Seven steps to fight for WV that you must take NOW. Ignore the wave of populist anger at your peril.
WV #WokeAF and Angry
The Economics of Extraction Debt
No longer do Robber Barons need to plunder villages with swords and arms. With regulatory and/or judicial complicity, the extraction industry can jab a siphon into our veins and drain our lives away. They simply appropriate our air and water, and transform them into wealth for themselves. In essence, Extraction Debt is the modern weapon of corporate pillage. Launch it at a community, and watch the fiscal destruction that follows.
Value of Statistical Life
Be aware that whenever you hear propaganda about "EPA overreach," you can be reasonably assured that the whining is originating from business interests who quite literally value your life and the lives of your children less than you do. Resource Barons prefer to frame the discussion as "higher costs" (for them) rather than accusing the EPA of valuing your life too much. When businesses and politicians talk about "EPA Overreach," they're looking at what profits can be made where your life or your child's life is just a statistic.
WV- Still Ours
We know that in McDowell county, for example, residents are literally paying those socialized costs with their lives. Profits are private. The average life expectancy there, due to coal extraction, is far lower than average. Each of them are paying an average of a decade or more. Wealth pours up; it doesn't trickle down. Extraction execs pocket their sacrifice in the form of profit.
Right to Work in WV
"Right to Work" laws have nothing do with ensuring your actual right to work. It's one of those terrible doublespeak names that enshrines its strawman argument conveniently within the name of the legislation. The truth is that laws like these could just as easily---and perhaps more accurately---be called "Right to Freeload."
To Catch the Conscience of King Coal
Ken Ward: "The questions that need asked in the wake of this deal between EPA and Jim Justice are less about whether Justice got special treatment, but whether really the entire mining industry gets special treatment — whether we should accept hundreds (or even thousands) of environmental and workplace safety violations as just the cost of doing business. And not for nothing, but we should also be asking questions about exactly how candidates who proclaim that they would end this way of doing business would do so — and political skills to build the sort of support doing so would require, given the state’s and the Legislature’s overall politics. Changing the way we interact with coal companies, or natural gas operators for that matter, isn’t something that can be done with the wave of some magic wand."
West Virginia’s Resource Curse
Frack executives have specifically stated that they site "shale gas wells away from large homes where wealthy people live and who might have the money to fight such drilling and fracking operations."
The Appalachian Oracle 