History for the Future: Jeff Biggers on Coal in the Heartland

Jeff Biggers on Coal in the Heartland
History for the Future



Jeff Biggers discusses the history of coal mining in Illinois, and the nation. Biggers is an award winning journalist and author of the book Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland, just published this year by Nation Books. This study asks readers to consider the true cost of coal by exploring the toll its production has taken on people and the environment throughout American history. On the show, Biggers talks about his book, the myth of “clean coal,” and his hopes for a truly clean energy future.

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NPR: Coal Reignites A Mighty Battle Of Labor History

Coal Reignites A Mighty Battle Of Labor History
NPR

A Coal-Fired Country

West Virginia's been called the Saudi Arabia of coal. It produces more than a third of all the coal mined in the U.S. More than half the energy Americans use is powered by burning those black rocks. The lights in your house, your TV, maybe the computer you're reading this story on — they all work thanks to coal.

The other thing about West Virginia is its poverty rate, one of the highest in America, even though coal prices just hit a 15-year high.

Almost a quarter of the people in Logan County live below the poverty level. They're people left behind by the changes in technology and technique that have allowed coal companies to earn more money and hire fewer miners.

This story, though, is only partially about jobs. It's really about history — the battle over what to remember and whether to remember it at all.

A Firefight To Organize

No one has the exact details of what happened here in late August/early September 1921, but the basic story says around 10,000 coal miners took up arms against the private militias employed by West Virginia's Stone Mountain Mining Co. For five days they fought for the right to organize — to join unions.

The Baldwin-Felts detectives hired by the coal companies in West Virginia were referred to as the "Death Special" by miners.

"From all the artifacts found here, there had to be hundreds of men up here," King says. "I mean, there's probably thousands of shell cases scattered around here."

As many as 100 men died in the fighting. It got so bad that President Harding sent a detachment of federal troops to crush the rebellion.

None of this happened in a vacuum. Tension had been building for years. Just a year before, union-busting mercenaries, who worked for a private agency called Baldwin-Felts, shot and killed the pro-union mayor of the nearby town of Matewan.

At the time, most states had laws against organizing. It didn't help that Harding's administration was decidedly anti-labor.

The worry was the unions would bog down industry and put the brakes on America's rapid economic growth.

The problem for the wage earners, at least in Logan County, was that they didn't have a whole lot of options.

A Company Town

"They had the yellow-dog contract which said that, basically, if you took a job at this mine, you could not associate with anyone in the union, you couldn't join," says Doug Estepp, a local historian who runs tours of the area. "You were basically fired, blacklisted and evicted — and probably beaten on the way out by the guards just for good measure."

The coal companies owned your house, they paid you in credits that could only be spent on highly inflated food at the company-owned store, and if you complained about safety, you were fired.

The private security men from Baldwin-Felts would threaten, beat and sometimes murder agitators — all with impunity.

And so it all came to a head in late August 1921. The miners of Logan and Mingo counties had had enough.

To Listent to the Episode

This Land is Our Land: The Fight To Reclaim the Commons

(Extra credit for ENG 102 and HUM 121 students)

This Land is Our Land: The Fight To Reclaim the Commons
Uprising Radio



Everywhere we look there is corporate control of American lives, from the private stranglehold of our food systems, to the privatization of the internet. A brand new documentary released earlier this month by the Media Education Foundation called “This Land is Our Land”, makes the case for reclaiming The Commons, and awakens audiences to what we are losing as ideas, and even the air we breathe and the water we drink, become the private property of corporations. This Land is Our Land: The Fight to Reclaim the Commons, is narrated by David Bollier author, blogger, and activist for commons based policy. The film gives a history of the commons in the United States and explains how values shifted and a movement to privatize everything from medical research to natural resources overtook our nation. Finally, the film offers examples of ways people around the world, and here at home, are reclaiming the commons.

