Organizing against coal companies in forgotten Eastern Kentucky

Eastern Kentucky is one of the poorest regions of the U.S., where 27 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. Coal mining has been going on for decades, while the struggles of the miners and the local community have been revived again and again against the exploitation. (A documentary called Harlan County, USA filmed the miners’ strike of 1973; and in 1981, the group Kentuckians For The Commonwealth was founded to offset the coal companies.) Even though the million-dollar coal business still employs a significant part of the local population, it takes away more than it contributes to the life of Eastern Kentucky. Poverty is the biggest in areas where coal mining is ongoing. Coal is a strong form of identity - there have been coal miners in essentially every family many generations back. Despite this, many people raise their voices and protest against the most devastating form of strip mining, mountain top removal, which has already led to the destruction of approximately 500 mountain tops in Central Appalachia.

We are driving in Floyd County, in the heart of the Appalachian mountains, to test the water of streams polluted by strip mining. The closest biggest town has a population of only 3,000. We are passing by a small settlement, David, which received its name from David L. Francis, the President of Princess Elkhorn Coal Company, who built this place for his workers and owned it for a while. 29 percent of Floyd County lives below the poverty line. The landscape very much reminds me of the Carpathians in Transylvania, Romania, where the community of Rosia Montana (Verespatak) has actually been struggling against cyanide gold mining and strip mining.

We are stopping by at a small plot of land. An old man is coming out of his cabin, his bandana displays the bald eagle, the symbol of the country. Chickens are running around the cabin, the little grassy area is embraced by thick bushes and tall trees. The nature has lustfully overgrown the area, leaving a bit for the old man, which he modestly occupied. It turns out that the stream flowing in his backyard is polluted. In the last couple of years, 10 percent of Central Appalachia, approximately 500 mountain tops, has been exploded to extract coal from its depth.

Any form of strip mining causes significant harm to the environment because the surface vegetation has to be removed, the soil is scalped by bulldozers, then the exposed overburden is moved leaving the bald mountain behind so that the mineral can be extracted. In the end, a big hole remains, into which the overburden is backfilled and may be covered by topsoil. The most devastating form of strip mining is the mountain top removal method when the mountain top is actually removed by explosives. The exploded poisonous overburden is filled into adjacent valleys, often by burying streams. The devastated plants and soil do not absorb rain water any more, exposing houses to flooding. Companies find loopholes in the environmental regulations or simply do not comply with the rules, and the Environmental Protection Agency is too weak to make them accountable.

Jeff Chapman-Crane: The Agony of Gaia
Source: KFTC

Kentuckians For The Commonwealth (KFTC) organizes in several ways to offset the destruction of the region. The campaign is a multi-faceted: KFTC organizes the community at a local level and raises awareness in the whole state about this unfairly ignored issue (e.g., urges authors, musicians, painters to make the issue more visible; organizes witness tours with the involvement of local people to expose the destruction; carries out water-tests), they want to achieve changes in the regulations (e.g., against burying the streams), and to implement the current laws (e.g., to review company permits and to ensure the compliance of mining with regulations).

Agitation is not easy in the closed communities of Appalachia, which relate to coal mining through numerous ways, says Kristi Kendall, KFTC's community organizer living in the region. Kristi often runs into folks who yielded to the coal companies and are not ready to act. Through the decades, they have learned that the companies can easily retaliate, so they had better not raise their voice, because one of their relatives or acquaintance works for the coal company. One of the features of rural organizing is that people are often tied by web of close relatives. Even if they do not agree with the mountain top removal and its effects on the community, they do not come to a meeting or a protest, because their neighbors or relatives would frown upon them. Kristi had to face becoming an outsider in her own community and to confront the disapproval of her own family for taking an active role in the fight.

We are walking up the hill to have a view of the mutilated mountain. We are at the end of an abandoned, gravel road: in the middle of the living mountain there is a huge, bald spot and the crippled part is covered by a thin layer of grass. More than 500 such plateaus are located in Appalachia. It is legally binding for the companies to reclaim the land, so under this label, golf courses, a prison, airplane runways and Wal-Marts have been built and real estate investors have experimented with constructing luxury homes.

A local fellow has driven up to us in his four-wheeler. He belongs to the nearby estate where probably three or four families live in their dwellings. He was curious about what we are doing.

"What do you think about the mountain top removal?," I asked.

He thinks there has been no problem. He will start working in the mine from the fall, just like his father did. Local folks do not usually ask questions about the mountain top removal. Strip mining is a taboo, nobody needs unnecessary fights.

Read it in Hungarian.

Organizing for a progressive tax system

KFTC members. Source: FB.

