A close view of the growing coal ash mountain in Perry County, Alabama (click on image for more photos)
by Glynn Wilson
Attorney David Ludder has filed an administrative complaint against the Alabama Department of Environmental Management that could result in a federal takeover of the state’s enforcement of national environmental laws by the Environmental Protection Agency and result in a loss of federal funding for the state.
The formal complaint was filed with EPA’s Office of Civil Rights on behalf of the people of Perry County in Alabama’s Black Belt. According to Ludder, they have been the subject of an environmental injustice due to their racial and economic disadvantage by the permitting and placement of a landfill near them that is now full of toxic coal ash from the Tennessee Valley Authority’s major environmental disaster in the Cinch River in 2008.
Ludder’s complaint alleges that the landfill and its contents pollute the environment in a poor, minority area without the means to fight it politically. In addition to potential health problems from the air and water pollution, the landfill exposes local residents to a constant bad odor, lowers property values and causes dangerous traffic problems in the area.
“If EPA determines that ADEM did violate EPA’s regulations without ‘justification,’ EPA must initiate proceedings to deny, annul, suspend or terminate EPA funding to ADEM,” Ludder said in an e-mail interview. “This could cripple ADEM, and no doubt would require ADEM to surrender EPA-authorized programs.”
President Obama and the First Lady Speak to Troops at Fort Bragg
by Glynn Wilson
Bush’s illegal and ill-fated war in Iraq is finally over. All of the U.S. troops are coming home after eight long years.
It was the longest war in American history, although the news media is not covering the war’s end as much as it did the “Shock and Awe” campaign that started it all on March 20, 2003.
President Barack Obama marked the occasion in a low-key, solemn fashion, by saluting the troops upon their return at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, but with “little fanfare,” according to the AP headline.
The wire service did report that Obama never tried to declare victory in this war, as Bush did with a “Mission Accomplished” banner aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003. Although it is doubtful that story made the front page of many newspapers or the top 10 minutes of many local news broadcasts in this country. It is a war we wish would just go away quietly, and for good reasons. It was started under faulty pretenses based on bad intelligence about a non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction program on the part of Saddam Hussein.
“It was a war that (Obama) opposed from the start, inherited as president and is now bringing to a close, leaving behind an Iraq still struggling,” the wire service reported.
What is America, and what is an American? If anything binds us together across space and time, it is our ideals and the stories we tell about our pursuit of them. From the beginning, we set ourselves against Europe’s hierarchies. We exalted democratic government, equality of opportunity and individual freedom. We conceived of our experiment as “the last best hope of earth,” in Lincoln’s words.
But ideals don’t live in a vacuum; they take root in the soil of institutions. Beginning with our first experiments in self-government, the dissonance between our ideals and our institutional practices–especially the tolerance and extension of slavery–created tensions that finally tore us apart.
The South’s alternative vision of the good society was defeated in the Civil War, and our 20th-century history can be told as a narrative of halting progress toward greater tolerance and equality. The major plot points include regulations on corporations in the early 1900s; women’s suffrage in 1920; a social safety net in the New Deal; the Supreme Court’s rejection of Jim Crow laws in 1954; the civil rights and feminist movements of the 1960s; the gay rights victories since the 1970s.
This narrative suggests that our democratic experiment is working, albeit slowly. If we have never been entirely unified in our ideals, the Civil War at least re-unified our institutions. A century and a half later, we rally around the same flag. Or so we think.
Singer-songwriter Jackson Browne talks about his recent performance at Zuccotti Park and his support of the movement. Discussing the suppression of Occupy, Jackson says, “People who really have so much money lose how serious a game this is to people who are slipping below the poverty line and whose children’s futures are beginning to evaporate.”
Woke up this mornin’
there was frost on the ground.
Opened up Facebook,
and there was hot air all around.
I’ve got the bad news blues,
the bad news blues, baby.
What you gonna do…
The bad news is, the Republicans are still in charge of all three branches of government in my home state.
