THE RAVAGES OF COAL CAPITALISM : HOW THE RICHEST COAL STATE IS SLOWLY DROWNING IN POVERTY AND DRUGS

Virginia was once a lush heaven of mountains and valleys, where American Indians and immigrants had settled in peace, and toiled side by side.  At first, that is.

Once the Indians were sent away on the trail of a million tears, which saw indigenous tribes travel hundreds of miles on foot to lands they had never known, only the immigrants were left.

Virginia was also a harsh country.  Soon after the settlers took over the bucolic landscape, Virginia became the coal capital of the world. Rich veins were discovered that ran throughout the state. From this tiny state came the fuel that made America into the economic and industrial power of the past two centuries. 

But the coal has been both the saviour and the damnation of the state, where rapacious energy interests have not provided for the locals as they relentlessly extracted the coal, and have never shared in the enormous bounty that came from Virginia's coal beds.

Now however, the coal is slowly vanishing.  The deep veins that ran through West Virginia's majestic hills have all but been stripped, and soon whatever meager earnings West Virginians drew from the coal industry will dry out.

Already, the signs of an impending doom are becoming manifest and daunting.  Poverty and poor education are paving the way for a drug epidemic that could define West Virginia as the failed state it will probably become. 

In some areas, authorities have told teachers and school personnel to be on the lookout for possible abuse, as more and more children go to school unfed and unwashed, often a sign that parents have succumbed to heroin or other severe drug addictions. 

In McDowell County, drug addiction levels are unprecedented, and are adding to the crushing poverty and lack of resources of the place.  Now that the mining jobs are gone there is nothing to take their place, people are falling into the deepest desperation.  The coal industry, which has contaminated and wrought havoc on the West Virginia landscape through leaching of coal processing chemicals and the ripping apart of mountain to expose the coal veins, has never provided for these communities aside from the dangerous and often underpaid mining jobs and the few small enterprises that fed from the meager revenues of the miners.  

McDowell, in fact, has the frightening reputation of having the highest drug overdose rate in all of West Virginia, which already has its own dismal rates county-wise and statewide.

The decadence of McDowell county however, is not a sudden event.  Since the 1980s when the steel industry all but collapsed and more jobs became mechanized, the moderate wealth afforded by mining jobs was already greatly diminishing.  

As more economic instability ensued and small businesses supported by the coal mining jobs shuttered, gloom and anxiety set in.  Alcohol was always a favorite escape.  Now however, that gloom is fast transforming into total despair and people are increasingly relying on prescription medication, often gateway drugs, and then on hard drugs readily and cheaply available on West Virginia streets. 

What has been observed nationally as a trend, the rise in heroin addiction generated by gateway drugs such as Oxycontin and other potent opiate derivatives, is already a full blown crisis in West Virginia. 

In one school alone in War, West Virginia, 48% of the students have lost one parent or both to drug addiction, either through death by overdose or because the state had to remove the child from the household. In some more severe cases, children were removed from their homes because the parents were selling them to paedophiles for drug money.

In another school in the same city, 40% of kids need special education assistance and a good percentage of those were born addicted because their mothers used drugs during gestation. 

The new generation, in the city  of War, and the county and in every city in West Virginia ravaged by poverty, is by many people's assessment a lost one.  So many children are scarred biologically and psychologically, that the people who are now taking care of them are almost at a loss on how to deal with their emotional wounds. 

Recent data compiled on drug addiction in America pins West Virginia as the hardest case. Appalachia has the highest number of drug overdoses, with 28.9 deaths per 100,000 individuals.  That's a 605% increase in 14 years.  Back in 1999, the rate was only 4.1 per 100,000 individuals.

Since the late 1990s through today, West Virginia had become the thru way for prescription drug abuse.  Couriers travelling to Florida pill mills often made their stop in West Virginia on their way back to the Mid-West.  Some of the couriers were West Virginians, who ferried the drugs that were becoming increasingly in demand in the beleaguered state, and created their own pill mills.  

Many cities in West Virginia have no infrastructure.  Kermit, West Virginia is one of them.  Only 300 people live there, but there is no supermarket, no mall, no cinema, not even a city centre.  

However, Kermit has a pharmacy, which, until the drug companies changed the formulation of opiate derivatives into non-crushable form, was busier than grand central station. Lines at the drive through sneaked for city blocks and beyond as addicts waited to get their pills.  