To Listen to the Episode

Linh Dinh: Earthbound

Earthbound
by Linh Dinh
Common Dreams

At an airport, I saw two adjacent ads, "DENVER THANKS OUR MILITARY," then, "LIVE. EVERY TRACK. ALL SEASON LONG. NASCAR ON SPEED." No irony was intended by this juxtaposition, but our troops are certainly killing and dying to sustain our car infatuation. On television, coverage of the Gulf of Mexico disaster is frequently interrupted by car commercials. Our oil car habit is destroying this planet, but we cannot wean ourselves from this addiction. We express ourselves through automobiles, after all. Cars are us. In much of America, one rarely sees bodies, only cars. Our land and cityscapes have been deformed for the hurling, private steel box.

A flying car will soon be available for $194,000. Its Italianate name, Terrafugia, translates to Fleeing the Earth, so our Jetsons future is still on, many hope, even as more Americans are sleeping in their cars, and many more are struggling to fuel their lugubrious lemons. The Motor City, Detroit, has been in full collapse mode for decades, to be slowly reincarnated as an urban agrarian zone. Instead of the clanking of heavy machinery, one will soon hear cockcrows among gunshots.

We will not flee this earth. On a finite planet, growth is also finite, and we've already reached all limits. There will be no economic recovery, because economic growth is no longer possible. The cheapest labor has been found, and demand for all resources, primarily oil, is outstripping supply. Nearly a billion people are already starving, and a billion lack clean water. The average Mozambican uses a gallon of water a day, less than a third of what you and I flush down the toilet each time. By contrast, the average American consumes 151 gallons of water daily.

We use more of everything. With five percent of the world's population, we engorge on 24 percent of its resources. Got a problem with that? If we can pay for it, we're entitled, aren't we? But there's the problem. We're the world's biggest debtor nation. We haven't been paying for squat. As a starving planet looks on, we're like the biggest pig who refuses to leave the all day, all night, all-you-can-eat buffet, with our moment of reckoning willed and deferred to our distant progeny. It's a farce, really. As we slobber, no one dares to nudge us from the trough because, well, we're so well-armed. We'll kick your ass! Got a problem with that?

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"Snapped as the DW Horizon offshore drilling rig collapsed into the gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and pumping 42k barrels of oil a day into gulf"

via Patrick Bigger: "Snapped as the DW Horizon offshore drilling rig collapsed into the gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and pumping 42k barrels of oil a day into the gulf."

UCLA African Studies Center: Discussion of the film Darfur Now

Discussion of the film Darfur Now
African Studies Center (UCLA)

Complexities can't be an excuse for not taking action.

Ted Braun, film director, Stephen Rapp, former chief prosecutor for the United Nations-International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Edward Alpers, UCLA History Chair, along with UCLA alum and activist Adam Sterling... Executive Director of Sudan Divestment Task Force and subject in Darfur Now.

To Listen to the Panel

Mike Davis: Labor War in the Mojave Desert

Labor War in the Mojave
By Mike Davis
The Nation

The biggest hole in California, with the exception of the current state budget, is Rio Tinto's huge open-pit mine at the town of Boron, near Edwards Air Force Base, eighty miles northeast of Los Angeles.

Seen from Google Earth, it is easy to imagine that the 700-foot-deep crater was blasted out of the Mojave Desert by an errant asteroid or comet. From the vantage point of Highway 58, however, the landscape is enigmatic: a mile-long rampart of ochre earth and gray mudstone, terminating at what looks like a giant chemical refinery.

At night, when a driver's mind is most prone to legends of the desert, the complex's intense illumination is startling, even slightly extraterrestrial, like the sinister off-world mining colony in Aliens.

Terri Judd's labor owns part of this eerie landscape--or rather its void. She's a third-generation borax miner, as deeply rooted in the high desert as one of the native Joshua trees. Every working morning for the past thirteen years, she has bundled her long red hair under a hard hat, climbed up the ladder of a giant Le Tourneau wheel loader and turned on its 1,600-horsepower Detroit Diesel engine. Her air-conditioned cab perches almost treetop height above custom-made, twelve-foot-high tires that cost $30,000 each. She operates this leviathan with delicate manipulations of two joysticks, more high-skill video game than Mad Max.

