Tag Archives: brother

These Striking Photos Will Change the Way the Way You Look at Coal Country

by MadisonMilerum Posted on October 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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In the many years Stacy Krantiz has been documenting life in Appalachia, as seen in her ongoing project, As it was Give(n) to Me, she has deftly navigated the minefield that comes with photographing in this often misrepresented part of the county. At least since Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the 1941 book by writer James Agee and photographer Walter Evans that chronicled the lives of poverty-stricken sharecroppers in the South, residents have rightfully complained about how outsiders have portrayed them in photographs—nothing short of a kind of visual openmouthed gawking and pointing. By living with her subjects, Krantiz challenges and plays with common stereotypes of the beautiful hill region of southern Ohio, West Virginia, and eastern Kentucky. Kranitz’s photos show her living it up with the subjects of her photos, deeply embedded, fully embraced, sometimes even appearing in the images herself. She photographs as a member of the family, showing the good and the beautiful, along with the bad and the ugly. Nothing to hide.

Drawing on these sensibilities, Kranitz shot in and around Mingo County, West Virginia, for Mother Jones, to provide a sense of what life is really like in Don Blankenship’s backyard.

Cheerleaders prepare before the first football game of the season at Mingo Central High School, home of the Miners.

A former Massey-run mountaintop removal mining site in West Virginia. The tiny patch of grass at the top of the mountain is a cemetery to which families have fought to have regular, safe access. Stacy Kranitz/SouthWings

A poster for R. T. “Tommy” Blankenship, candidate for the Knox District Member School Board in Buchanan County, Virginia

Part of a new mural in downtown Matewan, West Virginia, depicting life in the coal mines

Vernon Haltom of Coal River Mountain watch, photographed at the Kayford Mountain strip mine, once operated by Massey Energy

Left: Mingo Central High School cheerleaders and marching band. Right: Alpha Resources, the company that absorbed Massey Energy, donated the land for the new school on top of an old surface mining site.

Left: Mingo Central High School marching band and football team. Right: Mingo Central High replaced Don Blankenship’s old high school in Matewan, which was closed due to a declining population.

A memorial for the 29 miners killed in the Upper Big Branch mine disaster

Former Massey employees and active UMWA 1440 union members Butch Collins (left) and Charles “Hawkeye” Dixon. They are sitting outside the union hall in downtown Matewan.

“These guys are sitting maybe 500 feet from where the gas station/beer store run by Blankenship’s mother used to be. His brother lives in a home right across the street from the old store and in sight from this hangout spot. The town of DeLorme is super tiny and these guys just hang out and drink in this same spot everyday. Just 50 feet away are the train tracks with coal trains running by and 10 feet behind them is the Tug Fork River that marks the border of Kentucky. They all grew up going to the Blankenship’s store and everyone in town knows his brother. They say he is a nice guy.” –Stacy Kranitz

A store in Racine, West Virginia, in Boone county, sells reflective clothing for miners along with t-shirts, flags, stickers, and other items.

A portrait of Wilma Lee Steele, a board member of the Mine Wars Museum in Matewan

After church in Matewan, West Virginia

A river baptism on the border of Kentucky and Virginia. The church that performed the baptism is located in Stopover, Kentucky, where Blankenship was born.

A grocery store called Family Foods in Freeborn, Kentucky, just down the road from the gas station Blankenship’s mother ran in Delorme. The owners told Kranitz that they are not likely to be able to keep the family-run business open after the latest round of coal company bankruptcies, buyouts, and layoffs. They plan to close around the New Year. The next closest grocery store is almost an hour away.

Ellen Hatfield and Vera Hankins work on a mural depicting coal miners in an underground mine. The mural is part of the “Turn This Town Around” grant that also supported the Mine Wars museum. It is across the street from the union in downtown Matewan.

Jacob Knabb shows off his tattoo of West Virginia, with an X marking Boone county, a historic coal county with many former Massey workers. His father and grandfather worked in coal. His father was recently laid off. Jacob left West Virginia after college and now lives in Chicago.

