What is This?

Labor Law Reform?

Knowing that you are a progressive member of the Board of Directors of the Chamber of Commerce, I am astounded to find in the Newsletter of the Chamber of Commerce of February 22, 1968, an article entitled “Your Stake in Labor Law Reform” by Allen Shivers, President, Chamber of Commerce of the United States.

In this article, Mr. Shivers is extremely biased against labor unions and the good that they have brought to this country. I would hope that you and the other progressive members of the Board of Directors would see to it that the other side of the issue concerning labor law reform is presented or that such articles cease to appear in the newsletter.I think you will agree that the many people in the labor unions in this area would appreciate your efforts on their behalf.

The Institute of International Education

Gentlemen:

In light of some of your past articles, I think you will find the following of interest.

The Institute of International Education (IIE) conducts an annual census of foreign students in the United States. When finally analyzed and distributed to foreign student advisors and others, the information serves as a valuable source of statistics needed to help promote a clear picture of the foreign student in the U.S. to the general public.

In the past couple of years, a new item has been added to the census card that each foreign student fills out. The foreign student is now asked to provide not only his name but his exact home address. IIE claims that the student's name and home address will not be released to anyone if the student marks an X in the appropriate box on the card. However, IIE still wants the student’s name and exact home address, both of which seem useless for merely statistical purposes. Just why does IIE want the name and address if they swear they aren’t going to release it and if it is of no statistical value? Surely they don’t need street numbers and first names to correlate their data.

IIE claims that listing of foreign students by name, country and home address “are prepared at the request of reputable corporations…” One wonders if the giant electric companies, whose officers were sentenced to jail for price-fixing, or the corporations recently brought to court for over-charging on drugs are among those so-called “reputable corporations”. One wonders if the great exploiters such as the United Fruit Company and the others aren’t at the top of this “reputable” list.

The helping hand that IIE claims to want to give to foreign students on their return home is a bit superfluous. Most foreign students have little trouble finding their way to the giant corporations who are interested in using them as fronts back home. WVU is certainly not a Harvard nor MIT, but the foreign student graduates from here have little trouble in finding jobs. They find them in the open market where the “reputable corporations”, who always trust in such free competition, must bid against the others.
Sincerely yours, Julian Martin

Coordinator of Foreign Student Programs, West Virginia University. Past chairman of Region IX of the National Association for Foreign Student Affairs

Cold Facts about Coal

Only 3 percent to 10 percent of West Virginia’s coal “must” be obtained by the surface method. All the rest can be deep mined.

Strip mining is easier and cheaper and has much quicker return on initial investment than deep mining.

The overriding question of a landowner’s right to do with his land what he wants is an interesting one. The Air Pollution Control Commission can tell a man who lives outside the city limits if and when he can burn brush which pollutes the air. There are virtually thousands of city, county and federal police state laws like this one and there’s not much that can done about it. Yet, you can hardly breathe in the Kanawha Valley not because of burning trash but because of the chemical plant pollution. The only reason strip miners can do what they want when they want is because they are backed by powerful mineral and landowners who control some of the largest corporations in the U.S. and the world. This makes the question not one of working citizen pitted against blind environmentalist but one of unconscionable, multi-national, status and money loving conglomerate domination over every life-loving, creator-creation loving individual in the State.

The majority of West Virginia’s land is owned by out-of-state and out-of-country corporations. Their concern is with the profit they can make and for the most part they will tell you openly that they do not care what they do to the land to make their profit.

In many instances the mineral rights to the land or the land itself was obtained by false pretenses—phony unpaid tax assessments, fake deeds, outright lies—long, long ago when many of our ancestors could not read or write.