The tax system of Kentucky is overall regressive: those who earn less contribute with a higher percentage of their income to the common good than the better-off - largely due to the fact that sales taxes take a bigger bite out of the incomes of low-income households than they do out of the incomes of wealthy households. Kentuckians For The Commonwealth (KFTC) says that as a result of the current income tax system, tax exemptions for luxury services and the dated estate tax, the state loses income of $363 million each year. KFTC started a campaign for tax justive to replace the decade-old, outdated tax laws. Lisa Abbott, KFTC's Director of Organizing and Leadership Development, and Jessica Hays Lucas, KFTC's community organizer, tells us more about the campaign.

Is it tough to mobilize, build local chapters, and sustain continuous work around such a dry and overarching issue?
Jessica: It is always a dilemma whether the campaign goal should be overarching, which is harder to achieve but may bring real, systemic changes, or we should strive for smaller results, which bring only partial solutions. In KFTC, after several smaller economic justice campaigns, we decided to shoot for something big. In the 1980s, the organization gained its reputation in part by eliminating a property tax exemption on unmined coal. By the mid-90s, our members thought that we should diversify our agenda and fight for economic justice issues, too. A couple of years later, Bill Clinton, then the President of the U.S., severely cut social benefits for low-income people. As a result, KFTC started to work with a small segment of the affected population, with single, low-income parents with children, enrolled in post-secondary education. We won a partial victory.
Then our new goal was for the Kentucky state government to compensate for the regressive tax system and add 15 per cent equal to the earned income tax credit, a federal tax refund the federal government pays to low-income and moderate-income people. We haven't won this issue yet. This benefit would be useful for those who have an income. After all these fights, we decided to work on a campaign which is beneficial for everybody and helps a larger interest group. An overall tax reform proposal proved to be a good one.

An element of these severe welfare cuts of the 1990s, which Jessica mentioned, was that those being on public assistance were obliged to work a specific amount of time in order to be eligible to receive the benefit. This bears similarities to recent measures on welfare and public works in Hungary. How did you organize around this issue?
Lisa: As a result of the welfare cuts, those who were eligible for welfare benefit had to work for 20 or 30 hours weekly in return. If they did not accept the job the state agency offered to them (because it did not comply with their education, etc.), they did not get the benefit. In the very first period, people were sent to work for private businesses too, but that quickly undermined the opportunities of people in the labor market searching for jobs. Later they were only delegated to public institutions. These cuts had a severe impact on a whole generation of single, mostly female, low-income parents who were enrolled in post-secondary education. These women may have had a child at an early age, left an often abusive relationship and later on continued their studies. Being enrolled in post-secondary education meant for them a whole new opportunity for starting a new life. After the reform they had to work for 20 hours (e.g., sweeping a public building) because their studies did not count as work. We started to cooperate, lobbied together, and they told the decision-makers how their life became a mess due to the new law and cuts, etc. As Jessica said, we won only a partial victory: the state adopted a model policy that allowed that two years of post-secondary education counted as work for those welfare recipients.

What mobilization techniques do you use in the tax justice campaign?
Jessica: First of all, we start to make this tough issue tangible. We organize workshops for groups which are already active, for congregations, KFTC chapters, etc. We structured these discussions in a way that we talked about what is terrible in Kentucky (which services are missing, what makes the place unbearable, etc.), and how that relates to the regressive tax system. But later we tried to reframe the relation between the government and the people. We don't necessarily want people to hate the government, we want them to feel ownership over the state and the government.
So we used this frame to talk about the benefits of the progressive tax system for Kentucky and its residents. We discuss what changes people want to see in Kentucky, and what demands we could make to the state. This gives a perspective to the campaign and to the participants. The people have to differentiate between the state and the politicians. The citizens must reclaim the state. Now we are preparing and mobilizing for a wonderful lobby opportunity. The government of Kentucky has recently set up the Blue Ribbon Commission on Tax Reform, a commission elaborating recommendations on tax reforms that raise revenue. Between May and August the commission holds public meetings in all the six districts of Kentucky. This is a wonderful opportunity for us to communicate our ideas to the government. We recognized that it is helpful for people to have a framework to shape their thoughts into words. So based on this framework, our members first talk about who they are and what changes they want to see in Kentucky, then they list the tax- and revenue-related obstacles standing in our way and finally, they come up with good solutions. The commission will put forward its recommendations in November.