The good news is, more and more people are waking up on the Web and finding out that is a bad thing.
In the interest of keeping you abreast of what is in store for you in year-two of the Republican so-called “super majority” in the Alabama legislature, check out this article from the Dekalb County Times-Journal.
Conservative Senator Shadrack McGill, who replaced long-serving Democrat Lowell Barron, gives some indications of what is in store next year. In addition to “tweaking” the much criticized anti-immigration law, getting rid of the state retirement system for public workers and destroying teacher tenure, McGill indicates he will be doing everything he can to get rid of the Forever Wild program for preserving some of the state’s most valuable and environmentally sensitive areas for future generations.
Assistant Attorneys General Thomas E. Perez and Tony West of the U.S. Justice Department Civil Rights Division were in Birmingham on Monday in the continuing investigation into the impact of Alabama’s strict new immigration law, H.B. 56. It is a separate investigation from the pre-emptive lawsuit to keep the law from being enforced, according to remarks issued after the press conference by the office of U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance.
“The more we hear, the more concerned we are about the impact of Alabama’s immigration law on a wide range of federal rights,” Perez said. “This is why we have returned to Alabama to gather additional information.”
The department is receiving lots of calls and e-mails on the impact of the law. A hotline has been setup at 855.353.1010 and people can send e-mails about it to hb56@usdoj.gov.
Perez said they are concerned about kids dropping out of school or being chronically absent, that the law is being used as an excuse not to pay workers, as well as racial profiling on the part of police.
Assistant U.S. Attorneys General Tony West and Thomas E. Perez of the Civil Rights Division will be in Birmingham, Alabama, on Monday, Nov. 28, to meet with business and community leaders and discuss the impact of H.B. 56, Alabama’s immigration law, according to a press release from the U.S. Attorneys office in Birmingham.
Well, it’s official. Now that they think they have run all the Mexicans out of Alabama, the tea party Republicans are going to try to bring back the convict-lease system of slave labor to the state. The national and local backlash over the state’s draconian immigration law was apparently not enough.
Conservative Senator Arthur Orr, a Republican from Decatur, has prefiled a bill for the next session of the Alabama Legislature in February that would make it legal for private companies to hire prisoners to work on farms and chicken processing plants and even in manufacturing industries.
“There was probably no issue in the 20th century that has left a more negative, lasting impression of Alabama than the convict-lease system,” Historian and author Dr. Wayne Flynt said in an exclusive interview. “If Orr and Scott Beason decided that they had not done enough damage to the state already with the anti-immigration law, and they wanted to ratchet up the damage, to extend it and expand it and make Alabama even more the laughing stock of the nation, creating a convict-lease system in Alabama would just be a great idea.”
Under existing law, the employment of prisoners within the Department of Corrections facilities by private industry is not authorized, according to language in the bill. The proposed law would specifically authorize the Department of Corrections to enter into contract agreements with private industry “to establish work-oriented rehabilitation programs.”
Concerned citizens are being asked to join with Occupy Birmingham and other civic and religious organizations Dec. 3 to stand up for civil and economic rights of Alabama and protest the state’s new repressive immigration law and its participation in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention and deportation program.
Participants will gather in Gadsden at 12 p.m. and march to the Etowah County Detention Center, a privatized prison which houses a quota-based average of 325 undocumented immigrants on any given day. The Federal ICE program falls under Homeland Security and was billed as a way of detaining undocumented criminals, yet studies show that in some states 80 percent of those deported have committed no major crimes. In addition Alabama’s state law, H.B.56, encourages racial profiling, restricts employment, the use of public utilities and puts unnecessary strain on law enforcement resources.
“The economic cost to Alabama is only beginning to be estimated,” organizers said in a press release announcing the protest. “In taxes alone undocumented immigrants bring the state $130 million a year.”
During the Bush years, we specialized in covering the politicization of the U.S. justice system as much as any news organization. Our archives are about the most comprehensive for anyone researching the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, and the original case against Richard Scrushy, which Glynn Wilson covered for The New York Times.
