Author Archives: AdalbertoCocker

America’s Most Notorious Coal Baron Is Going to Prison. But He Still Haunts West Virginia Politics

by AdalbertoCocker Posted on April 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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As CEO of Massey Energy, central Appalachia’s largest coal producer, Don Blankenship towered over West Virginia politics for more than a decade by spending millions to bolster Republican candidates and causes. That chapter came to an end in April, when Blankenship was sentenced to a year in prison for conspiring to commit mine safety violations in the period leading up to the deadly 2010 explosion at Massey’s Upper Big Branch mine. But even in absentia, he casts a long shadow over state politics. For evidence, look no further than the contentious Democratic primary for governor.

The campaign pits Jim Justice, a billionaire coal operator and high school basketball coach, against two opponents—state senator minority leader Jeff Kessler, and Booth Goodwin, the former US attorney who prosecuted Blankenship. Justice holds a double-digit lead in the polls and (not unlike another billionaire running for office this year) is spending much of his time arguing that his 10-figure net worth will insulate him from special interests. But when he was asked about the Blankenship conviction at a campaign stop earlier this month, he ripped into Goodwin for what he considered to be a sloppy, opportunistic prosecution.

“I think we spent an ungodly amount of money within our state to probably keep Booth Goodwin in the limelight and end up with a misdemeanor charge,” Justice told WOAY TV. “If that’s all we are going to end up with, why did we spend that much money to do that?”

Blankenship originally faced up to 30 years for making false statements to federal regulators, but he was only convicted on only the least serious of three counts—the misdemeanor conspiracy charge. In Goodwin’s view (and in the minds of plenty of Blankenship’s critics), his light sentence is the product of weak mine safety laws, not lax prosecution. As he told the Charleston Gazette-Mail, “It is not our fault that violating laws designed to protect workers is punished less harshly than violations of laws designed to protect Wall Street.” (Nor was the Blankenship case a one-time gimmick—prior to that trial, Goodwin also secured the convictions of a handful of Blankenship’s subordinates at Massey.)

Goodwin fired back at Justice in a fundraising email to supporters. He referred to Blankenship as Justice’s “good friend,” alleging that Justice “took him as his personal guest to the 2012 Kentucky Derby two years after the horrific UBB mine explosion,” and attended a gala that night with Blankenship hosted by then-Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear, “while the families of the UBB miners who were killed were still suffering their loss.” (A Beshear spokesman told the Louisville Courier-Journal at the time that Blankenship attended Derby Day events as Justice’s guest, which Justice’s campaign denies.) For good measure he noted that Justice, like Blankenship, had racked up a huge tab of mine safety violation fines, some $2 million of which had gone unpaid and were considered “delinquent” prior to the start of the campaign. (Justice began paying off the fines after an NPR investigation made the total bill public.)

On Monday, Goodwin’s campaign went after Justice again, releasing an ad based on the front-runner’s remarks about the Blankenship prosecution. In the spot, Judy Jones Petersen, the sister of a miner who died at UBB, speaks straight to the camera and suggests that the two coal operators have more in common than Justice would like to admit.

“I don’t really understand why Mr. Justice would step out against the integrity of this incredible prosecution team,” Petersen says. “He of all people as a coal mining operator should understand the plight of coal miners, but I think that unfortunately the plight that he understands best is the plight of Don Blankenship.”

She goes on to call Goodwin a “hero” for prosecuting Blankenship.

Justice, for his part, is running his own ad—touting an endorsement from the United Mine Workers praising him for his record on safety and job creation. The union’s president, Cecil Roberts, previously called the Upper Big Branch disaster “industrial homicide,” and fought Blankenship over mine-safety and worker rights for three decades. His message is a not-too-subtle contrast with Blankenship and Massey: “Jim is one of the good coal operators.”

Don’t expect Blankenship’s shadow to shrink as the race heats up. The Democratic primary is set for May 10—two days before the notorious coal boss reports to federal prison.

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America’s Most Notorious Coal Baron Is Going to Prison. But He Still Haunts West Virginia Politics

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The Navajo Nation Will Soon Have the Country’s First-Ever Junk-Food Tax

by AdalbertoCocker Posted on March 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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A version of this piece was originally published by Civil Eats.

Next month, after three years of legislative tug-of-war, the Navajo Nation will become the first place in the United States to impose a tax on junk food. The Healthy DineÌ&#129; Nation Act of 2014, signed into law by Navajo Nation President Ben Shelly last November, mandates a 2 percent sales tax on pastries, chips, soda, desserts, fried foods, sweetened beverages, and other products with “minimal-to-no-nutritional value” sold within the borders of the nation’s largest reservation.

