Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Take Back STL from Coal Fired Collusion

The Take Back St Louis ballot initiative has clearly caught the attention of Peabody Energy, along with the 36,000 people who offered their signatures. Coming from West Virginia, I’ve seen the devastation left in the wake of the coal industry. Water is left undrinkable, properties unlivable, and communities in ruin. Peabody Coal has had their opportunity to dispute this in court but instead chose to settle on gag orders and feign altruism through a shameless campaign of green washing across the metro area. It takes a special anti-democratic corporation to silence cancer stricken communities of Appalachia, to commit racketeering against the Dine (Navajo), and to dispose of disabled retirees to enhance their portfolio- all the while pretending to care about the ecosystem at the zoo, and environmental engineering on campus at UMSL.

Despite the shady economic engineering and criminal practices of our local coal baron, the one member of the mining community we should really be watching right now is our dying canary- the arctic ice and glaciers that are quickly melting in Greenland, Alaska, and Antarctica. The only place that global warming is being debated anymore is in Washington DC. Perhaps if we, too, ascertained the services of lobbyists who frequent that revolving door between corporations and the capital we could impel our government to face the truth.
Local lobbyists blasting away at environmental regulations. Source: lobbyingdisclosure.house.gov 

Targeting these green house tax incentives through the Take Back STL initiative is part of a globalized moral imperative to preserve the future of our world as we know it. Incentivizing carbon dioxide is, no doubt, in direct conflict with every reflex, instinct and defense mechanism built into the human genome. Maybe reaching a CO2 level of 400 parts per million doesn’t raise the hair on our neck like a sudden drop of barometric pressure, but the danger is far greater than any single storm on the horizon.

In addition to the warming arctic, the world has also witnessed the recent mass extinction of millions of species, the over-wintering of parasites and disease carrying insects, the slowing of jet streams, and the acidification of our oceans. Meanwhile in St Louis, we’ve seen both record floods and record low river levels over a four month span; we’ve seen record setting heat-waves and been surrounded by thousands of square miles of crop failure.

Because we live in a city with provisionally accredited schools and an aging infrastructure, we should look at other communities to see what those tax breaks have spelled out for their bottom line. For most of us, if we are robbed of our ability to generate income we go broke- which is exactly what happened to Detroit, Michigan. The corporate myth which dictates that you can tax-break your way to prosperity is alive and well despite 30 years of trickle-down economics and the resulting fiscal failure that tell us otherwise. We can no more count on Chrysler to return a favor and bail out the city of Detroit than we can count on Peabody Energy, a corporation that is continuing the oppressive Bennett Freeze against the Dine people, to pay their fair share in a city which is devastated by poverty and destitution.


Our city takes its name from a 13th century French king who was a true servant to his people. St Louisans can no longer accept that corporate welfare is given to those who strip our Earth, incinerate our atmosphere, corrupt our water, and operate at the intersection of black lung and manifest destiny. This ballot initiative will enable our city to choose the sustainable future that the people of Germany and Spain have already determined for themselves.

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