September 13, 2000
West
Virginia's Mountain (Party) Mama
by
David Case, Mother Jones
West Virginia
often seems like America's very own slice of Third World. A powerful
clique of good-ole-boys rape the earth for natural resource wealth,
while the masses contend with shabby schools and inadequate public
services. Far-flung economic interests own much of the valuable land.
Public servants work for peanuts, while powerful corporations lavish
pliant politicians with campaign contributions. Crony capitalists
-- most notoriously from the coal industry -- rotate in and out of
public office.
But there's one
important difference between the state and a real banana republic:
West Virginia is a democracy. That's a fact that Denise
Giardina plans to take advantage of.
Fed up, she is
launching a grassroots effort to topple the entrenched oligarchy and
break the state out of a downward spiral it has been riding since
she was a girl. No, she's not the leader of a local militia marching
through the Appalachia plotting a bloody coup against King Coal. Close,
though.
She has launched
her own political party, called
the Mountain Party, and is running for governor.
A university lecturer,
lay preacher, and acclaimed author, Giardina has no experience in
elected office, but her background gives her ample insight. She was
born in West Virginia and brought up in a coal camp. Two of her four
books are tales of the state and its coal heritage; perhaps her most
famous is 1992's account of failing coal mines and weakened miners'
unions, "The Unquiet Earth." Her "Storming Heaven," published in 1987,
fictionalizes the historic West Virginia mine wars, in which Mary
Harris "Mother Jones" was a central figure. "Storming Heaven" is being
made into a mini-series by Turner Network Television.
Polls show Giardina
in the single digits. Nonetheless the Democrats in general, and front-runner
Bob Wise in particular, appear to be shaking in their boots over her
candidacy.
In fact, the state's
entrenched Democrats have battled -- in some very undemocratic ways
-- to stymie her run for office. It's been an ongoing war that has,
ironically, enabled Giardina to show that she is ready to take on
the state's pillars of power and fight for West Virginians, as she
promises.
In 1999, before
Giardina and her Mountain Party were on the radar screen, the legislature
doubled -- to 2 percent of the voters -- the number of petition signatures
needed to get on the ballot. Giardina's camp says that this was an
attempt to thwart upstart candidates, in a state where Democratic
voters out-number Republicans 2-to-1. After she announced her campaign,
the Democrats intervened against her court battle to overturn an archaic
and obstructive ballot access law. A Democratic judge handed down
a decision in the party's favor. Yet she qualified for the ballot,
with more than 13,000 valid signatures.
Most recently,
Democratic candidate Wise vowed to dodge debates that include Giardina.
He cites presidential debating standards (advocated by -- and favoring
-- the major parties) that only allow candidates polling more than
15 percent of the electorate to participate. Wise spokesman Mike Plante
says this rule is necessary to give West Virginians adequate time
to view the two major candidates.
But the League of
Women Voters (LWV), which hosts a public television debate in October,
says that polling and presidential standards are irrelevant and impractical
in West Virginia, and that Giardina has earned her place at the podium.
"We understand why there are restrictions at the federal level," says
West Virginia LWV president Ellender Stanchina, "but in West Virginia
it is very difficult to get on the ballot. Once you are on the ballot
you have a right to participate in the debate. That's what democracy
is."
Some say that
a debate between the two major candidates in West Virginia would merely
plumb new depths of ennui: Wise has said that he agrees with 85 percent
of what his opponent, Republican Gov. Cecil Underwood, has done --
though Wise's spokesman, Mike Plante, says that the remaining 15 percent
is fertile turf. Wise's refusal to face Giardina prompted the Charleston
Gazette to label him a "chicken."
The real reason,
according to Giardina's campaign manager Vince George, is that "Giardina
has been raising issues that he simply doesn't want to talk about,
issues of unfair taxation, corporate favoritism, sales tax on food,
and the lack of timber regulation. He's afraid to talk to her on the
same stage and give her credibility. This is a lady who doesn't have
any party affiliations, she's just looking out for John and Mary Doe
West Virginia and she says what she thinks." Those interests, according
to Giardina and many other West Virginians, don't happen to coincide
with the interests of the Democrats, nor the party's faithful patron:
big coal.
Not true, responds
the Wise campaign. Spokesman Plante dismisses Giardina's candidacy:
"Denise is in a position of being nowhere in the polls with no substantial
[financial] support -- she has to make sensational statements like
that in order to breathe life into what has otherwise been a failing
campaign."
West Virginians
agree that the most pressing issue in the gubernatorial race is the
languishing economy -- which many see as a result of the decline of
coal-mining jobs in the state (actual coal extraction is at record
levels). Economic growth is nearly stagnant, and the state's biggest
employers are Wal-Mart and the state government itself, which is now
running deep in the red.