In a regular twelve-and-a-half-hour shift, she ceaselessly repeats the same mechanical calisthenic: lowering her twenty-foot-wide bucket, deftly scooping up twenty-five to thirty tons of borax ore, then delivering the load to one of the mine's plants to be made into boric acid or granulated for eventual use in dozens of industrial applications, from fiberglass surfboards to HD display screens.

Each year 1 million tons of borax products are fed into hopper cars (800 of which are permanently assigned to the mine) and hauled to the LA harbor for shipment to China and other industrializing countries hungry for the caustic residue of the Mojave's ancient lakes. The Boron pit, which replaced an underground mine, produces almost half the world's supply of refined borates.

Strip-mining the Mojave may not be everyone's cup of tea, but Terri--a combat veteran of Operation Desert Storm and a single mom--flat-out loves her job. "What can I say? We get to play with the big toys. I guess I was always a tomboy. I preferred Tonkas to Barbies, socket wrenches to dollhouses."

But she doesn't play alone: Big Brother is looking over her shoulder, evaluating her performance. "In effect, the boss rides with me. The GPS in my loader can be monitored not only from the plant but from Rio Tinto's US headquarters in Denver, or, for that matter, from the global head office in London."

Peeping Toms, however, don't normally perturb Terri. "There are no slackers in the pit. Our productivity is sky-high because borax mining is our family history." Indeed, a Boron workforce shrunk to less than 40 percent of its 1980 size produces record outputs despite a rapidly aging plant; an ornery, dipping ore body; and an increasingly remote and hostile management.

I

Terri acknowledges that her devotion to the mine has been an act of unrequited love. In last year's contract negotiations, Rio Tinto (the British-Australian multinational acquired its Boron facility, U.S. Borax, in 1968 and renamed it Rio Tinto Borax) stunned members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, ILWU, Local 30 (Boron), by demanding abolition of the contractually enshrined seniority system and the surrender of any worker voice in the labor process.

According to Dean Gehring, the latest in a succession of recent mine managers, international competition compels a drastic switch to "high-performance teams that have the flexibility to do many different jobs, and we need to reward and promote our top performers. The old contract doesn't allow us to do that."

The company wants a contract that would allow it to capriciously promote or demote; to outsource union jobs; to convert full-time to part-time positions with little or no benefits; to reorganize shift schedules without warning; to eliminate existing work rules; to cut holidays, sick leave and pension payments; to impose involuntary overtime; and to heavily penalize the union if workers file grievances against the company with the National Labor Relations Board.

Rio Tinto, in essence, claims the right to rule by divine whim, to blatantly discriminate against and even fire employees for felonies like "failing to have or maintain satisfactory inter-personal relationships with Company personnel, client personnel, contractor, and visitors."

"The company's proposal," union negotiators emphasize, "would destroy our union, lower our living standards, and give Borax total control over our jobs." On January 30, Local 30 members unanimously rejected the concessions demanded by Rio Tinto.

The company deadline expired the next morning, when Terri Judd set off for work as usual with her lunchbox and thermos. At the locked front gate she and other day-shift workers encountered a phalanx of nervous Kern County sheriff's deputies in full riot gear. Inside the plant, an elite "strike security team" hired by Rio Tinto had taken control of operations.

Delaware-based J.R. Gettier & Associates brags that it is the Home Depot of unionbusting, a one-stop source for security planners, armed guards, legal experts, industrial spies and, most important, highly skilled replacement workers. It even has staff who can operate Terri's giant loader.

The Gettier mercenaries wore sneers and dark glasses as they pushed their convoy past a crowd of angry Local 30 members. "Being locked out," says Terri, "is different from going on strike. Initially there's disbelief that the company is actually serious about booting you out the door. Hey, my granddad worked in this mine. But then you see that caravan of scabs coming to take your jobs, and the betrayal cuts like a knife in your heart."