The pharmacy in Kermit had become a pill mill in its own right, and people knew that just about any opiate could be obtained there easily and seemingly legally.  Just like Florida, tiny Kermit had become a pill mecca, and people drove to its remote location all the way from the north east to get their stuff. 

DEA finally stormed the pharmacy in Kermit and shut down the operation. They found that the small pharmacy was doling out enough pills for the entire state to consume, to the tune of 3.2 million dosage of hydrocodone alone in just one year, 2006.  Cash was so stuffed in drawers at the tiny pharmacy that they would not even close.

The closure of this pill mill however, created a fatal vacancy: soon people were looking for substitutes to the easily obtainable opiates.  And that's when heroin dealers moved in. In fact drug gangs from as far as Detroit and Atlanta moved in to provide both the pills and their harder substitute, heroin. 

The pills and now the heroin consumption are also bringing the obvious child of rampant addiction: violence.  In Mingo county, authorities are almost helpless to stop what they are calling a catastrophic increase in violence that spans the entire gamut, from domestic violence, to murders, to burglaries to DUIs.  Mingo county, just a decade ago, was the kind of place where one incidence of violence would have been the talk of the town.  Now, no one is talking, as violence engulfs the impoverished county. Shootings in broad daylight have become so common, they barely make the news. 

Many people blame the mining companies for more than just pillaging.  Many miners are addicted to pills because of the injuries received from the work in the mines.  Almost all miners have back problems and lung ailments.  Oxycontin, in fact, was probably a staple adopted in the late 1990s.  

Just recently, two West Virginia agencies have sued the pharmaceutical companies for causing the drug epidemic that is tearing the state apart. In a state where the Attorney General's wife is a lobbyist for the pharmaceutical company that makes opiates, there is doubt that such action will bring a quick or even effective resolution to the problem. 

But suing they are.  Governor Earl Ray Tombling's office is pushing the action through.  All money from possible settlements would go to the families of the people who have been affected by the prescription pill epidemic.  

And that is only because the drug epidemic has so depleted West Virginia's medical and enforcement resources that they have to find a solution to the problem. 



Partial Sources: Al Jazeera/Healthyamericans.org/Salon/Med. Malpractice:  3.26.14

AMERICA'S DARK RETURN TO RACISM: A SUSPECTED LYNCHING IN TEXAS PROVES THAT RIGHT WING RADICALS ARE ON THE RISE

 

Warnings about the return to the dark times of racism and lynching, fueled by unfettered rhetoric coming from the Tea party and other right wing parties, might just have been proved right.

Although lynchings in Texas have happened before, and might happen again, the way the lynching of Alfred Wright was dealt with shows that while hatred never does go out of style, complicity from local authorities that should have disappeared a long time ago, may still play a role in places where separations between whites and blacks is still a reality. 

Alfred Wright disappeared on November 7th of last year as he was traveling to a physical therapy session. His vehicle apparently broke down, and he found himself on the side of the road. Wright called his wife and asked her to help him, but she was occupied with their sons and declined to go. 

He then called back a short while later, seemingly in deep distress.  When relatives arrived not long after to try to help Wright, he had vanished.  A nearby liquor store employee told the relatives that he had seen Wright outside the store, but that instead of going in, he had started running way in a panic. 

A day later, some of Wright's personal items were found not far from where his car broke down, but his body was not found until 18 days later.  His body too, was a few yards away from where he had first stopped on the road. More importantly, his body was not decomposed as if it had been exposed to the elements, indicating that he might have been held somewhere and possibly tortured.

What is remarkable from this point on, is the fact that the authorities wrote off his death as an accidental drug overdose, although his corpse was mutilated and his throat cut.  The coroner's report even went so far as to detail that there was no 'evidence of severe truama' to the body.  

Wright's family, who knew he was not a drug user, immediately suspected that the coroner's report was incorrect, and worse, that the wrong finding was cited to divert public attention to the case. 

 

In addition to a missing ear, the murderers had also severed his tongue and taken out two teeth.   He was almost naked, wearing only briefs and his tennis shoes.  His cell phone was still on his body, curled between the folds of his remaining sock.  

The coroner did however, mention that the missing 'parts' on Wright's body were due to animal feeding on his remains, although no mention was made of his slit throat. 

A second coroner's report, obtained after the family of the deceased protested - and paid by the family-, did mention severe head and neck trauma, but did so without being able to make his report without the photographic evidence that was attached tot he first coroner's report, a first evidence of 'stonewalling' on the part of the local authorities.