Authored by the Diné Community Advocacy Alliance (DCAA), a grassroots organization of community volunteers, the legislation was modeled on existing taxes on tobacco and alcohol, as well as other fat and sugar tax initiatives outside the United States. The act follows on the heels of a spring 2014 amendment that removed a 5 percent tribal sales tax on fresh fruits and vegetables.

The sales tax will generate an estimated $1 million a year in 110 tribal chapters for wellness projects—greenhouses, food processing and storage facilities, traditional foods cooking classes, community gardens, farmers’ markets, and more.

Those who advocate for a return to a more traditional diet hail the law as a positive change: The Navajo Nation, a 27,000-square-mile area that straddles three states, has a 42 percent unemployment rate. Nearly half of those over the age of 25 live under the federal poverty line. The USDA has identified nearly all of the Navajo Nation as a food desert, meaning heavily processed foods are more available than fresh produce and fruit.

According to a 2014 report from the Diné Policy Institute there are just 10 full-service grocery stores on the entire Navajo reservation, a territory about the size of West Virginia that straddles parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. As a result, many people rely on food stamps to stretch grocery dollars with the inexpensive processed, fried, and sugary foods commonly found in gas stations or convenience stores.

But even having a grocery store nearby doesn’t guarantee access to healthy food. A DCAA survey of one major grocer in the town of Kayenta found approximately 80 percent of the store’s inventory qualified, in the group’s definition, as junk food. Compounding the issue is the continued popularity at family gatherings, flea-markets, and ceremonial gatherings of lard-drenched frybread—whose dubious origins have been traced back to the “Long Walk,” the federal government’s forced removal of Navajos to a military fort in New Mexico 300 miles away from ancestral land in Arizona.

The heavy consumption of soda, fat, and processed foods has taken its toll. According to the Indian Health Service, an estimated 25,000 of the Navajo Nation’s 300,000 members have type-2 diabetes and another 75,000 are pre-diabetic. The tribe has some of the worst health outcomes in the United States, with rampant hypertension and cardiovascular disease. According to data collected between 1999 and 2009 by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) overall death rates for American Indians and Alaska Natives were nearly 50 percent greater than those of non-Hispanic whites.

These stark health statistics drove the DCAA to lobby for a consumer tax—despite strong opposition at the start from Shelly and some council delegates. Navajo Nation Council Delegate Jonathan Nez was a co-sponsor of the Healthy Diné Nation Act. He says there was “overwhelming support” for the initiative in his region, a large rural area on the Utah and Arizona border, but he did hear misgivings amongst the general population and some of the other delegates.

“Some people thought: ‘A two-percent sales tax is going to hit my wallet,'” says Nez. The legislation was vetoed three times by Navajo Nation President Ben Shelly, because of questions about how the tax would be regulated. He also cited concerns about how the tax would be enacted along with its potential impact on small business owners. Other opponents said the bill would place undue burden on consumers and drive desperately needed revenue off the reservation and into surrounding cities. After multiple revisions, the tax gained support from a majority of the council, with the added concession of a 2020 expiration date.

While this is the first “junk-food tax” in the United States, the movement to slow the consumption of unhealthy foods gained momentum last November after residents of Berkeley, California voted to tax soda and other sweetened beverages. According to the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, which supports a national sugar-sweetened Beverage (SSB) Tax, studies show a correlation between added excise taxes and lower consumption rates. One 2011 study published in Preventive Medicine showed that a penny-per-ounce tax on sugar-sweetened beverages nationally could generate nearly $16 billion a year in revenue between 2010 and 2015 while cutting consumption by 24 percent.

It’s still too soon to evaluate the tax’s effect on consumption habits in the Navajo Nation, but Nez says it has already opened a discussion “about how to take better care of yourself, how to return back to the way we used to live, with fresh produce, vegetables, and fruit along with our own traditional unprocessed foods.”

Denisa Livingston, a community health advocate with the DCAA, has been leading grocery store tours in Window Rock, Arizona to educate government officials and community members about how the layout and inventory of local markets affects buying patterns. “I’ve been telling the councils, food can either empower us and make us strong, or it can kill us,” she says. “Healthy food is not just our tradition, it’s our identity. This is the start of a return to food sovereignty.”

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The Navajo Nation Will Soon Have the Country’s First-Ever Junk-Food Tax

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Why Is the Green Movement So Dominated By White Dudes?

by AdalbertoCocker Posted on May 9, 2014

Mother Jones

This story first appeared on the Guardian website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Americans are regularly told that climate change is happening here and now, in real time, and that nobody will be left unscathed. Just this week as a corporate-backed disinformation campaign continued to fuel lobbying against climate science and on behalf of a failed vote on the Keystone XL pipeline, the White House released a landmark climate change report, underlining that “certain people and communities are especially vulnerable, including children, the elderly, the sick, the poor, and some communities of color.” According to the even more landmark IPCC report, that goes for the developing world and rich countries alike.