To Read the Rest of the Article

More resources:

Democracy Now: Labor Struggle in Boron: Union Workers in CA Town Locked Out by Mining Giant Rio Tinto After Stalled Contract Talks

Common Sense with Dan Carlin: #167 The Big Clip Show

(This is a great series of clips that gives a good sense of why I value Dan Carlin's commentaries and why I listen to his podcast--even if he is naive in thinking he is non-partisan ;)

Show 167 - The Big Clip Show
Common Sense with Dan Carlin

This ... year-ending edition of the show contains clips from past episodes on a variety of topics. From Iran to Obama, torture to energy this show has a little of a lot.

Notes:
1.Clip from Common Sense show #127 “Great Expectations” (released 6/10/2008)
2.Clip from Common Sense show #137 “A Vote for None” (released 10/30/2008)
3.Clip from Common Sense show #152 “Sick Politics” (released 5/21/2009)
4.Clip from Common Sense show #126 “The Way You Play The Game” (released 5/27/2008)
5.Clip from Common Sense show #77 “Mushrooms and Onions” (released 12/29/2006)
6.Clip from Common Sense show #39 “Iranicide” (released 3/14/2006)
7.Clip from Common Sense show #106 “M.P.F.E.” (released 9/14/2007)

To Listen to the Year-End Retrospective

Revolution By the Book: Mountain Justice Dispatch #2

Mountain Justice Dispatch #2
Revolution By the Book

Escalating Sanctions against Mountaintop Removal Protesters

“Protesters Occupy Marfork Coal Co.’s Office in Response to Mounting Violations,” said a press release from the protesters’ supporters at Climate Ground Zero on Thursday morning, Feb. 18.

A news release from Massey Energy, Marfork’s parent company, told rather a different story: “Environmental Terrorists Invade Marfork Coal Company Office…. Three criminals clad in fatigues and carrying chains invaded a company office and chained themselves to chairs in the lobby. A terrified receptionist went into shock and was transported by ambulance to a local hospital…. One of the criminals, Mike Roselle, was a founding member of Earth First!, which is considered by many to be a domestic terrorist group…. These domestic terrorists are part of an anti-coal group that wants to shut down mining in Appalachia and destroy West Virginia’s economy.”

Massey’s “news release” doesn’t specify who those “many” are who consider Mike and his colleagues to be “domestic terrorists.” But even right-wing activist Ron Arnold, who’s written an entire book on “ecoterrorism,” asserts that “Roselle may be a terrible pain in the ass, but he’s no terrorist.” Writing shortly after Mike’s first trespassing arrest on Massey property, at Marfork’s Bee Tree strip mine site a year ago, Arnold scolded those who would “dilute” the meaning of the word terrorism by applying it to nonviolent protest.

“Face it,” he wrote, “what he did was civil disobedience, not terrorism.”

The claim that “a terrified receptionist went into shock” is equally puzzling. “She was definitely startled when we came in,” says Joe Hamsher, one of the three protesters arrested that day. But soon “she calmed down. She was even laughing.”

Protests are not a new experience for Massey workers. Since February of last year, more than 130 arrests have been made at civil-disobedience actions protesting mountaintop-removal (MTR) strip mining for coal in West Virginia. Several of those actions have targeted Marfork, which has begun blasting at its Bee Tree MTR site a short distance from its enormous Brushy Fork impoundment, which holds billions of gallons of liquid coal waste up above the Coal River valley. Anti-MTR activists and local residents are concerned that blasting so close to the impoundment, which is built over abandoned underground coal mine tunnels, risks catastrophic flooding that by Massey’s own estimate could kill close to a thousand people.

The only violence or threats of violence at any of these actions have been directed at the protesters, not vice versa. For example, at a protest rally at the front gate of Massey’s Goals Coal facility last June, a Massey supporter slapped anti-MTR activist Judy Bonds hard enough that she couldn’t move her neck properly for days. Most recently, in January, workers at Marfork’s Bee Tree site blared multiple airhorns, day and night, at three protesters sitting in trees there, risking permanent damage to the protesters’ hearing. At a previous tree sit, last summer, a sitter was threatened with gang rape.