Underground shift workers from a dog mine near Feds Creek, Kentucky. Dog mines are independent and small operations nestled between the big corporate mines.

A man in downtown Madison, West Virginia, in Boone County

Men at an overlook in Pikeville, Kentucky, staring at the cut-through project, one of the largest civil-engineering projects in the western hemisphere, constructed from 1973 to 1987. Nearly 18 million cubic yards of earth were removed from the Peach Orchard Mountain, rerouting a fork of the Big Sandy River as well as rail lines and the highway. The cut-through project was initiated to relocate the railroad and eliminate the coal dust in the community.

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These Striking Photos Will Change the Way the Way You Look at Coal Country

Posted in alo, ALPHA, Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Oster, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged brother, central, climate-change, energy, environment, Everyone, kranitz, mother, Ona, virginia | Comments Off

Miami Nice: Are Florida’s Power Brokers Mellowing on Cuba?

by CharoletteCambe Posted on August 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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For decades, Florida’s Cuban exile community has ensured that the United States maintained its tough policy toward the island nation. From Miami, these fierce opponents of Fidel Castro plotted to overthrow the Cuban dictator and channeled funds to dissidents. This made them logical allies of communism-denouncing Republicans, and the exile community’s wealth and political savvy made it a crucial voting bloc, not to be crossed by either party, in a state that can decide presidential elections. But attitudes have shifted. The embargo doesn’t hold the same importance for younger Cubans and those who left Cuba for economic reasons. The major players now fall into three categories: hardliners who continue to oppose any change in policy until the Castros are out of power; reformers who have long pushed for normalization; and converts whose views have softened.

The Hardliners

Sen. Marco Rubio, though his parents came to Florida before the Cuban Revolution, has made anti-Castro opposition central to his political career. He vows to roll back Obama’s efforts to normalize relations once he is in the White House.

Jeb Bush, whose political roots lie in Miami’s Cuban exile community, has called Obama’s policy a “tragedy.” But his opposition has been less aggressive than Rubio’s, a reflection of changing attitudes in Florida and disagreement among his own advisers.

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who fled Havana when she was eight, began her political career in the Florida Legislature in 1982, when a tough position on Cuba was a political necessity. The Republican has slammed normalization with Cuba as a “propaganda coup for the Castro brothers.”

Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, another Republican, hails from a powerful Miami family—his father was a Cuban politician before Fidel Castro seized power, and his aunt was Fidel’s first wife. A member of the House appropriations committee, he has tried to undermine Obama’s policy by attaching riders to spending bills—including a provision blocking flights and cruise ship routes to Cuba.

Gus Machado, a wealthy Miami auto dealer and Republican donor, is the treasurer of the US-Cuba Democracy PAC, the main political advocacy group opposing normalization.

Remedios Diaz-Oliver, the Miami-based CEO of a major plastic container company and a board member of that PAC, has called Obama’s policy of normalization “Bay of Pigs II.”

Mel Martinez, a former GOP senator from Florida who fled Cuba as a teenager, supported Obama’s 2009 decision to lift travel restrictions for people visiting relatives in Cuba, but he has blasted the president’s decision to normalize relations.

Al Cardenas, the former head of the Florida GOP, is now a lobbyist and adviser to Jeb Bush. His opposition to normalizing relations has put him at odds with others in Bush’s inner circle.

The Reformers

Ricardo Herrero, the onetime executive director of the Miami-Dade Democratic Party, cofounded #CubaNow in 2014 to pressure the White House to normalize relations with Cuba—part of a lobbying campaign spearheaded by the Trimpa Group.

Mike Fernandez, a Cuban exile billionaire, is a big GOP donor and an ally of the Bush clan. But on Cuba, he’s in Obama’s corner. “I am not a fan of President Obama, but after 50-plus years, this is long overdue.”

Manny Diaz, a lawyer who was born in Cuba, rose to prominence representing the Miami relatives of Elián González, thereafter becoming the city’s mayor.

Jorge Pérez, Florida’s “Condo King,” supports lifting the embargo and says doing so may lead to a real estate boom on the island: “Demand for second homes will be much bigger than the Bahamas, Puerto Rico, or Dominican Republic.”