During the period July, 1967 through July, 1977, 206,626 acres were placed under surface mining permits and 17,859 acres under prospecting permits. There appears to be no record available anywhere in the Department of Mines or the Department of Natural Resources as to how many acres were stripped in West Virginia prior to 1967. However, a rough figure for the period 1939 to 1967 is 300,000 or more stripped. (At a minimum three times more surrounding land is disturbed than is actually stripped, not to mention the water pollution and erosion and sedimentation which ruins stream beds and kills water life for miles. That hurts everyone from fishermen and swimmers to taxpayers footing the bill for upkeep on sewage systems and millions of dollars in flood relief.) The minimal number of acres actually disturbed in West Virginia from 1939 to 1977 using the above figures is at least 2,000,000 acres. The total land area of West Virginia is 25,000,000 acres. (Source: Department of Natural Resources.)

If strip mining continues at its present pace, within 10 years all strip mine coal will have been stripped, all stripminers (the laborers) will be out of work, the fat cats will move out west or anywhere else they can get richer and will have fit place to live.[I was dead wrong about this. Huge mountain top removal equipment has made it possible to get at coal never before thought mineable.]

Damage done by active stripping should be considered a grave problem. The Charleston Gazette reported on April 9, 1977: “Governor Rockefeller said Friday during a news conference that there is no question that old, unreclaimed strip mines, ongoing strip operations, and those where reclamation hasn’t been completed substantially contributed to the flooding in southwest West Virginia.” Still he refuses to use his power to delete areas of the state from stripping.*

The usefulness of many federal reservoir projects has been severely limited by sedimentation and water pollution from stripping. The taxpayer is again paying for this. (Source—“Adverse Effects of Coal Mining on various Federal Reservoir Projects,” Sixteenth Report by the Committee on Governmental Operations, 93^rd Congress, 2^nd Session, House Report No. 93-1156, Union Calendar No. 5456, June 26, 1971.)

In West Virginia an average of $750 is spent on reclaiming an acre of stripped land. In West Germany, where strip mining is permitted only for special kinds of coal and then only on gently rolling and flat terrain, reclamation costs are $4,000 to $9,000 per acre. To reclaim the mountainous terrain in America would greatly reduce the amount of profit to coal companies. Money, not people or land, is the supreme consideration.

Mountain top removal obliterates our last resource of fresh pure surface water, mountain springs. The land is extremely unstable for years and while there has been much talk about building homes on mountaintop removal projects, so far talk is about all that’s happened.

While it is possible to grade steep slopes to something approximating original natural contour, it is frequently impossible even after re-vegetation growth to keep them from sliding.

Even when the best reclamation possible is completed and the operators are relieved of further responsibility, no one takes care of the site and the re-vegetation frequently dies, leaving the land barren.

While West Virginia has a better law than other states, it has not been properly enforced. Although the Federal strip mine bill passed recently, no amount of laws will prevent environmental damage from stripping no matter how strong and no matter how strictly enforced.

Appalachian deep mined coal employs approximately 10 times as many people as western surface mines for each million tons of coal produced.

Each year the stripper’s numbers grow larger. Their ranks have doubled since 1974. The coal is mined so quickly that the continuous opening of new mines is essential to support the dependence of the operator and his workers.

Since 8,031 surface miners produced 20,982,316 tons of coal in 1976 and 51,771 deep miners produced 87,811,278 tons of coal, the average surface miner produced 2613 tons and average deep miner produced 1673 tons, around 1000 tons less. 8031 strippers put 12,539 deep miners out of work. Surface mining, therefore is not favorable to maximum employment for extended periods. (Source: Department of Mines).

West Virginia coal operators shipped 108,944,000 tons of coal in 1976 as follows:

Within West Virginia 25,876,000

Within Continental U.S. 55,553,000

To Canada 8,800,000

Overseas 18,715,000

Martin, based in Lincoln County, is a member of Save Our Mountains

*Here are two revealing quotes from Rockefeller:

   March 12, 1977-- "...mountaintop removal should certainly be encouraged, if not specifically dictated." Gov. Rockefeller's testimony to the U. S. Senate Subcommittee on Energy and Natural Resources, March 12, 1977.