“We were definitely not much of a threat to her,” Joe Hamsher says, referring to the receptionist at the Marfork office. “I mean, we were locked down.” Joe, the first of the three to enter the building that morning, announced “this is a protest,” then immediately sat down and locked himself to a chair. (That’s why they were carrying chains.)

To Read the Rest of the Report

Amy Goodman: Cracking Down on Fracking

Cracking Down on Fracking
by Amy Goodman
Common Dreams



Mike Markham of Colorado has an explosive problem: His tap water catches fire. Markham demonstrates this in a new documentary, “Gasland,” which just won the Sundance Film Festival Special Jury Prize. Director Josh Fox films Markham as he runs his kitchen faucet, holding a cigarette lighter up to the running water. After a few seconds, a ball of fire erupts out of the sink, almost enveloping Markham’s head.

The source of the flammable water, and the subject of “Gasland,” is the mining process called hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.”

Fracking is used to access natural gas and oil reserves buried thousands of feet below the ground. Companies like Halliburton drill down vertically, then send the shaft horizontally, crossing many small, trapped veins of gas and oil. Explosive charges are then set off at various points in the drill shaft, causing what Fox calls “mini-earthquakes.” These fractures spread underground, allowing the gas to flow back into the shaft to be extracted. To force open the fractures, millions of gallons of liquid are forced into the shaft at very high pressure.

The high-pressure liquids are a combination of water, sand and a secret mix of chemicals. Each well requires between 1 million and 7 million gallons of the fluid every time gas is extracted. Drillers do not have to reveal the chemical cocktail, thanks to a slew of exemptions given to the industry, most notably in the 2005 Energy Policy Act, which actually granted the fracking industry a specific exemption from the Safe Drinking Water Act. California Congressman Henry Waxman, chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has just announced an investigation into the composition of the proprietary chemicals used in fracking. In a Feb. 18 letter, Waxman commented on the Safe Drinking Water Act exemption: “Many dubbed this provision the ‘Halliburton loophole’ because of Halliburton’s ties to then-Vice President Cheney and its role as one of the largest providers of hydraulic fracturing services.” Before he was vice president, Dick Cheney was the CEO of Halliburton.

In an earlier investigation, Waxman learned that Halliburton had violated a 2003 nonbinding agreement with the government in which the company promised not to use diesel fuel in the mix when extracting from certain wells. Halliburton pumped hundreds of thousands of gallons of toxic, diesel-containing liquids into the ground, potentially contaminating drinking water.

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Revolution By the Book: Fighting for mountain justice in Appalachia

(Courtesy of Laura W.)

Fighting for mountain justice in Appalachia
By kate
Revolution By the Book

Before dawn on Thursday, Jan. 21, a dozen heavily laden activists headed for the edge of a strip mine site on Coal River Mountain, in southern West Virginia. The hikers approached three trees, oak and poplar, previously selected by scouts as suitable in several ways: The trees were not far apart, about 50 or 60 feet between them. Each tree was suitable for installing a person on a platform high enough up to make removal difficult. They were in undeveloped terrain where it would be hard for mine workers to bring in heavy equipment. And they were close enough to mining activities to prevent blasting if the trees were occupied.

Working quickly, the three prospective tree sitters and their supporters hoisted plywood platforms, tarps, food, water, radios, batteries, and other essentials up into the trees. Finally, the sitters—Eric Blevins, Amber Nitchman, David Aaron Smith (also known as Planet)—settled on their platforms and pulled up their ropes.

Setting up traverse lines—ropes that would enable the sitters to move themselves and their supplies from one tree to another—was about the only thing that did not go as intended. Too many branches were in the way for lines to be set between the trees, especially in the dark, so they would have to do without. The sitters had planned to share certain supplies: They had only two cellphones and one battery-to-phone charger between them, for example. If one sitter came down early, he or she wouldn’t be able to pass unused supplies to the others. Still, each of the sitters had at least a communications radio, spare batteries, and enough food and water for a week or more. Eric, who had the cellphone charger, would be the primary contact with the outside world. Amber would minimize use of her cellphone, and the three of them would communicate as needed by radio. They would make do.