In this setting,
coal mining jobs are seen as precious plums, paying $45,000 per year.
But for years mining companies have been laying off workers, blaming
cheap western coal. This has served as an excuse for politicians --
typically with close ties to the industry -- to turn a blind eye to
unprecedented environmental destruction perpetrated by the industry,
most notably in the form of "mountaintop
removal" mining. This technique, which mushroomed in the
1990s, uses mammoth machines (and relatively few workers) to literally
move whole peaks to get at the coal.
To Giardina, mountaintop
removal is tantamount to bloodletting -- both for the economy and
the state's natural heritage. She intends to staunch it.
"When looking
across the nation it becomes very clear that sound environmental protection
is also sound economic policy," she writes on her campaign Web site.
"States which put a high priority on environmental protection are
states that prosper. And West Virginia's place at the bottom of the
economic barrel goes hand in hand with our history of environmental
destruction."
She argues that
the only way to change the status quo is to clean the house of State.
"West Virginia's lack of care for the environment can be traced directly
to the lack of political leadership and the co-opting of our political
process by industry. Coal set the tone, and others have taken advantage
of the situation."
In fact, both
Gov. Underwood and environment commissioner Michael Castle are former
coal executives. The Clinton administration, despite a renowned romance
with the mining industry, has been so displeased with West Virginia's
oversight of mining laws that it recently threatened to take over
the states enforcement program.
"Agencies which
supposedly exist to protect the environment are in fact run by industry
hacks who think their mission is to grease the wheels for polluters
and ward off citizen complaints," says Giardina.
While some West
Virginians view Giardina and her Mountain Party as a single-issue
liberal movement, a closer look reveals a freethinker willing to break
from the mold -- even if it means an accidental allusion to Gov. George
W. Bush's platform. In a July 24, 2000 op-ed column in the Charleston
Gazette, Giardina wrote, "[One] of my first priorities would be
to appoint people to help me who would be compassionate tightwads,"
to cut waste without "endangering essential services."
She hopes to bolster
the state's economy by offering corporations incentives to use the
resources they extract to manufacture goods before shipping them out
of West Virginia (turning timber into furniture, for example). She
opposes the state's burgeoning gambling industry, and vows to tighten
the purse strings on the government's growing debt.
While she pledges
to maintain or decrease taxes on citizens, she would impose an "excess
acreage tax" on landowners with more than 10,000 acres and a tax on
coal royalties paid to landowners. This, she argues, would be lucrative
and would encourage big, absentee landowners, like Georgia Pacific
and Norfolk-Southern Railroad, to free up regions of the state that
they dominate, ending a stranglehold on economic development.
Giardina points
out that 80 percent of land in southern West Virginia is controlled
by outsiders. "West Virginia's citizens are bearing the tax burden
of this state they own little of, while those in control get a free
ride." She says that resident taxpayers are actually subsidizing the
coal and timber industries by paying more property taxes and by funding
the cleanup of the messes they cause.
A political science
professor in the Charleston (who asked not to be identified because
the state pays his salary) said that while he was initially skeptical,
after reviewing all the candidates he is impressed with Giardina.
"She's a person of integrity, very bright, with good ideas, [particularly
about] growing small business instead of smokestack industries."
Yet he says that
her chances of winning are slim. "It isn't fair," he says, but under
the current campaign finance laws "she has no chance of getting elected.
The only way she could win would be if she had money, she could do
television and get her name out. With her stance on the mountaintop
removal issue and other issues she may have had a shot. But we often
don't elect our best."
Giardina, who
has to return to her university job in the fall, has only one paid
campaign employee, Vince George -- a disaffected Democrat and self
described political junkie. He earns $1,000 a month, and runs the
campaign out of his home.
George says the
campaign has spent less than $20,000 in cash, a remarkable feat of
thrift considering that it has engaged in a court battle and collected
signatures from 2 percent of the state's voters. He stresses that
this is truly a grassroots effort: "I don't know how to estimate the
time energy and resources of people who have volunteered, who have
made phone calls, sent faxes and given other in-kind services." In
an otherwise humdrum race, the campaign has also garnered interest
from the local media.
Meanwhile, the
other candidates are running million dollar campaigns, funded by the
entrenched interests that Giardina contends are milking the state
dry.
George concedes
that the cards are stacked against the Mountain Party. But as long
as Giardina gets one percent of the vote the party will be able to
run a full slate of candidates in 2002. Moreover, he points out that
with only about 650,000 regular voters and a population of fewer than
2 million, "this is still a hand-pressing style campaign. It's still
possible to reach everybody face-to-face. And we expect lots of people
to vote who wouldn't otherwise, because this time there is a real
choice."
Published in the Mother
Jones