No investigation had been initiated, nor any search done by authorities to obtain evidence from Wright's truck or from the possible perpetrators of his killing.  

Under pressure from the family and the public alike, the Sheriff's office in Wright's locality finally relinquished the files and the case to the Attorney General.  The case had been however, under the jurisdiction of the Texas Rangers until then, and they had retained the files of the case.  

Due to pressure from the press and other sources, federal investigators have also decided, belatedly, to investigate the case, since it would fall under the umbrella of hate crime cases. 

But even with all this untimely mobilization, what indeed did prompt the authorities involved initially with the case to go so far as to try burying Wright's murder?  

 

Enter CNN and Cooper's segment on the same channel on Wright's case, and a Congresswoman from Texas, Sheila Jackson Lee.  Last Monday, under renewed focus on the case, the US dept of Justice agreed to Federal involvement.  But all this was not to be before Congresswoman Lee went to Attorney General Holder to plead her case.  She was under the impression, and rightfully so, together with Wright's family and other people concerned with the case, that the County authorities that handled the case not only have botched the case, but that they were purposefully hiding crucial evidence. 

In the months since Wright's death, many people have banded together to demonstrate about what they see as a miscarriage of investigative duties.  

According to Cooper's report on CNN, a dime was found near Wright's body.  Some believe that this was a sign of a vendetta, since dropping a dime is symbolic of someone snitching.  

More relevant to Wright's story is a report of a racial attack outside the same store where Wright disappeared.  A black man had stopped there only two days before Wright's disappearance, and said that he was attacked by two men who hurled racial slurs at him.  However, the Sheriff in the case has already declared that the two cases are unrelated. 

More worrisome is the fact, that the severing of the ear of a black man was a practice that clanners used when they went out on a lynching.  The severed ear then became a souvenir.  

Interestingly too, is the fact that the Sheriff's office asserts that the area in which Wright was found was thoroughly searched, although the father of Wright found his corpse 18 days later with the help of volunteers only 25 yards from where his truck was stopped.  The local authorities gave up any search only 4 days into Wright's disappearance.

Some have even suggested that the reason for the 'cover-up' if there is one, is due to some connection with a relative of the Sheriff himself, although that connection does not see to be very clear. 

But Jasper, Texas, where Wright died, has a long history of racial violence.  In 1998, only 45 minutes from the locality of Wright's murder a man was chained to a pickup truck and dragged until he died, then chopped up in pieces.  That case broke however, as a nationwide scandal, fast and loud.  

Is the reason for Jasper's authorities reticence, to put it mildly, in investigating this case due to shame?  Or is it because authorities are colluding with racist elements of the local population?

If the latter is true, then the US has to examine very closely what changes the polarized political climate has wrought.  

It seems that racial violence has increased in some places, like Mississippi, after years of relative quiet.  The overt racism and discrimination of the Tea Party seems to have emboldened that segment of the population that has never relinquished its ignorant beliefs and prejudices.  

It is time to stop the violent and racist rhetoric, no matter from where it issues.  The first amendment cannot be a license to promote racist and divisive ideals. If no one speaks up and condemns the propaganda, the insults, the overt racism of certain political groups, harsh sentiments and violent hatred will no longer be relegated to dark rooms and private chatter: it will spill over onto those black people who they hate, and entitle the racist individuals to act upon those beliefs and thoughts and feelings that should have been wiped out long ago

Even if Wright's case does not turn out to be a case of lynching, and this writer has great doubt of that, it still demonstrates how small local jurisdictions in places where the echoes of Jim Crow still resonate, are willing to derail the course of justice in name of self preservation or the preservation of 'good old boys'. 

How can the authorities in the case claim that a man who had no precedents of law infraction, nor a history of drug use, simply claim that a drug overdose is involved? If nothing else their course of action is also very indicative of how the case was handled.  Just as many murders of prostitutes take - at best- second place to 'regular people's' murders, so does the intimation or finding that a minority, and especially a black man, is a drug user push the investigation of his demise into the basket of lesser cases, which may or may not even be investigated properly.

Oh, and there's one last teenie weensie detail: Wright was in an interracial marriage.  

In Wright's case, then, the 'finding' of accidental overdose, is a frightening example of how a stereotype could have been employed to turn away the attention of the people and the press from an unwelcome case.

That black men in Jasper, Texas, still have to fear living, and walking and of all things being on the side of the road for a broken vehicle, is telling.  When, America, will we be done with racism?

Op-Ed

Partial sources: Raw/12 News now/Texas Observer   1.11.14