Just the other day, the National Wildlife Federation announced its new president—a white male “whiz kid”. Last month, the Climate Reality Project, founded by Al Gore, replaced its female chief executive with a white man. Last November, the National Parks and Conservation Association replaced its veteran leader with another white male. The Union of Concerned Scientists is due to announce its new leader as early as next week. Spoiler alert: it’s not going to be a woman.

Public opinion research in the US suggests women, Latinos, African-Americans, Asians and Native Americans are more concerned—and more directly affected—by climate change than other populations. Doesn’t it make sense to include those who are most at risk in decisions about how we fight the defining challenge of our time?

Now take a look at the top executives at eight of the top 10 groups devoted to fighting that fight:

Sierra Club? White male.

Nature Conservancy? White male.

League of Conservation Voters? White male.

World Wildlife Fund? White male.

Environmental Defense Fund? White male.

Friends of the Earth? White male.

National Audubon Society? White male.

Nature Conservancy? White male.

The very top of “Big Green” is as white and male as a Tea Party meet-up. It doesn’t look like change. It doesn’t even look like America. So is it any wonder environmental groups are having trouble connecting with the public on climate change? Corporate and conservative funding of climate denial is one thing, but it’s beyond past time for the leaders of this movement to look at how their choice in leadership is affecting their strategy and messaging.

It’s not as if there haven’t been opportunities: the last few years have seen a generational change as more and more founding activists of the 1970s have retired. But rather than embrace the turnover as a chance to make change, we have exceptions to the old-white-man rule:

The Natural Resources Defense Council has a woman president in Frances Beinecke, but she just announced her retirement.
Greenpeace on Tuesday chose the well-known activist Annie Leonard as their president. Women also lead at Environment America, Defenders of Wildlife and Rainforest Action Network. And not to knock their leadership, but those are much smaller organizations. They are far from the top when it comes to getting money from donor foundations—which tend to be headed by white males, too—and operate on smaller budgets. They are also less likely than Big Green groups to get the access to White House officials who would help them shape climate policy.
Women and minority candidates have been applying for those top jobs, in some cases getting shortlisted. And they have been getting the top environmental jobs in government for years: Barack Obama chose Lisa Jackson to head the Environmental Protection Agency and Steven Chu to head the Energy Department during his first team. He promoted Gina McCarthy to the top job at the EPA. Even George Bush—though he blocked action on climate change—appointed Christine Todd Whitman to head the EPA.

Set aside for a moment the equality-in-the-boardroom part. America is in the midst of a demographic transformation. By mid-century—as the effects of climate change really begin to bite—whites will no longer be the majority population. In California, Latinos became the single biggest ethnic/racial population last March.

And yet the environmental groups that are calling for sweeping changes to the economy—moving away from oil and coal to carbon-free sources of energy—seem incapable of making a transition themselves.

“The community should challenge itself in the same way that it challenges corporate America to change the business-as-usual trend,” Kalee Kreider, a former environmental advisor to Al Gore, wrote me in an email. “It’s well past time for the environmental movement to look more like America and the world.”

That gap between activists and Americans has resulted in some bad decisions. In 2009, with Obama in the White House and Democrats controlling both houses of Congress, Big Green took a roll on the once-in-a-generation chance of trying to pass climate change legislation. Their strategy? Engage in a series of clubby, back-room negotiations with the chief executives of oil and utility companies to reach a deal that achieved some carbon cuts—while limiting the costs to big business. The insider deal suffered a spectacular collapse.

Then there’s the messaging. Environmental groups are only now beginning to wake up to the idea that bombarding the public with graphs and statistics is not, on its own, going to persuade people that climate change has anything to do with their own lives.

Meanwhile, beyond Washington, and beyond the male-dominated preserves of Big Green, women activists are just getting on with the job—without that White House access or the expensive consultants paid for by the biggest of big donors.

It’s worth remembering that one of the biggest victories for the environmental movement in recent years—last month’s indefinite delay on the Keystone XL pipeline—was achieved thanks to the efforts of Bold Nebraska, a tiny environmental group with just three paid staffers, which assembled an unlikely coalition of ranchers, Native Americans and other activists operating in one of the country’s most conservative states.

The president of Bold Nebraska who was so instrumental to that breakthrough? Why, that would be one Jane Fleming Kleeb.

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Why Is the Green Movement So Dominated By White Dudes?

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