Two supporters remained on the ground by the trees. Several others would hide in the woods, too far away to see the sitters but close enough for radio contact: If the sitters said they were in danger, these off-site supporters would run to their aid. Others who helped set up the sit left and began a long hike back toward base camp, several miles away, at the headquarters for Climate Ground Zero (CGZ).

CGZ supports the use of nonviolent civil disobedience by activists seeking to end mountaintop removal (MTR) coal mining and similar sorts of large-scale strip mining in Appalachia. In 2009, anti-MTR activists affiliated with the CGZ and Mountain Justice campaigns launched 18 civil-disobedience actions in West Virginia’s coalfields, incurring more than 130 arrests. Some of those actions, like this tree sit, were on mine sites; others took place at the front gates of mine facilities or in the offices of government officials. Most took place in or near the Coal River valley, and many focused on Coal River Mountain.

Coal River Mountain is the last intact mountain bordering the valley, with thousands of acres of continuous forest and healthy streams. It has excellent potential for a large-scale wind farm that would produce more jobs and higher local earnings and tax revenues than would strip-mining the site. In addition, a wind farm would leave nearly all of the mountain’s forest intact, allowing local people to continue to hunt and forage there, as they have done for generations. All those benefits could be sustained as long as the wind blows. MTR operations would end on the mountain in 15 years or so, leaving a flattened, treeless landscape with much-reduced wind potential and insufficient stability for installing large turbines.

Massey Energy, whose subsidiaries run most of the strip mines near Coal River valley, has long planned to strip-mine some 6,600 acres of this mountain, divided into four contiguous permit areas with a total of 18 proposed “valley fills,” where miners would dump rubble from mining nearby. Massey has not yet obtained permits for any of those valley fills. Instead, Massey’s subsidiary Marfork has permission to dump rubble from the Bee Tree permit area around the edge of the adjacent Brushy Fork sludge pond.

Such mining at the Bee Tree site would require blasting quite close to the huge pond, first for building a haul road then for the mining itself. The pond covers hundreds of acres, is held back by an earthen dam 900 feet high, is permitted to hold up to 9 billion of gallons of sludge (liquid waste from processing coal), and is located above a honeycomb of old underground mines. Blasting nearby thus runs the risk of causing a catastrophic flood by cracking the pond’s floor. That is exactly what happened a decade ago at another Massey site, in Inez, KY, where more than 300 million gallons of sludge spilled into tributaries of the Ohio River—30 times more waste than the Exxon Valdez oil spill. But Brushy Fork is a much bigger pond than the one at Inez, and its failure could result in a much bigger catastrophe: Massey’s own disaster contingency plan, required of it after the Inez spill, supposes a wall of sludge 40 feet high moving down the Coal River valley, mile after mile after mile.

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Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter: Empire@Play: Virtual Games and Global Capitalism

Empire@Play: Virtual Games and Global Capitalism
by Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter
CTheory

...

Global Game Factory

Let's first reframe some conventionally celebratory factoids about virtual play. The global game factory is now a major cultural-industrial complex, dominated by the console corporations--Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo--and a cluster of super-publishers, such as EA, Activision, Konami, Ubisoft and THQ. Control of game finance, licensing and marketing enables these giants to harvest the creativity of thousands of game developers, from big third party studios to microenterprises, all around the world. The global revenues of this industry are about $57 billion, five times the annual additional expenditures necessary to provide basic primary education to every child on the planet. [5] It is often claimed videogames are "bigger then Hollywood," but while North American sales rival the cinema box office, games lack the film's ancillary streams from advertising, DVD, and cable TV release, though advergaming and DLC sales may change this. Game factory revenues are, however, overtaking those of the music business, and growing faster than those of both film and music. More significantly, games are integrated with film, music, and other media: Spiderman, Saw and The Simpsons become games, Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy, films; EA's Madden games are part of the sports-media nexus; Guitar Hero and Rock Band are the new music platform.

