caveney let what was known as its “stop loss” coverage for employees’ health care lapse — despite taking almost $300,000 in city money to pay for it.

As a result, the city was exposed to $628,000 in claims. It was a “deep, deep shock,” said its treasurer, David Kiley. In the ensuing furor, Kiley was forced to resign, the mayor decided not to seek reelection and the Massachusetts attorney general launched an investigation into the city’s finances. Caveney reimbursed the $628,000 and half of his fee and was not criminally charged.

Pinto, the Corrections USA vice chair, was unaware of this incident. He was a registered Republican, but he admired Joe Biden’s criminal justice record. In meetings with Corrections USA executives, Jim and his partner offered an attractive package and emphasized their Washington clout. Jim “makes sure he tells you his brother is Joe Biden,” Pinto said. “‘We’re brothers, we’re close.’”

One day in 2007, Pinto recalled, was an all-out Biden blitz. In the morning, he and other Corrections USA executives took Amtrak from Philadelphia to Washington for meetings. When Jim boarded in Delaware, he “brought Joe back to say hello,” Pinto recalled.

On Capitol Hill, Pinto’s group met with the senator, who chaired the Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on crime and drugs. Pinto had his photo taken with Joe, and a Biden aide discussed the group’s priorities. That evening, Pinto said, they dined with Hunter Biden, then a lobbyist with Oldaker in Washington.

Biden & Caveney gave a benefits overview at the group’s annual conference.

Then the deal fell apart. Pinto and another association executive said the group balked at Jim’s demand for an unusual arrangement to pay Biden & Caveney’s fees. They had assumed that Corrections USA would pay the fees out of member dues. But Jim insisted that the guards pay all dues — roughly $750,000 a year, deducted automatically from their paychecks — to Biden & Caveney. It would keep its fees of about $120,000 and disburse the rest to Corrections USA.

Spokespeople for Jim Biden and the Biden campaign disputed Pinto’s account of the breakup but did not explain why.

After registering as an insurance agent in at least 10 states, Biden & Caveney dissolved in 2011, records show. Dennis DiMarzio, formerly an insurance executive and Boston’s chief operating officer, who helped Biden & Caveney land government contracts, said that Caveney ended the partnership.

“In spite of the name Biden, I don’t think Jimmy was successful in bringing in contracts, which is surprising, because the name carries a lot of weight,” he said.

Both ex-partners stayed in the benefits business. Caveney established an employee benefits firm in Puerto Rico. Approached at his Massachusetts home, Caveney declined comment. Later, he did not return phone messages.

Jim Biden and his wife are principals of BBS Benefits Solutions in Connecticut, which caters to large employers and labor unions.

Its motto: “When families feel secure about their future, they can have peace of mind for today.”

Ed Caveney had problems in Pittsfield before he hooked up with Jim Biden. Some of Jim’s other associates encountered legal trouble after he worked with them — or while they were discussing potential partnerships.

In August 2007, Jim accompanied Joe to Oxford, Mississippi. The senator was running for president, and his supporters were holding a fundraiser for him at the Oxford University Club.

Among the hosts was plaintiff’s attorney Dickie Scruggs, dubbed “America’s most powerful trial lawyer” in a book by Wilkie, who teaches journalism at the University of Mississippi. Unbeknownst to Joe, Scruggs was then under federal investigation for bribing a local judge. The brother-in-law of former Republican Senate majority leader Trent Lott, Scruggs had gained fame — and nearly a billion dollars — by brokering a landmark 1998 settlement with four major tobacco companies, which paid more than $200 billion to 46 states to resolve tobacco-related health care claims.

That deal had come after the companies and state attorneys general first sought to wrap the state cases in a single federal settlement requiring the companies to pay more than $360 billion. As the bill reached the Senate, Scruggs retained Jim and Sara Biden’s Lion Hall Group to lobby for its passage.

In a lawsuit deposition, Scruggs vaguely explained Jim and Sara Biden’s role. “I’m not sure they’re lobbyists, but they are a firm that’s headed up by … the person I deal with in the firm, I don’t know who heads it up, is a gentleman named James or Jim Biden, B-I-D-E-N, who’s the brother of Sen. Joseph Biden,” he said. “And he gave us a great deal of advice about what was going on on Capitol Hill during the tobacco legislative effort.”

