Tag Archives: mahoning

These Rust Belt Democrats Saw the Trump Wave Coming

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Like labor unions everywhere, the local Plumbers & Pipefitters union in Ohio’s Mahoning Valley—a historically Democratic bastion due to the influence of labor—endorsed Hillary Clinton for president in September 2015 and urged its members to vote for her. But unlike in years past, when Roland “Butch” Taylor briefed about 200 members on the union’s support of Clinton and the prospective benefits of a Clinton presidency in May, the meeting didn’t go well. “I got a lot of boos,” he recalls. “I got a lot of chatter back. And out of the group, only one person came up and asked me for a T-shirt.”

“Right then and there, I knew something was wrong,” says Taylor, who retired a few months later. “I thought, ‘Well, maybe it will change as the campaign moves forward.'”

As the results on election night show, it didn’t change. Clinton fell well short of polls and expectations in the Rust Belt, losing two key swing states, Pennsylvania and Ohio, and two that were thought to be safe bets, Michigan and Wisconsin. Working-class white voters, including many union members, banded together into a pro-Donald Trump force that the strategists in Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters didn’t see coming until it was too late.

But local Democrats did. And they tried to warn the Clinton campaign.

In May, after thousands of Democrats had switched parties to vote for Trump in the primary, Mahoning County Democratic Party Chairman David Betras circulated a memo cautioning that Trump was making headway in his Rust Belt region and urging the Clinton campaign to take the threat seriously. The memo focused largely on the issue of trade, arguing that because Democratic politicians in Ohio regularly denounce the North American Free Trade Agreement and free trade generally, Trump’s anti-trade message was familiar and its appeal powerful. If the Clinton team didn’t find a way to counter it, Betras warned, she would lose a lot of votes she was counting on.

Betras sent the memo to Aaron Pickrell, an adviser to Clinton’s Ohio campaign team; David Pepper, the chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party; Rep. Tim Ryan, a Democrat who represents northeast Ohio; and union leaders in the region.

To counter Trump’s populist appeal, Betras urged Clinton to go vigorously after blue-collar workers by promising to bring back jobs. The key, Betras argued, was to have this message delivered not by politicians but by local blue-collar families in radio and television ads across the region. “The messages can’t be about job retraining,” he wrote. “These folks have heard it a million times and, frankly, they think it’s complete and total bullshit.” Instead, he argued, the ads should “focus on the reinvigoration of American manufacturing, and I don’t mean real high-tech stuff because they’ve heard that a million times before and they aren’t buying it.”

Betras wrote:

Talk about policies that will incentivize companies to repatriate manufacturing jobs. Talk about infrastructure—digging ditches, paving roads, building buildings and producing the materials needed to do it all. The workers we’re talking about don’t want to run computers, they want to run back hoes, dig ditches, sling concrete block. They’re not embarrassed about the fact that they get their hands dirty doing backbreaking work. They love it and they want to be respected and honored for it. And they’ll react positively if they believe HRC will give them and their kids the opportunity to break their backs for another ten or twenty or thirty years. Somewhere along the line we forgot that not everyone wants to be white collar, we stopped recognizing the intrinsic value of hard work.

Clinton did revoke her support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade deal, supported unions and higher wages, and talked about an economy that would work for all people. While Trump spoke in broad strokes, her website boasted detailed economic plans, including one to bring back manufacturing. But it was clear from Bernie Sanders’ primary victories in Wisconsin and Michigan that she was lagging with the white working class. Like Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney four years ago, she was the candidate who made millions by giving speeches to Wall Street banks. (It certainly didn’t help that when pieces of those speech transcripts were released in the WikiLeaks hacks, the sentence that stood out most was: “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders.” Trump used that line at his campaign rallies to claim, falsely, that Clinton was going to open the borders completely.)

“Somewhere in all of this, we forgot that we’re the party of the working class,” says Betras, trying to explain Clinton’s loss. He believes the campaign did try to reach out to the blue-collar families of the Rust Belt, but that the attempts never reached the pitch and fervor they needed. “I did like her message of ‘Stronger Together,’ but that doesn’t get anyone a job, does it?”

The Ohio Democratic Party shared Betras’ memo with Clinton’s Ohio campaign team, according to state party spokeswoman Kirstin Alvanitakis. In an email to Mother Jones, Alvanitakis wrote that “Chairman Betras’s memo was a helpful reminder that Democrats should not neglect working-class voters and the Clinton campaign should acknowledge the very real struggles working families are facing in Ohio.”