Most of the sales of this "global" media are concentrated in rich planetary consumption zones: North America, Europe, and Japan, with the US still the largest single market; some 53% of Americans, 97% of college students, play; gaming is no longer a youth pastime; and while its testosterone bias has not vanished, it is declining, as online casual gaming and the Wii attract more girls and women. [6] The diffusion of online cybercafé pay-per-play from South Korea--the most game-intensive culture in the world--to China is opening vast new player populations in Asia. For the majority of the world's inhabitants, and especially the 2 billion who subsist on less than 2 dollars a day, a mint copy of Gears of War, let alone the $400 Xbox 360 on which it plays, remains an unthinkable luxury. But the market in old consoles and computers and mass pirating of game software give games a wider circulation into Latin America, the Middle East, and Southern Asia. Nonetheless, access to the game metaverse remains stratified by wealth, and by energy and Internet infrastructures. A quarter of the world's population lacks electricity. Meanwhile in Second Life--whose parallel universe, though free at the most basic level, is populated by the avatars of Europeans, North American, and Japanese with annual real life incomes of $45,000 or more--the average resident uses about 1,752 kilowatts of electricity a year, as much as an average Brazilian, and generates CO2 emissions equivalent to a 2,300 mile journey in an SUV. [7] Virtual play is thus firmly embedded in Empire's unequal, destructive consumption of global resources.

In production, too, situating games in Empire shatters myths. For millions of young men (and many aging ones, and some women) from Shanghai to Montreal, a job making virtual games seems employment nirvana--a promise of being paid to play. And it is true that for designers, programmers, and producers the industry offers creative, well paid work involving the most positive possibilities of "immaterial labour" [8]: scientific know-how, hi-tech proficiency, cultural creativity, and workplace cooperation. But just as game development studios typify the gloss of new media labour they also expose its dark side. The slogan of work-as-fun legitimates the perpetual "crunch-time" culture whose revelation in 2004 by the disenchanted partner of a programmer, EA Spouse, unleashed an industry wide scandal. Game studios, small and large, stratify permanent employees and a low-paid, precarious testers and contract workers. Behind these well-known studio labour flashpoints, however, lies the architecture of the digital play business organized, as part of Empire, in a "global hierarchy of production." [9]

What enables publishers to extract extreme hours is not only internalization of responsibility, but the threat of outsourcing. The global game factory, no longer constrained to a 'core,' comprises an increasingly distributed meshwork of satellite offices, subsidiary studios and contracted out work. A design team conceives a new game sipping espresso on the mountain vista patios of EA's Vancouver studio, then sends elements of the game's design to a World-Bank-funded company, Glass Egg, in Ho Chi Min City, where programmers earn about $4000 annually, rather than $60,000 in Canada; Lyon-based Infogrames (current owner of Atari), negotiating the game rights to Tom Cruise's Mission Impossible, dispatches the graphics work on NPC's to Dhruva, a Bangalore studio, paying a fraction of North American rates, shrewdly cushioning itself (but not its Indian workers) when the deal turns sour.

Labour in such peripheral studios is far closer to the all-too material processes indispensable to the game factory, though far less glamorous, and less visible, than studio work. The abyssal depths of this ladder were glimpsed in the coltan scandal of 2000. Prices for columbite tantalite, a rare mineral vital for cell phones, computers and game consoles were driven to extreme heights by the launch of the PS2, setting off a frenzy of resource grabs on the open pit, child-labour mines of the Eastern Congo by the armies fighting Central Africa's ongoing multi-million death war. But the low-cost, no-care human infrastructure of the play industry has many other rungs: maquiladora plants where hand-helds are made up by nimble-fingered female labor; the regimented electronics assembly lines of South China from which Xbox 360s and PS3's pour; and the toxic e-waste sites of Nigeria and Delhi, where the products of Sony and Nintendo are amongst the most noxious disassembled by subsistence-wage scavengers.