The bill, which Joe Biden supported, died in the Senate. Scruggs then crafted the settlement with the states, which did not require congressional approval.

Nine years later, when Jim came to Oxford, his old tobacco connections offered a new business opportunity. Among the other fundraiser hosts were Scruggs associates Steve Patterson and Timothy Balducci. Patterson was a former state auditor who resigned in 1996 and pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of filing a false affidavit to keep from paying county taxes. A former aide to Mississippi Sen. John C. Stennis, Patterson had raised money for Joe Biden’s 1987 presidential bid.

At the time of the fundraiser, Patterson and Balducci, a lawyer, were looking for a Washington presence for a practice they were setting up in New Albany, Mississippi.

They added Sara Biden to the venture, to be called Patterson Balducci & Biden. But it collapsed as a federal bribery investigation caught Balducci on wiretaps arranging a $40,000 bribe for a local judge.

Balducci pleaded guilty and turned over details of the scheme that drew in Patterson, Scruggs and others. All pleaded guilty.

One of Scruggs’ lawyers early in the case was Joey Langston, who would soon plead guilty in another Scruggs-related judicial bribery case. Langston had hosted fundraisers for Joe Biden and solicited the senator’s legislative help.

Despite Langston’s guilty plea and subsequent disbarment, he and Jim Biden eventually became business associates. Both showed up as managers in Earthcare Trina International, a marketing firm affiliated with a Sacramento, California, health care company called Trina Healthcare.

“Biden was going to have a big bite of the apple,” said Shad Ellison, a corporate dealmaker who was asked to help raise money to open medical clinics that would administer Trina’s new diabetes treatment.

Trina’s “artificial pancreas treatment” was controversial. The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services had stopped paying for the procedure in 2009, citing evidence that it doesn’t improve health outcomes. The American Diabetes Association agreed. Nevertheless, Trina’s founder, lawyer G. Ford Gilbert, tried to push a bill through the Alabama Legislature requiring private insurers to cover the treatment. He pleaded guilty in January 2019 to federal bribery charges and was sentenced to six months in prison.

Langston did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for Jim Biden did not respond to emailed questions about Trina.

In December 2013, Jim and Sara Biden invested $2.5 million in a luxury vacation home on Keewaydin Island near Naples, Florida. The six-bedroom house can only be reached by boat, and Joe Biden vacationed there when he was vice president.

While Jim and Sara Biden racked up renovation debts, the IRS slapped them with another $589,000 lien for unpaid 2013 federal taxes.

The financial obligations led them to another Joe Biden supporter. In May 2015, as first reported by Politico, they got a $500,000 mortgage loan from a corporation recently set up by auto dealer John Hynansky. Hynansky’s corporation at the time already had a mortgage on Jim and Sara Biden’s Pennsylvania house, records show. Hynansky did not return phone calls.

The Bidens paid the back taxes and then unloaded the Florida house for $1.35 million in 2018. Hynansky’s company released its mortgages on both properties.

One of Jim’s old patrons came to his aid as well. Oldaker — whose WashingtonFirst Bank loaned Jim and Hunter $1 milion in 2006 — is now a founder and director at a new bank, Trustar, based in Virginia. Jim Biden got a $250,000 loan from Trustar last December, records show. He secured it with another mortgage on his Pennsylvania house, which is now on the market for just under $2 million.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Extreme wind gusts, blowing snow and widespread flooding made traveling treacherous on Friday as a storm system moved into the northeastern United States, leaving rising water and at least five deaths in its wake across the South.

More than 400,000 homes and businesses were without power Friday after the National Weather Service warned of gusts up to 60 mph (97 kph) from Virginia into New England. Falling trees damaged homes and power lines in many places. North Carolina and Virginia, where hundreds of people had to be pulled from flooded homes, had the most customers without electricity, according to poweroutages.us.