“Strip-mining must be abolished because of its effect on those who have given most to the cause—the many West Virginians who have suffered actual destruction of their homes; those who have put up with flooding, mud slides, cracked foundations, destruction of neighborhoods, decreases in property values, the loss of fishing and hunting, and the beauty of the hills…" Rockefeller in 1972 while running for Governor of West Virginia.

     When I confronted Governor Rockefeller in Lincoln County about strip mining he said, "Do you want to deny the people of southern WV the flat land necessary to build new homes?" A friend sitting next to me who was not politically active responded with, “Oh come on Jay!”

Germ Warfare

Several nights ago on the ABC Evening News it was mentioned that the Army admitted to conducting germ warfare experiments in the subways of New York, Chicago and San Francisco.

The Army said that the germs were of a non-disease carrying kind. Others have said that these Army germs cause heart valve infection and pneumonia. But, even if they are harmless germs, what right does the Army have to experiment on the people who ride those subways? And, since they only admit to what they get caught at, what other experiments are they conducting against the health of the American people? Perhaps swine flu and French polio are ‘army experiments.

These experiments shocked me so much that I called my friends and asked them to send a telegram to Jimmy Carter asking him to stop the Army germ warfare against the American people or any people for that matter. I ask everyone who reads this letter to do as I have done, send Jimmy Carter a telegram or letter and ask your friends to do the same and to pass the word along.

Remember, you and your family may already be part of a germ warfare experiment.

I called Ned Chilton, the inspired publisher of the Charleston Gazette daily newspaper. I told him that the Army released germs in several locations in the United States to find what the pattern of distribution would be as time went on. He said, “It was probably just an experiment.” I replied “You got it!” Soon after that a front page article in the Gazette by reporter Lawrence L. Knutson, revealed that this experiment had gone on for twenty years ending in 1969.

The Gazette article revealed that, “The Army secretly conducted simulated germ warfare attacks using live bacteria against 19 American civilian targets including the Pennsylvania Turnpike, the city of San Francisco and National Airport in Washington…Overall, the Army staged 239 open air tests….In 79 of the cases, disease-causing agents were used. The other 160 tests involved stimulants such as sulfur dioxide, fluorescent particles and soap bubbles. However, some critics have questioned whether some of these theoretically nontoxic bacteria may have caused pneumonia or other respiratory diseases.”

I recall reading of a family in San Francisco suing over the death of their father, which they claimed was caused by the Army’s germ warfare experiments.

More recently, June 2009, there was a TV documentary confirming once again the Army germ warfare experiments on U.S. citizens.
Juries Must Be Respected

Lincoln Journal, July 1979
Dear Editor,

This letter is in response to the interview with Sgt. Andy Galford of the State Police which was in the Lincoln Journal on July 3. In that interview Sgt. Galford said police morale was low in Lincoln County because our juries are made up of people who do not take their duty seriously and who are irresponsible. He seemed to be saying that the police were unhappy about the way our citizens judge their fellow citizens and that police morale would go up if the people were sent to prison.

The morale of the police should come from a feeling of satisfaction that they are serving the people who pay their salaries. It is not the job of the police to tell the very people who employ them how to think when they are members of a jury. It is the duty of the police to honor and respect the decisions of the people who serve on juries—the police have no right to be granting interviews in which they criticize the entire population of Lincoln County for not seeing things their way. If a policeman wants to criticize juries then he should resign as a policeman and criticize his fellow citizens as a fellow citizen not as a public servant.

Police have rights to criticize their supervisors or even politicians but not juries. Juries are established to determine who is telling the truth—the police or the defendant. For the police to speak against juries is an attempt to control the whole legal process. The jury is there to protect the defendant against illegal investigations, police brutality and the very good chance that someone with political power was trying to railroad the defendant.

It isn’t surprising that a jury might let someone off for stealing a typewriter when they consider how much Nixon and Agnew stole. I wonder if the morale of the police would go up if more of our corrupt public officials were found guilty of their crimes.