Perhaps the best single demonstration of the game factory's stratified planetary space is, however, the online fantasy game World of Warcraft (WoW). Of the 11.5 million participants of its virtual continent of Azeroth, about 25% play in North America, 20% in Europe and some 55% in Asia, mostly from Chinese cybercafés. [10] WoW was brought to Beijing and Shanghai by the partnership of its US developer, Blizzard, with Chinese game company The9, at once a neo-colonial penetration and a boost to China's own MMO (Massive Online Game) industry. Where Empire's inequities transform WoW, however, is via virtual trading. A "ludocapitalism" [11] by which virtual goods or skills exchange for real currencies generates an interdependence between North American players and as many as half a million planetary poor country "gold farmers," the majority probably in China, for whom looting monsters round the clock is an alternative to labour on the strike-swept assembly lines of the Pearl River cranking out the very computers on which WoW is played world-wide. Such migrant avatar-service work [12] at once sustains the gaming habit of time-stressed North Americans, incurs their racist antipathy for "ruining the game", and is repressed by Blizzard to control the property rights to its game world. It thus typifies the bipolarity of "Chimerica," [13] the current US-China axis of Empire, virtually replicating a relation where one side is all play, the other all work. Such are the biopolitical forces mobilized in the global game factory.

...

To Read the Entire Essay

Joshua Frank: The Coal Ash Industry Manipulated EPA Data

The Coal Ash Industry Manipulated EPA Data
by Joshua Frank
Truthout

The coal ash industry manipulated reports and publications about the dangers of coal combustion waste, reports Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). The group stated that the Environmental Protection Agency allowed the multibillon-dollar coal ash industry to have virtually unfettered access to the EPA during the Bush administration and now under President Obama.

As a result of the industry's formal relationship with the EPA, insiders were allowed to edit and ghostwrite publications and official reports on the effects of coal waste. The documents obtained by PEER indicate that the coal ash industry "watered down official reports, brochures and fact-sheets to remove references to potential dangers" of coal ash waste. Additionally, the so-called "environmental benefits" of coal ash were repeatedly aggrandized.

"For most of the past decade, it appears that every EPA publication on the subject was ghostwritten by the American Coal Ash Association," stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, whose group examined thousands of coal industry and EPA communications. "In this partnership it is clear that industry is EPA's senior partner."

There is little debate that coal ash is toxic, despite what the wavering EPA and steadfast coal industry purport.

Coal ash is the sludgy muck that is left over after coal is burned to produce electricity and is often laden with heavy metals like arsenic, mercury, cadmium, lead and selenium. These harmful substances can produce cancer, kidney problems and nervous-system disease. The amount of heavy metals in coal-ash depends largely on the type of coal burned. However, all coal produces this waste, even though the toxicity may vary slightly depending on the type of coal being incinerated.

While the EPA continues to discuss whether or not it should classify coal ash as a hazardous waste, the environmental and health effects of a coal slurry impoundment at the Tennessee Valley Authority's (TVA) Kingston coal-fired power plant in Harriman, Tennessee, are still not known. The December 2008 catastrophe caused more than 500 million gallons of toxic coal ash to enter the Tennessee River.

The spill was over 40 times larger than the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska. Approximately 525 million gallons of black coal ash flowed into tributaries of the Tennessee River - the water supply for Chattanooga and millions of people living downstream in Alabama and Kentucky. The true adverse effects of the spill are still not known.

An immediate crackdown on TVA and other coal-slurry impoundments by the EPA was likely sidelined as a result of the American Coal Ash Association's formal partnership with the EPA during the Bush administration. If coal ash were deemed a hazardous waste, coal companies could potentially lose billions of dollars in revenue, as they would not be able to promote their toxic coal ash substances for agricultural, consumer and industrial use.

It seems as if the efforts of coal industry representatives have paid off handsomely. Back in 2002, the EPA released a report that indicated the agency had information on the risks of coal ash, yet requests for the data under the Freedom of Information Act were either denied or the documents that were released, with the estimates of cancer risks, were largely blacked out.

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