How does the campaign look like?
Jessica: We first prepared a bill. It was community-driven. Our members elaborated a preliminary framework - they put down the principles, aspects that are important for them and what they want to see in a tax reform. Based on this detailed document, our expert allies formulated the bill. For example, in Kentucky there are a lot of untaxed services which are mostly used by rich people. Our members put down what kind of services they would like to see taxed, and they discussed the list with other grassroots organizations so that they make sure that there are no services included which may be used by public institutions or organizations. The Kentucky General Assembly (the legislative body), however, debates tax-related issues only every second year. On the one hand, this gives us time for preparation, but we also have to be smart so that our campaign does not lose impetus.
Overall, we want to reform our outdated estate tax, we recommend the stair-stepped rate structure of our income tax, and the taxation of luxury services (such as membership fees to private clubs, golf course fees, limousine rides, etc.) and the taxation of film production, which is currently untaxed in Kentucky. We also want Kentucky government to add 15 percent equal to the federal earned income tax credit. This would mean a total of $363 million annual income and the last one would mean an expense of $100 million.

Lisa: We hear many times that topping up the earned income tax credit is just handing out a benefit. We, however, think that this is a rightful compensation to low-income people who contribute with a higher percentage of their income as a result of our regressive tax system.

Read it in Hungarian.

Community organizing in rural areas - The rural face of the United States

Organizing in rural areas requires different tactics from the organizer compared to the urban context. Acquaintances may live in close vicinity to one another or in the same neighborhood and relationships may easily overlap. There is a great chance that the decision-makers and the members of the local chapter often meet in everyday life (in the supermarket, in church, in community events, in the neighborhood), or they may nurture personal relationships, which gives a particular character to campaigning and confrontation. Furthermore, the issues will sooner or later go beyond the local context and will require the targeting of decision-makers both at a county and a state level.

During the summer I am going to visit eight community organizations working in rural areas. Based on the interviews and the field work with their organizers, and by learning about the aims, possibilities and limits of the organizations, I am hoping to collect and share a variety of community organizing techniques in this blog.

In the upcoming 11 weeks you can read about community organizing in rural areas and at the same time, explore the diverse face of the rural U.S. through the work of the following organizations:

Kentuckians For The Commonwealth (Kentucky)
KFTC was established in 1981 (under the name of Kentucky Fair Tax Coalition). The primary aim of the organization was the taxation of coal companies which had been exploiting the residents of the state and the local farmers. KFTC since then has formed chapters in 13 counties, and the organization took up further economic justice issues, as well as environmental and other social justice issues.

Agricultural Missions (Kentucky)
Agricultural Missions mobilizes and generates power for local farmers to fight for food justice and for a more just food system. The organization steps up efforts against rural poverty in cooperation with local communities such as Amish farmers.

Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (Iowa)
Iowa CCI was established in 1975. It kicked off with fighting for local issues at a neighborhood level, and then in the 1980s, it successfully unified both rural and urban groups behind statewide issues.

Indigenous Environmental Network (Minnesota)
IEN is a grassroots alliance of local North American Indian tribes (dakota, arikara, mandan, hidatsa, ojibwe). The organization first and foremost deals with environmental issues in the spirit of traditional teachings and respecting the natural law.

Northern Plains Resource Council (Montana)
NPRC established the Western Organization of Resource Councils (WORC) in 1979 in a joint effort with citizen groups in North Dakota and Wyoming to enhance cross-state cooperation. The organization has mostly environmental and agricultural issues on its agenda.

United Vision For Idaho (Idaho)
UVI was established in 1995 with the aim of spreading progressive and leftist ideas and to unify local groups in Idaho.

Rural Organizing Project (Oregon)
ROP was established in 1993 with the alliance of more than 40 human rights groups to offset an anti-gay, conservative Christian social movement and to protect progressive values. Since then the organization has put economic justice and immigration issues on its agenda.

PCUN Oregon's Farmworker Union (Oregon)
PCUN is a union of farmworkers, reforestation and nursery workers. It was founded in 1985 by 80 farmworkers and the organization has more than 5,000 members, 98 per cent of which are Mexican and Central American immigrants. PCUN is Oregon's largest Latino organization.

Besides learning about new rural community organizing techniques, my aim is also to explore a variety of campaign strategies in terms of social issues which translate to a Hungarian or Central European context and also increase my knowledge of how these organizations balance between local and statewide campaigns.

Read it in Hungarian.

A community organized in a neighborhood of high crime

Jim Field, on the left
Source:
http://jesssteele.wordpress.com

Jim Field is the Director of Community Organizing at the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless. He has been organizing for 40 years in different neighborhoods of Chicago. This is the synopsis of an interview made in 2012 during my three-week internship with the organization.


In 1992 in Chicago's mostly Polish American, Avondale neighborhood, the most immediate issue was the elimination of crime. How did you start organizing there?
Jim: I kicked off with canvassing. I started in those blocks which were the closest to the headquarters of the gang dominating the neighborhood. I went on the blocks in concentric circles until the residents started to say that their everyday life is not so much affected by the gang's activities. I was tracing potential leaders, one or two people in each block who were affected by the issue. Then I organized a meeting with them. We discussed how the level of crime influences their lives. In the meantime, I tried to make them understand that the authorities will not solve the problem without them putting on pressure.