The Converts

Carlos Saladrigas, a Miami millionaire who was once a fierce advocate of the embargo, now says the old policy has held the Cuban people back. In 2000, he cofounded the Cuba Study Group, an organization of Cuban business leaders to promote engagement.

Carlos Gutierrez, who fled Cuba as a child, was George W. Bush’s commerce secretary and is now a Jeb supporter. Gutierrez recently embraced normalization, penning a New York Times op-ed titled, “A Republican Case for Obama’s Cuba Policy.”

Alfonso Fanjul leads a vast sugar and real estate empire with his brothers. For decades they bankrolled anti-Castro efforts. But Alfonso shocked the exile community last year when he said he was open to doing business in Cuba. His brother Andres has also mellowed, and is on the board of the Cuba Study Group, which calls for normalization. Meanwhile, his brother Pepe, a major GOP donor, has not joined his brothers in calling for change.

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Miami Nice: Are Florida’s Power Brokers Mellowing on Cuba?

Posted in Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged bahamas, brother, foreign policy, gop, king, miami, obama, Ona, revolution, white | Comments Off

Friday Cat Blogging – 24 July 2015

by Fidelia13O Posted on July 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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Hopper and Hilbert like to (a) play-wrestle with each other, and (b) jump up on the fireplace mantel. Here they are doing both. Hopper has lately been taking control of these affairs, finally realizing that she’s the real alpha cat in the household even if her brother is bigger. As she’s finally figured out, being alpha is more about will and energy than about size, and she’s got both. Nonetheless, you can see in this picture about how seriously she takes it.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 24 July 2015

Posted in ALPHA, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged beautiful, brother, broward, color, fashion-victims, friends, office, photo essays, public, Real, venta, victims | Comments Off

Jeb Bush Says Obama Has Left “Violence Unopposed.” Ask Al Qaeda.

by HunterLuiassfs Posted on June 16, 2015

Mother Jones

There were many absurd moments during Jeb Bush’s official I’m-running-for-president announcement on Monday. But the most Bizarro World instance might have come when Bush, the brother of the president who committed one of the greatest strategic blunders in US history, and the candidate who has enlisted the architects of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq as his own foreign policy advisers, embraced the right’s Obama-is-feckless meme. Bush slammed President Barack Obama and his foreign policy team for failing “to be the peacemakers.” He added, “With their phone-it-in foreign policy, the Obama-Clinton-Kerry team is leaving a legacy of crises uncontained, violence unopposed.”

This has become a conservative mantra: Obama has done nothing to counter the foes of the United States. Forgotten are the raid that nabbed Osama bin Laden, the drone strikes that have decimated Al Qaeda, the special forces assaults on the Taliban, and the bombing raids mounted against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Obama’s moves in the fight against these extremists are certainly open to debate. But his conservative critics keep insisting the guy essentially does nothing. Note Bush’s brazen accusation that Obama refuses to oppose violence.

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Jeb Bush Says Obama Has Left “Violence Unopposed.” Ask Al Qaeda.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged brother, candidate, death, g & f, general, Ona, radius, special, top stories, venta | Comments Off

Friday Cat Blogging – 5 June 2015

by LelandFountain Posted on June 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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I suppose I could write a post about the Rubio family’s many traffic tickets, but I dunno. Seems to me that 23 mph in a school zone is pretty safe driving. Florida sure does have some strict rules about that, I guess.

In any case, it’s far more pleasant to round out the week with some catblogging. Here is Hopper blissfully stretched out while her brother grooms her chin. So sweet. At least, it was until Hilbert got tired of licking and decided to clamp his jaws around Hopper’s neck. I pushed him away, but this is sadly typical behavior from our own Dr. Hilbert and Mr. Hyde.