With water levels were rising fast after up to 8 inches (20 centimeters) of rain in just three days, the Tennessee Valley Authority said it began making controlled releases from some of its 49 dams in Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama and North Carolina. That could lead to more flooding downstream, so people who live near the water should be wary, said James Everett, senior manager of the utility’s river forecast center in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Creek water was still raging Friday in Alabama’s Buck’s Pocket State Park, where a person was seen inside a car as it disappeared under the surface two days earlier. Rangers walked for miles above the swollen creek but found no trace of the vehicle, so authorities sent up a state helicopter crew on Friday.

“The weather is better, but the water is not. The water is several feet higher than normal. It’s extremely high and fast.” Alabama Trooper Chuck Daniel told The Associated Press. “Until that water slows down, nobody’s going to get in that water.”

It took nearly three weeks last year to recover the body of an 18-year-old who was in a Jeep that got swept into the water in the same area.

The National Weather Service was using radar data and making damage assessments to confirm many reports of tornadoes touching down, including spots in Virginia and Maryland, near the nation’s capital, meteorologist Isha Renta told the AP. In the Tampa, Florida, area, tornadoes blew a tree onto a mobile home, trapping an elderly woman, and toppled a construction crane along interstate 275.

The dangerous winds formed the leading edge of a band of weather that stretched from Tennessee to Maine on Friday, blowing snow into northern states. As much as 4 inches (10 centimeters) fell overnight in Ohio, contributing to car accidents in the Akron area, and the Ohio Department of Transportation urged people to make room for nearly 1,300 state crews working to improve the icy conditions.

Up to 8 inches (20 centimeters) of snow was predicted in West Virginia, and Gov. Ralph Northam declared a state of emergency in Virginia, where he said more than 500 people had to be rescued from their homes as the waters rose.

Citing floods, rain, snow, power outages or all of the above, many school districts canceled classes in state after state.

Earlier, the weather destroyed mobile homes in Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, caused mudslides in Tennessee and Kentucky and flooded communities that shoulder waterways across the Appalachian region.

Authorities confirmed five storm-related fatalities, in Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina and Tennessee.

Anita Rembert was killed and her husband was injured, but their child and two grandchildren were unhurt as high winds destroyed two mobile homes near the town of Demopolis, Alabama, according to the county’s emergency management director, Kevin McKinney. They emerged to a scene littered with plywood, insulation, broken trees and twisted metal.

At least four other people died in vehicles that were hit by falling trees or lost control in heavy rain or floods. Authorities pleaded with motorists to avoid driving where they can’t see the pavement.

A driver died in South Carolina when a tree fell on an SUV near Fort Mill, Highway Patrol Master Trooper Gary Miller said. The driver’s name wasn’t immediately released.

In North Carolina’s Gaston County, Terry Roger Fisher was killed after his pickup truck hydroplaned in heavy rain, plunged down a 25-foot (8-meter) embankment and overturned in a creek, the North Carolina State Highway Patrol said, according to news outlets.

An unidentified man died and two others were injured Thursday when a car hydroplaned in Knoxville, Tennessee, and hit a truck, police said in a news release.

And in Tennessee, 36-year-old teacher Brooke Sampson was killed and four people were injured when a rain-soaked tree fell on a van carrying Sevierville city employees, officials said. The crash, though still under investigation, appeared to have been weather-related according to preliminary information, said Tennessee Highway Patrol spokesman Lt. Bill Miller.

There’s little room to relax after this storm blows through, because there’s more wild weather to come.

“We do expect another storm system to come along about midweek next week and bring heavy precipitation to some of the same areas that just saw it over the past 24 hours. So something to keep an eye on for next week,” meteorologist Greg Carbin of the Weather Prediction Center told the AP.

Schools around New York were closed as the storm moved through the state. Operators of the Thruway reduced the highway’s speed limit from 65 mph (105 kph) to 45 mph (72 kph) across more than 100 miles (160 kilometers) amid snowy, icy conditions.

In northern New York, an ice storm left more than 35,000 customers without power as falling tree limbs brought down power lines.

Associated Press staffers Jeff Martin in Atlanta; Ben Finley in Norfolk, Virginia.; Tamara Lush in Tampa, Florida; Adrian Sainz in Memphis, Tennessee; John Raby in Charleston, West Virginia; and Andrew Welsh-Huggins in Columbus, Ohio; contributed to this report.