Julian Martin

Griffithsville, WV
Not long after I wrote this letter Sgt. Galford parked his police cruiser within view of my home. I went out and talked to him. He told me he didn’t like the letter I wrote. I told him that was his right. He no doubt meant to intimidate me but it didn’t work. A couple of years later he was the state policeman who threw me in a chair and doubled his fist in my bloody face. I was there to file a complaint about being assaulted at a board of education meeting and ended up being assaulted and threatened by Sgt. Galford.
State Police Review Board

The Lincoln Journal
Dear Editor,

Several years ago I was “sucker punched” after a Lincoln County

Up to that point we had had no confrontation with the policeman, we had discussed nothing that could lead him to believe I wouldn’t listen.  We had come to the state police headquarters of our own free will to file a complaint of assault and battery.

We talked to a lawyer in Hamlin about the situation.  He told us the best thing we could do for the people of Lincoln County would be to get some publicity on the brutality of the state police.  “Every time I have a

   State police officials are opposed to a civilian review board.  If the recent brutality by state policemen in McDowell County had not been recorded in a 911 call there is little doubt, based on my experience, that the in-house investigation would have another white-wash.

John Raese*

The money, you say, where will the money come from? Try the super tax credit. We have wasted billions of dollars on corporate welfare in tax

Forests Are Helpless Without Foresters

To Dye the forest is one big factory and wildlife is that big stuff you can see and hunt with a gun. Untold wildlife habitat is destroyed, fragmented and altered forever by the bulldozer blades, trucks and skidders that rip and tear the forest floor and creek beds in timbering jobs.

Dye claims that foresters have “…benefited the forest by learning how to improve it through scientific management practices.” On a recent trip to the Olympic National Park, I was so glad that foresters didn’t get an opportunity to “benefit and improve” the Olympic rain forest as they have “scientifically managed” the clear cutting just outside the park. Next to mountaintop removal, clear cutting on the Olympic peninsula or in Fayette County, West Virginia, is the worst environmental disaster I have ever seen.

The wonderful thing about old growth forests is that the foresters have been kept out and the woods can be enjoyed in their natural state. There are roads cut across every forest in West Virginia. Why can’t we preserve some that are left alone, unmanaged and natural?

Let’s leave our grandchildren the gift of state forests full of old growth trees. The problem isn’t where can we find more trees to cut. The problem is where can we save a few from the rapacious appetite of chip mills led by flag-waving foresters.

Dye brags that our state is more heavily covered with forest than it has been in more than one hundred years. I sure hope so. One hundred years ago the foresters of the day had been clear-cutting our virgin forests for 20 years.

It seems logical that if the whole state is covered with forests, we don’t need to be invading the state forests with chain saws and bulldozers. Do we cut it all down because it is so big and nice?

It seems that from the number of log trucks on the highways the foresters and timber industry are getting all they can haul from privately owned forests. Why do we give them the publically owned state forest trees?

The secret to Dye’s soaring praise of foresters is found near the end of the article where he shamelessly proclaims that in the state forests “…25 percent of the money generated from timber sales goes back into the forest where the logging occurred.” There is the dirty little devil that makes logging so tasteful to the state’s chief forester—his outfit gets a load of money from it. He claims this saves the taxpayers money. I will happily pay my share of taxes to keep logging out of state forests. Are timber industry tax breaks forcing us to cut the trees in state forests?

Once again the “We had to destroy the village to save it” illogically wiggles to the surface. It sounds similar to the mountaintop removal pleas that we must destroy the mountains to save the mountain state.

The foresters are busting a gut to get into Kanawha State Forest and cut trees. They are stopped by a law that says they can’t. They are going to try to get a law passed this next session to let them have at those trees. A law should be passed that they can’t cut trees in any state forest. Enough, already!

^* Dye is director of the West Virginia Division of Forestry.