At the moment, Hilbert is resting right next to me. He exhausted himself running from window to window to watch our local squirrel hopping along the fence. At one point his tail was flapping so vigorously he was knocking stuff off my desk. But now the squirrel is gone and it’s snoozing time.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 5 June 2015

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged alo, brother, hopper, island, local, mother, Ona, photo essays, southern-prison, world | Comments Off

Jeb Bush Says His Brother Was Misled Into War by Faulty Intelligence. That’s Not What Happened.

by Jolie4596sak Posted on May 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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Last week, Jeb Bush stepped in it. It took the all-but-announced Republican presidential candidate several attempts to answer the most obvious question: Knowing what we know now, would you have launched the Iraq War? Yes, I would have, he initially declared, noting he would not dump on his brother for initiating the unpopular war. “So would almost everyone that was confronted with the intelligence they got,” Bush said. In a subsequent and quickly offered back-pedaling remark—on his way to saying he would have made “different decisions”—Bush emphasized that a main problem with the Bush-Cheney invasion was “mistakes as it related to faulty intelligence in the lead-up to the war.” And as his Republican rivals jumped on Bush, they, too, blamed bad intelligence for causing the war. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), insisting that he would not have favored the war (if he knew there were no weapons of mass destruction), commented, “President Bush has said that he regrets that the intelligence was faulty.” And former CEO Carly Fiorina noted, “The intelligence was clearly wrong. And so had we known that the intelligence was wrong, no, I would not have gone in.”

But here’s the truth Jeb Bush and the others are hiding or eliding: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, & Co. were not misled by lousy intelligence; they used lousy intelligence to mislead the public.

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Jeb Bush Says His Brother Was Misled Into War by Faulty Intelligence. That’s Not What Happened.

Posted in Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged anchor, brother, bush, chief, house, lai, major, saddam | Comments Off

Bush v. Rubio: Who Will Win Neocons’ Hearts and Minds?

by DemetriMattox Posted on May 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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As Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, once political pals, now compete for the Republican presidential nomination, one battle they will be waging with each other will be who has better neoconservative bragging rights. Both have recruited prominent policy wonks from the hawkish wing of the GOP, and they may be heading to a showdown over who gains more support from this influential cadre. (Should he enter the 2016 race, Republican candidate Lindsey Graham will take a stab at winning over this group too.)

Ever since Rubio entered the Senate in 2011, he has made a strong play for the neocons. He has reached out to some of the George W. Bush administration’s most hawkish alumni for advice on foreign policy, and he has made national security a centerpiece of his campaign. The Rubio Doctrine, which he outlined in his first major foreign policy address as a candidate on Wednesday, comes straight out of the neocon playbook, calling for a robust military and aggressive approach to intervention.

But Rubio may find that out-neoconing Jeb Bush won’t be so easy. Bush, too, has assembled a foreign policy team almost entirely made up of former George W. Bush administration officials—including Paul Wolfowitz, a key architect of the Iraq War who for years peddled a conspiracy theory favored by neocons that held that Saddam Hussein, not Al Qaeda, was the main sponsor of anti-US terrorism. And Bush’s ties to the neoconservative movement date back to the mid-1990s, when he became affiliated with the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a foreign policy think tank established by leading neocons and hawks.

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Bush v. Rubio: Who Will Win Neocons’ Hearts and Minds?

Posted in Anchor, Bragg, FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged bragg, brother, florida, king, pnac, pur, radius, rubio, saddam, texas | Comments Off

If You Read One Post About Labor Force Participation This Decade, Let It Be This One

by NelsonHaylupwbx Posted on April 24, 2015

Mother Jones

While Kevin Drum is focused on getting better, we’ve invited some of the remarkable writers and thinkers who have traded links and ideas with him from Blogosphere 1.0 through today to pitch in posts and keep the conversation going. Here’s a missive from Max Sawicky, a DC-based economist and blogger. You can read his always entertaining work on welfare policy, politics, and many other topics at MaxSpeak, You Listen! or find him on Twitter.

I started blogging in May of 2002. In those days the liberal side of the blogosphere was relatively thin, so I got a bit of notoriety. In my recollection, that fall I started noticing the blog of Mr. Kevin Drum. As the weeks went on I noticed this guy Drum was writing a lot, all well-reasoned, articulate prose. Other people were noticing as well. He left me in the dust. At least Kevin was reading me. At some point he came through D.C. with his wife and we had lunch.