So you won’t be surprised to learn that its front page was essentially all Iran and The Donald. Atop it, there was a large photo of the president heading for a podium with his generals and officials lined up on either side of him. Its caption read: “‘The United States is ready to embrace peace with all who seek it,’ President Trump said Wednesday at the White House.” Beside it, the lead story was headlined “U.S. and Iranians Lower Tensions, at Least for Now.” Below were three more Iran-related pieces, taking up much of the rest of the page. (“A President’s Mixed Messages Unsettle More Than Reassure,” etc.)

At the bottom left, there was a fifth Iran-related article. Inside that 24-page section of the paper, there were seven more full pages of coverage on the subject. Only one other piece of hot news could be squeezed (with photo) onto the bottom right of the front page. And whether you still read actual papers or now live only in the world of the Internet, I doubt you’ll be shocked to learn that it focused on Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, already involved in a crisis among the British Royals that was almost Iranian in its intensity. The headline: “In Stunning Step, Duke and Duchess Seek New Title: Part-Timers.”

Had you then followed the “continued on page A5” below that piece, you would have found the rest of the story about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex (including a second photo of them and an ad for Bloomingdales, the department store) taking up almost all of that inside page. If, however, you had been in a particularly attentive mood, you might also have noticed, squeezed in at the very bottom left of page 5, an 11-paragraph story by Henry Fountain. It had been granted so little space that the year 2019 had to be abbreviated as ’19 in its headline, which read in full: “’19 Was the 2nd-Hottest Year, And July Hottest Month Yet.”

Of course, that literally qualified as the hottest story of the day, but you never would have known it. It began this way:

“The evidence mounted all year. Temperature records were broken in France, Germany and elsewhere; the Greenland ice sheet experienced exceptional melting; and, as 2019 came to a close, broiling temperatures contributed to devastating wildfires that continue in Australia. Now European scientists have confirmed what had been suspected: 2019 was a very hot year, with global average temperatures the second highest on record. Only 2016 was hotter, and not by much — less than one-tenth of a degree Fahrenheit.”

As Fountain pointed out, however briefly, among the records broken in 2019, “The past five years have been the five warmest on record” (as had the last decade).

In another world, either that line or the actual headline should reasonably have been atop that Times front page in blazing letters. After all, that’s the news that someday could do us all in, whatever happens in Iran or to the British royal family. In my own dreamscape, that piece, headlined atop the front page, would have been continued on the obituary page. After all, the climate crisis could someday deliver an obituary for humanity and so many other living things on this planet, or at least for the way of life we humans have known throughout our history.

If you live online and were looking hard, you could have stumbled on the same news, thanks, say, to a similar CNN report on the subject, but it wasn’t the equivalent of headlines there either. Just another hot year… bleh. Who’s going to pay real attention when war with Iran lurks just beneath the surface and Harry and Meghan are heading for Canada?

To give credit where it’s due, however, a week later when that climate news was confirmed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, as well as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, it did finally hit the front page of the January 16th edition of the paper Times. Of course, I wouldn’t be writing this if it had been the day’s blazing headline, but that honor went to impeachment proceedings and a photo of the solemn walk of the seven House impeachment managers, as well as the clerk and sergeant-at-arms, delivering those articles to the Senate.

That photo and two stories about impeachment dominated the top of the page. Trump’s “phase 1” trade deal with China got the mid-page area and various other stories (“Warren Confronts the Skeptics Who Fear Her Plans Go Too Far”) were at page bottom. Stuck between the impeachment headliners and the Warren story was, however, a little insert. You might think of it as the news equivalent of a footnote. It had a tiny chart of global temperatures, 1880 to 2019, a micro-headline (“Warmer and Warmer”), and a note that read: “In the latest sign of global warming’s grip on the planet, the past decade was the hottest on record, researchers said. Page A8.” And, indeed, on that page was Henry Fountain’s latest story on the subject.

As it happened, between the 9th and 16th of January, yet more news about our heating planet had come out that, in a sense, was even grimmer. A new analysis found that the oceans, sinkholes for the heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions, had also experienced their hottest five years on record (ditto for the last decade). In their case, however, 2019 was the very hottest, not the second hottest, year so far. And that, too, was a Times story, but only online.