She added, “The Ohio Democratic Party was the first state party in the nation to pass a resolution against fast-tracking the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and our leaders—including Sen. Sherrod Brown, Rep. Tim Ryan, Rep. Marcy Kaptur and more—acutely understand the economic pressure facing working-class families because of terrible trade deals and big banks and corporate special interests run amok. The fact is that the typical Ohio household had a higher income three decades ago than it has had in the past few years.”

Betras believes strongly that economic populism was to thank for Trump’s Rust Belt victories, saying, “It was people who want a job and want to be able to work and want a job, and they would accept an imperfect messenger because at least he was saying that.” But of course there was more to Trump’s message. Some African American residents of Youngstown, the largest city in Mahoning County, have long believed that Trump’s appeal in the region had more to do with racial resentment than with economic populism—that Trump’s racially charged rhetoric united white voters against others who they believed were taking their jobs, their culture, and their country. (On Tuesday night, Clinton won Mahoning County by a hair thanks to backing in minority-majority Youngstown but lost the mostly white surrounding counties of the Mahoning Valley.) As a local African American labor organizer told Mother Jones this summer, “This whole racist rhetoric plays well with some people here.”

Like Betras, Taylor doesn’t believe his peers and neighbors who supported Trump are racist. But he understands how Trump’s talk about immigration appealed to people in the Rust Belt. A few years ago, his union was working on a billion-dollar natural gas processing plant, and the workers noticed that the bulk of the work was being done by Spanish-speaking laborers who arrived each morning on buses. “It brought a lot of resentment to the area because they’d never seen it before,” Taylor says. “People see that and then they go tell everybody else, and social media, the way it is, it just runs wild.” He believes Trump benefited when the community saw immigrants “taking jobs that Americans think they should be doing.”

When went to Youngstown in June and met Taylor, jovial and smartly dressed in a suit, he believed his peers would see through Trump’s demagoguery on trade and manufacturing and reject him. “We also are citizens of this country concerned about how he’ll react, whether it’s a nuclear war, God forbid, to racist comments, to deporting immigrants,” he said. “These are core beliefs that as citizens of this country we don’t stand for.”

In the aftermath of the election, even as Taylor looks backs and sees the writing on the wall, he sounds shaken by what the country—and specifically white-working class voters in the Rust Belt—allowed to happen. He acknowledges that the Clintons were “wrapped so close to NAFTA” (which Bill Clinton approved as president) and that Hillary Clinton’s speaking fees from big banks looked bad. “I see where people would have resentment,” he says.

But then, sounding close to tears, he adds, “She’s the most qualified person ever to run for the position, and I agree, she would have done a great job if given the opportunity. But she did not—she had the opportunity to win. She did not win.”

More:  

These Rust Belt Democrats Saw the Trump Wave Coming

Posted in alo, Citizen, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on These Rust Belt Democrats Saw the Trump Wave Coming

Trump Ohio Deputy’s Racial Remarks Reveal a Hidden Reason for His Rust Belt Success

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

People across America reacted with shock Thursday to a video of racially charged comments by Donald Trump’s campaign chairwoman for Ohio’s Mahoning County, who denied that racism existed there before Barack Obama became president—remarks that quickly led her to resign. But one group was probably less surprised to hear this kind of racially divisive language: the black residents of Mahoning County.

Mahoning County, in the heart of the Rust Belt, has received outsize attention this year for the exodus of once-loyal blue-collar Democratic voters into the Trump camp. The overwhelming focus of this attention has been economic: In this poster child of industrial decline, the prevailing narrative goes, residents opposed to free trade have flocked to Trump and his promise to restore the Rust Belt to better times. But the comments by Kathy Miller, Trump’s Mahoning chairwoman, reveal a different story that African American residents have been telling all along—one of political shifts driven by issues of race and racism.

“I don’t think there was any racism until Obama got elected,” Miller, a real estate agent, told the Guardian recently a video-taped interview posted Thursday. “Now, you know, with the people with the guns and shooting up neighborhoods and not being responsible citizens, that’s a big change, and I think that’s the philosophy that Obama has perpetuated on America.”

Miller continued, to the wide-eyed astonishment of the reporter, “And if you’re black and you haven’t been successful in the last 50 years, it’s your own fault. You’ve had every opportunity, it was given to you.”