I’m honored to be invited to contribute to this festschrift. Yes, that’s the word his editors used when they got in touch. Such high-falutin academic terminology. I prefer to think of it as a roast. But there is nothing funny about Kevin. He’s just too damn reasonable and level-headed. No doubt this contributes to his success. I usually have something obnoxious to say about everybody, but with Kevin I draw a blank. Since I’ve been able to infiltrate the ginormous Mother Jones web site, I need to come up with something. My default mode is attack, so here’s some MaxSpeak love for KD and MoJo.

In this post from just last weekend, Kevin links to a bit from Tyler Cowen. That was your first mistake, Brother Drum. I realize linking is not endorsing, though KD offers a limited, tentative ‘interesting possibility’ type of approval. You see, the prolific and very smart Tyler hails from the zany economics department of George Mason University. No good can come from referencing him. These characters spend all their time excoriating Government and social protection for the working class from tenured, Koch-subsidized positions at a public university. Sweet.

Professor Cowen briefly discusses a paper suggesting the Clinton era welfare reform (sic) reduced labor force participation. (I too am an economist, in case you didn’t know. Ph.D. from Dave’s All-Night University.) The paper suggests that the causes are the imposition of work requirements under Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF; formerly Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or just ‘the welfare’), and the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC).

The TANF explanation makes no sense. To get benefits you have to work, sooner or later. Previously, you didn’t. How could that reduce labor force participation? (On pushing welfare people into Social Security Disability Insurance, thus far there is no evidence of that.) The other cause—the EITC providing enough benefits to a couple to enable one spouse to work less—is pretty well known, though the magnitude of the effect is weak. This is all basic stuff in the literature, as noted in Cowen’s comments section by Virginia Postrel, but it’s evidently new to Tyler. In his defense, Tyler publishes a dynamite guide to ethnic dining in the MD/DC/VA metro area.

So the upshot is this whole mess is thesis interruptus. Even Tyler is skeptical in the end. Though he alludes to it vaguely, the implication of one spouse working somewhat less because the other earns more is not necessarily Bad, unless you’re a Stakhanovite. More time not working can be more time with the kids.

The 1996 welfare reform looked good in the late ’90s, but that was when the whole labor market looked really, really good. Since 2000, not so much. Poverty rates, for instance, have consistently gone up since then. People have not been empowered to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Looking to Tyler for enlightenment on anti-poverty programs is like taking Driver’s Ed from Vin Diesel.

Your go-to sources on the plight of the poor would include Jared Bernstein, Matt Bruenig, Kathy Geier, Shawn Fremstad, and Elise Gould, among others, and occasionally your humble servant.

I wish Kevin the best for an industrial-strength recovery so he can continue to set a good example for progressive commentary, while also providing me periodically with inviting targets. And I look forward to Mother Jones‘ exposé of Scott Walker’s background in Wisconsin animal husbandry. With the obligatory slide show.

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If You Read One Post About Labor Force Participation This Decade, Let It Be This One

Posted in Casio, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged assistance, beautiful, brother, clinton, george, kevin, Ona, professor, tyler, university, wisconsin | Comments Off

Hillary’s Alien Baby And 7 Other Out-of-This-World Tabloid Tales

by DarbyMackie Posted on April 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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UFO enthusiasts are hoping that a Hillary Clinton presidency would blow the lid off the government’s alien conspiracies. But the shocking truth about Hillary’s affinity for aliens is already out there—in the pages of the Weekly World News, the spoof tabloid best known for its tireless coverage of Bat Boy. Throughout the ’90s and early ’00s, the WWN documented—alright, fabricated—the Clintons’ political alliances and personal dalliances with extraterrestrials, including Hillary’s on-again, off-again boyfriend P’Lod.

Some highlights of the WWN‘s Clinton-alien exclusives:

Take me to your leader: In 1992, an unnamed alien passed over President George Bush and Ross Perot to endorse presidential candidate Bill Clinton, kicking off the Clintons’ tumultuous relationship with interplanetary visitors.