Two Kinds of Time

Now, I don’t want you to misunderstand me here. The New York Times is anything but a climate change-denying newspaper. It has some superb environmental and global-warming coverage (including of Australia recently) by top-of-the-line journalists like Somini Sengupta. It’s in no way like Fox News or the rest of Rupert Murdoch’s fervently climate-denying media organization that happens to control more than 70% of newspaper circulation in burning Australia.

The situation I’ve been describing is, I suspect, far more basic and human than that and — my guess — it has to do with time. The time all of us are generally plunged into is, naturally enough, human time, which has a certain obvious immediacy for us — the immediacy, you might say, of everyday life. In human time, for instance, an autocratic-minded showman like Donald Trump can rise to the presidency, be impeached, and fall, or be impeached, stay in office, and pass on his “legacy” to his children until something new comes along to make its mark, fail or end in its own fashion, and go the way of… well, of all of us. That’s human history, again and again.

And then there’s the time-scape of global warming, which exists on a scale hard for us mortals to truly take in. After all, whatever Donald Trump might do won’t last long, not really — with two possible exceptions: the use of nuclear weapons in an apocalyptic fashion or the help he’s offering fossil-fuel companies in putting yet more greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, while working to limit the development of alternative energy, both of which will only make the climate crisis to come yet more severe.

Otherwise, his time is all too human. With our normally far less than century-long life spans, we are, in the end, such immediate creatures. Climate change, even though human-caused, works on another scale entirely. Once its effects are locked in, we’re not just talking about 2100 or 2150, dates hard enough for us to get our brains (no less our policy-making) around, but hundreds of years, even millennia. Though we’ve known about climate change for many decades now, we’re dealing with a time scale that our brains simply aren’t prepared to fully take in.

When weighing an Iranian drone assassination or a presidential impeachment or the latest development in election 2020 against news of the long-term transformation of this planet, no matter how disastrous, the immediate tends to win out, whether you’re a New York Times editor or just about anyone else.

It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that it’s been so difficult to truly grasp the import of the warming of this planet, because its effects have, until now, generally been relatively subtle or challenging to grasp. When The Donald is in the White House or Harry and Meghan cause a stir or an Iranian major general is assassinated, that’s riveting, graspable, headlines. Those heating waters, those warming temperatures, the bleaching of coral reefs, the melting of ice shields in Greenland, the Arctic, and the Antarctic leading to rising sea levels that could one day drown coastal cities, maybe not so much, not deep down, not where it truly counts.

The Burning

The real question is: When will climate change truly enter human time — when, that is, will the two time scales intersect in a way that clicks? Perhaps (but just perhaps) we’re finally seeing the beginning of an answer to that question for which you would, I suspect, have to thank two phenomena: Greta Thunberg and Australia’s fires.

In August 2018, all alone, the 15-year-old Thunberg began a Friday school strike in front of the Swedish parliament in Stockholm to make a point: that however all-encompassing the present human moment might seem, she understood in a way that mattered how her future and that of her peers was being stolen by the adults in charge of this planet and the climate crisis they were continuing to feed. The movement of the young she sparked, one that’s still sparking, was a living, breathing version of those two times intersecting. In other words, she somehow grasped and transmitted in a compelling way how a future crisis of staggering proportions was being nailed in place in human time, right at that very moment.

And then, of course, there was — there is — Australia. But one more thing before I get to the devastation of that country. I began writing this piece in New York City on a weekend in January when the temperature hit a record-breaking 65-69 degrees, depending on where in the metropolitan area you were measuring. (A couple of hundred miles north in Boston, it hit 74 degrees!) It was glorious, spring-like, idyllic, everything a human being in “winter” could want — if, that is, you hadn’t made it past Meghan and Harry or Suleimani and Trump, and so didn’t have a sense of what such records might mean on a planet threatening to heat to the boiling point in the coming century. We’re talking, of course, about a world in which Donald Trump and crew were responding to climate change by attempting to open the taps on every kind of fossil fuel and the greenhouse gas emissions that go with their burning. Meanwhile, despite the news that, by 2100, parts of the North China plain with its hundreds of millions of inhabitants could be too hot for habitation, China’s leaders were still pushing a global Belt and Road Initiative that involves the building of at least 63 new coal-fired power plants in 23 countries. Huzzah! And remember that China and the United States are already the top two emitters of greenhouses gases.