Were they afraid, were you afraid that the gang would take revenge?

Jim: The gang had already taken revenge. The gang kept them frightened, crimes already happened. The question was if the community is capable of a level of cooperation, as a result of which it could step up against the intimidation. "What if the gang retaliates?" they asked. "The gang has already retaliated, you have been living in fear," I answered. "I am afraid for my child," they said. "If you want your child not to be afraid, you have to do something," I replied. I agitated them. They had to understand that unless they do something, everything will stay as it was. Then I stepped back and let them make the decision. Finally they committed themselves. They also agreed that if a community member was intimidated, they will step up as one against the gang. It also helped them make the decision that I already carried out such a campaign and could tell them that it had been successful in other neighborhoods. As an organizer, you have to take away every excuse they have. They will say in the white neighborhood that it can be done in an African-American neighborhood because they act more collectively, but not here. They will say in an African-American neighborhood that it can be done in white neighborhoods because they can more easily be gathered, but not the African-Americans.

How did the campaign go?

Jim: We started to put pressure on the authorities: we nagged at the police and went to the mayor's house. We generated media attention around the crimes so that it became inconvenient to the authorities not to deal with the issue. Unfortunately, the authorities started to take meaningful action only after a 16-year old girl's throat had been slit. The neighborhood was deeply upset and they started to heavily push the police commander and the state attorney to take action and to take the perpetrator to court. The police finally arrested the gang member and we mobilized the neighborhood so that we could pack the courtroom. On one of the days preceding the trial, however, the gang threw a brick into the window of our office. We immediately convened a gathering and 130 people came. We then decided to show the gang that we are not afraid and we would deliver back the brick to the headquarters of the gang. We wanted this to be a public action, so we announced it to the media. It blew the fuse at the police station, they said we were not allowed to do such a thing. The media loved it. And we insisted on carrying out the action. So two days before the trial, on a Wednesday evening, accompanied by police cars and the media, we marched to the headquarters of the gang and hand delivered the brick. Two days later we packed the courtroom.

Did the gang ever intimidate somebody from the community organization?

Jim: It helped that we worked in close cooperation with the police and we generated media attention to our issues. It happened though that a gang member popped in to our meeting. The new leaders were freaked out. At that meeting a policeman also participated. He said that if somebody is ready to give a testimony, he could arrest the intimidator, but nobody decided to do so.

What is a good leader like?
Jim: A good leader really cares about the interest of the community, and about building the organization. They respect people but can be tough at the same time. I work with leaders' natural instincts. If I am going into a fight with legislators, and I need someone who vehemently expresses their views; I am bringing the pitbull type.


In the beginning of your career, you organized in a Lithuanian neighborhood in Chicago. Without any Lithuanian ancestors, how did you bridge the gap of cultural differences?

Jim: The Lithuanians are a very closed community, and at the beginning, they were reluctant to accept me. I did not give up, I wanted to understand who they are and where they are from. The community organizer is like water - water always finds its way. Most of the people living in that neighborhood are upper-class Lithuanians who migrated to the U.S. after World War II, after the Soviet Union occupied Lithuania. In the meantime, I was searching for those Lithuanians who would talk to me. The second generation was more friendly. I persuaded them to talk in the Lithuanian community media about the issue I identified (it was a badly directed bus service which embittered the life of many in the neighborhood). The older Lithuanians became very angry with me because the younger ones appeared in the media even though they did not speak perfect Lithuanian. But as a result of this incident, I got on friendly terms with a first generation Lithuanian. I was looking for leaders. Organizing is like sifting sand. You are looking for new leaders and new leaders continuously. First I started with the "anointed" leaders, with the president and the vice-president of a Lithuanian organization dating back decades. First I thought I cannot avoid them although they did not do anything else in the name of organizing but drinking beer and talking about the good old years. Then I realized that I don't need to build on them; instead I tried to find those people who do not just pretend to be leaders but are real leaders. And of course I involved the president and the vice-president when it was possible, and they turned out to be good fundraisers because of their connections.

What is a good organizer like?
Jim: A good organizer believes in people, handles them very well and shows patience. They will take the time to grow a leader. They understand power, strategy and tactics. They can bring people together in a collaborative manner and use the media well. They are good at confrontation but also good at building allies: every target is a potential ally, and in one case, they can be worthy of cooperation, but in another case, you have to humiliate them. One of the challenges for an organizer is to understand that they don't have to be liked all the time. If you want somebody to like you, go and get a dog. The role of the organizer may be somewhat schizophrenic: you want to win, but eventually you are not just there to win, but to build a powerful organization.

Read it in Hungarian.