Mahoning County is ground zero for Trump’s rise. It’s the home of Youngstown, famous for its decline from a booming steel town in the first half of the 20th century to a downtrodden playground for the mob in the second half. Now Youngstown is a struggling, down-and-out city where signs of rehabilitation are dwarfed by the lingering effects of the economic collapse and the poverty of many of the city’s black residents. Following white flight to the suburbs, Youngstown is nearly half black. Thanks to the strong influence of labor unions, for decades the region has been a Democratic stronghold. But in the Ohio Republican primary in March, Trump won the region handily, with the help of many Democratic voters who switched parties to support Trump.

I visited Youngstown in June. Most of the people I spoke with traced Trump’s appeal to the economy and particularly to the issue of trade. Union officials worried that if Hillary Clinton didn’t match Trump’s zeal in opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, she would lose Democratic votes in the region, and with them the state of Ohio. And that is essentially the story I wrote.

But a few people voiced a different view of Trump’s appeal in Youngstown. For them, Miller’s comments reflect what they’ve long said: that Trump’s popularity in Youngstown has a lot to do with race. Unsurprisingly, those people were black.

“I have some other strong personal feelings about this that nobody wants to talk about,” Jaladah Aslam, a former public sector union employee and former local Democratic Party official, told me this summer. “This whole racist rhetoric plays well with some people here.”

Aslam recalled footage she had seen of a clash between supporters and protesters at a Trump rally. “I saw a man screaming at this one guy, ‘Go back to Africa,’ and I’m like, ‘Really? We’re talking like that again?'” she said. “That means that people never gave up that thinking.” When it comes to Youngstown and its environs, Aslam believes nasty rhetoric toward African Americans never went away; it just went out of sight.

Aslam was born and raised in Youngstown. In the late 1990s, she left the city limits and bought a house in the suburb of Austintown Township. Her first summer in the neighborhood, she was in her backyard when she overheard a visitor at her neighbor’s house a few yards over. “I don’t believe this shit,” her neighbor’s friend said. “The nigger has the new pool in the neighborhood.” The incident alerted her to the way some locals think and talk about black people when they don’t think black people are listening: “In their mind, why should somebody of color have anything nice?”

Trump’s rise reminded Aslam of that summer day nearly two decades ago. “It comes back to me in the moment of Trump because it reminds me of that thought process, it reminds me people feel that way,” she said. “And unfortunately, there are a lot of people who feel that way in Youngstown. There are a lot of people who are comfortable with what Trump says about Hispanics and Muslims.”

Aslam’s hunches are borne out by academic research. Last year, a doctoral student at Cleveland State University found that the American metropolitan area where the N-word showed up most frequently as an internet search term was Youngstown. He published his findings in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, noting that research out of Harvard shows that search data “does actually correlate with other measures of racism” and that “the private use of coarse racial terminology is the first stage of prejudice.”

Youngstown might not be an obvious epicenter of American racism, but its history helps explain its racial tensions. There’s academic research demonstrating that support for far-right nationalist political parties in Europe correlates with a perceived loss of power at the hands of immigrants or other ethnic groups—a fact that helps explain Trump’s rise in Youngstown and the dynamic Aslam sensed for years. At 45 percent black and 9 percent Latino, Youngstown is a majority-minority city.

“The Trump phenomenon is basically a middle-class white movement because they feel disenfranchised, they feel like they are losing out,” Rufus Hudson, an African American former Youngstown city council member who serves on the local Democratic Party’s executive committee, told me when I visited. “I think there’s that quiet undertone that after eight years of Barack Obama, there’s people that think, ‘We’re falling behind, we’re not getting our fair share.'” With Miller’s remarks this week, all of a sudden it wasn’t so quiet anymore.

“Growing up in this community, there has always been a racist undertone here,” Hudson said. “I actually didn’t realize that until I moved away. When I moved to Houston, and I lived down there for 10 years and then I come back, and it’s like, wow, I mean, it’s like kind of in your face.” He nodded toward the car he drives, a Lexus. As a black man driving a nice car, he said he had been pulled over 17 times in the area but had never been issued a citation.

By Thursday evening, the Trump campaign had found a new Mahoning County chair, a black state GOP official from Youngstown named Tracey Winbush. Upon joining the campaign, she immediately deleted her entire Twitter history of about 17,000 tweets. Many of them had been critical of Trump. In February, following Trump’s first win of the Republican primary campaign, she tweeted out an article bearing the headline, “A Racist, Sexist Demagogue Just Won The New Hampshire Primary.”