Of course, tell that to the Australians whose country, by the way, is the world’s third largest exporter of fossil fuels. For the last month or more, it’s also been a climate-change disaster area of a previously unimaginable sort. Even if you haven’t taken in the acreage that fire has already destroyed (estimated to be the size of South Korea or the state of Virginia) — fire that, by the way, is making its own weather — you’ve certainly seen the coverage of the dead or hurt koalas and roos, right? Maybe you’ve even seen the estimate by one scientist — no way to confirm it yet — that a billion creatures (yes, 1,000,000,000) might already have died in those fires and it’s still not the height of the Australian summer or fire season.

In some fashion, as a climate-change disaster, Australia seems to have broken through. (It probably doesn’t hurt that it has all those cute, endangered animals.) Looking back, we earthlings may someday conclude that, with Greta and with Australia burning, the climate crisis finally began breaking into human time. Yes, there was that less than Edenic November of 2018 in Paradise, California, and there have been other weather disasters, including hurricanes Maria and Dorian, that undoubtedly were heightened by climate-change, but Australia may be the first time that the climate-change time-scape and human history have intersected in a way that truly mattered.

And although, in the midst of winter, this country isn’t burning, we do have something else in common with those Australians: a nation being run by arsonists, by genuine pyromaniacs. After all, earlier in his coal-fired career, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison brought a literal lump of coal into that country’s parliament, soothingly reassuring the other members that “this is coal. Don’t be afraid. Don’t be scared.”

In the election he won in 2019 (against a Labor Party promoting action on climate change), he was in big coal’s back pocket. And like our president, his government has been messing with international attempts to deal with the climate crisis ever since. Again like our president, he’s also been an open denier of the very reality of climate change and so one of a crew of right-wing global leaders seemingly intent on setting this planet afire.

Climate-Change Previews?

Years ago, in my apartment building, someone dozed off while smoking in bed, starting a fire a couple of floors below me. I noticed only when the smoke began filtering under my door. Opening it, I found the hall filled with smoke. Heading downstairs wasn’t an option. In fact, a couple who had tried to do so were trapped on my floor and I quickly took them in. I barely had time to panic, however, before I heard the sirens of the first fire engines. Not long after, the doorbell rang and two firemen were there, instructing me to open all the windows and stuff towels at the bottom of the door to keep the smoke out. I’m sure I’ve never been so happy to greet someone at my door.

That fire was, in the end, contained inside the apartment where it started and I was in no danger, but peering into that smoke-filled hallway I would never have known it. The memory of that long-lost afternoon came back to me in the context of burning Australia, a country where fire fighters had been desperately at work for weeks without being able to douse the hundreds of blazes across that drought-stricken land, which has also recently experienced record high temperatures. It’s been the definition of a living nightmare.

And here’s what I began to wonder on this newest version of planet Earth: Are we all in some sense Australians, whether we know it or not? I don’t mean that as an empathetic statement of solidarity with the suffering people of that land (though I do feel for them). I mean it as a statement of grim fact. Admittedly, it won’t be fire for all of us. For some, it will be rising sea levels, flooding of a never-before-experienced sort, storms or heat waves of a previously unimagined ferocity, and so on.

Still, right now, Australia is our petri dish and unless we get rid of the arsonists who are running too many countries and figure out a way to come together in human time, we’re likely to enter a world where there will be no fire fighters to save us (or our children and grandchildren). Climate change, after all, looks to be nature’s slo-mo version of nuclear war.

In movie terms, think of Australia as the previews. For most of us, the main feature is still to come. The problem is that the schedule for that feature may not be found in your local paper.

RICHMOND, Va. — Police are scouring the internet for clues about plans for mayhem, workers are putting up chain-link holding pens around Virginia’s picturesque Capitol Square, and one lawmaker even plans to hide in a safe house in advance of what’s expected to be an unprecedented show of force by gun-rights activists.

What is provoking their anger in this once reliably conservative state is the new Democratic majority leadership and its plans to enact a slew of gun restrictions. This clash of old and new has made Virginia — determined to prevent a replay of the Charlottesville violence in 2017 — ground zero in the nation’s raging debate over gun control.

The Virginia Citizens Defense League’s yearly rally at the Capitol typically draws just a few hundred gun enthusiasts. This year, however, thousands of gun activists are expected to turn out. Second Amendment groups have identified the state as a rallying point for the fight against what they see as a national erosion of gun rights.

“We’re not going to be quiet anymore. We’re going to fight them in the courts and on the ground. The illegal laws they’re proposing are just straight up unconstitutional,” said Timothy Forster, of Chesterfield, Virginia, an NRA member who had one handgun strapped to his shoulder and another tucked into his waistband as he stood outside a legislative office building earlier this week.

VCDL president Philip Van Cleave said he’s heard from groups around the country that plan to send members to Virginia, including the Nevada-based, far-right Oath Keepers, which has promised to organize and train armed posses and militia.

Extremist groups have blanketed social media and online forums with ominous messages and hinted at potential violence. The FBI said it arrested three men linked to a violent white supremacist group Thursday who were planning to attend the rally in Richmond, according to a law enforcement official who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to discuss an active investigation.

Democrats have permanently banned guns inside the Capitol, and Gov. Ralph Northam declared a temporary state of emergency Wednesday that bans all weapons, including guns, from Capitol Square, during the rally to prevent “armed militia groups storming our Capitol.” Gun-rights groups asked the Virginia Supreme Court to rule Northam’s declaration unconstitutional, but the court on Friday upheld the ban.

Northam said there were credible threats of violence — like weaponized drones being deployed over Capitol Square. On Friday, the FAA issued a temporary flight restriction, including for drones, over Capitol airspace during the rally.

The governor said some of the rhetoric used by groups planning to attend Monday’s rally is reminiscent of that used ahead of the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville in August 2017. One woman was killed and more than 30 other people were hurt when a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters there.

The Virginia State Police, the Virginia Capitol Police and the Richmond Police are all coordinating the event and have plans for a huge police presence at Monday’s rally that will include both uniformed and plainclothes officers. Police plan to limit access to Capitol Square to only one entrance and have warned rally-goers that they may have to wait hours to get past security screening.

Nonessential state staff were being told to stay away. Del. Lee Carter, a Democratic Socialist, said he’s planning to spend Monday at an undisclosed location because of threats he has received.

“I ain’t interested in martyrdom,” Carter tweeted.

Northam lamented that such precautions were necessary for what’s been a peaceful yearly event, but said pro-gun activists have “unleashed something larger, something they may not be able to control.”

The pushback against proposed new gun restrictions began immediately after Democrats won majorities in both the state Senate and House of Delegates in November. Much of the opposition has focused on a proposed assault weapons ban, which would affect thousands of owners of the popular AR-15-style rifles. One version of the bill, which Democrats later disavowed, would have required current owners of the rifles to turn them in or face felony charges.

That bill was the spark that created the massive pushback, according to Sen. Creigh Deeds, one of the few moderate Democrats left in Virginia who represents rural areas.

“That allowed people who like to inflame passions to say, ‘Look, they’re really coming after your guns, they’re coming after you,’” Deeds said.

Thousands of gun owners from around the state packed municipal meetings to urge local officials to declare their communities “Second Amendment Sanctuaries” opposed to “unconstitutional” gun restrictions like universal background checks. More than 125 cities, towns and counties have approved sanctuary resolutions in Virginia.

Gun-control advocates, meanwhile, have also been flocking to Richmond to show their support for the proposed legislation. More than 200 volunteers with Moms Demand Action held a rally on Jan. 6. Gun control became a leading issue in the 2019 Virginia legislative elections after a city employee in Virginia Beach opened fire on his co-workers in May, killing 12 and injuring four others.

Janet Woody, a retired librarian from Richmond and a Moms volunteer, said she believes the proposed package of legislation can help reduce gun violence.

“I just feel so angry and helpless because of all these massacres,” she said. “You can call your legislator or write, but there comes a point where you just have to get out in the street.”