See the original article here:

Trump Ohio Deputy’s Racial Remarks Reveal a Hidden Reason for His Rust Belt Success

Posted in alo, Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Oster, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Trump Ohio Deputy’s Racial Remarks Reveal a Hidden Reason for His Rust Belt Success

Fracking halted at Ohio site following earthquakes

Fracking halted at Ohio site following earthquakes

Shutterstock

Fracking began at a well in rural eastern Ohio last month. On Monday, parts of the surrounding Mahoning County started shaking, prompting state officials to shut down the operation, fearing it was responsible for what could be an unprecedented string of earthquakes linked to natural gas extraction.

Four earthquakes with magnitudes as high as 3 were felt Monday in Poland Township and in the village of Lowellville, sparking the immediate shutdown order. Another earthquake struck on Tuesday. Ohio oil and gas inspectors have been visiting the fracking site at the Carbon Limestone Landfill in Lowellville this week, trying to figure out whether it was responsible for the temblors.

“Out of an abundance of caution,” a state official said, “we notified the only oil and gas operator in the area and ordered them to halt all operations until further assessment can take place.”

Links between earthquakes and the disposal of wastewater by frackers have been well established in recent years. The use of a single injection well, into which frackers were pumping their polluted wastewater at high pressure, was linked to 167 earthquakes around Youngstown, Ohio, in 2011 and 2012, prompting the state to put an end to its use.

If the recent string of Mahoning County earthquakes is found to have been caused directly by fracking, it would be the first such confirmed case.


Source
ODNR sends inspectors to examine earthquake site, 21 WFMJ
Fracking halted near small quakes, The Columbus Dispatch

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Business & Technology

,

Climate & Energy

Read this article: 

Fracking halted at Ohio site following earthquakes

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Fracking halted at Ohio site following earthquakes

Ohio fracking company owner faces federal charges for dumping wastewater

Ohio fracking company owner faces federal charges for dumping wastewater

Things just got a little worse for the owner of the Ohio fracking company whose employees were caught dumping fracking wastewater into the sewer system last month. Yesterday afternoon, the U.S. attorney for Ohio’s northern district announced federal charges against him.

From the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

U.S. Attorney Steven Dettelbach and Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine announced the criminal charges against Ben Lupo, 62, of Poland, Ohio, at an afternoon news conference on the banks of the Mahoning River.

If convicted, Lupo faces up to three years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

progressohio

Lupo, who co-owns D&L Energy, was directly implicated in the dumping.

The charges state that Lupo ordered Hardrock employees on at least six occasions to pump polluted waste into a storm drain, which led to the tributary and emptied into the Mahoning River about a mile away. The waste consisted primarily of salt-water brine, but also contained crude oil and benzene, Dettelbach said.

Two employees told investigators that Lupo actually ordered them to dump the polluted waste at least 20 times since November, and directed them to lie to investigators about the number of times they dumped the waste, according to documents related to the charges.

Lupo specified that the dumping should only occur at night and after all of the other employees had left the facility, according to an agent with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency who conducted the interviews.

As the article notes, Ohio is sensitive about the quality of its waterways.

At Thursday’s news conference, Dettelbach said Ohioans have learned from past mistakes never to allow our rivers and lakes to be spoiled again by industrial pollution.

“Whether our water flows south to the great Ohio River, or north to the Great Lakes, whether [it] flows past a fisherman or into our kitchen, protecting and preserving clean and safe water in Ohio remains a major priority for the Department of Justice, the EPA and state regulators,” Dettelbach said.

One river flowing north to the Great Lakes caught fire in 1969, helping to spur a national push for cleaner water.

The wastewater dumped by Lupo and his employees isn’t likely to be as flammable, though it’s still not healthy for the environment. Exactly how unhealthy isn’t clear: Ohio has notoriously lax rules around reporting the composition of fracking water.

The charges against Lupo are nonetheless a significant action. As natural-gas fracking matures, it must evolve out of an anything-goes mentality. Establishing consequences for malfeasance is a bare minimum of what needs to be done — but at least it’s being done.

Source

Reported waste dumping results in federal charges against fracking company owner, The Cleveland Plain Dealer

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

Read more:

Business & Technology

,

Climate & Energy

Also in Grist

Please enable JavaScript to see recommended stories

From:

Ohio fracking company owner faces federal charges for dumping wastewater

Posted in GE, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Ohio fracking company owner faces federal charges for dumping wastewater