North Carolina

Criminal Charges Filed Against Duke Energy

February 23, 2015 Brian Sewell, www.appvoices.org Strategize! Energy, Environment, North Carolina, Oil & Gas

The U.S. Department of Justice has filed criminal charges against Duke Energy for violating the federal Clean Water Act at coal ash sites across North Carolina. The company announced today it has reached a proposed plea agreement with federal prosecutors to resolve the charges. According to a Duke Energy press release, the plea agreement includes $68.2 million in fines and restitution and $34 million for community service and mitigation. The charges include multiple misdemeanor violations of the Clean Water Act in connection with last year’s coal ash spill in the Dan River as well as unauthorized discharges at other Duke coal plants in North Carolina. The agreement is subject to review and approval by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina.

Week Of Action Anticipates NC’s Moral Movement March

February 16, 2015 Sue Sturgis, www.southernstudies.org Resist! Faith, Moral Mondays, North Carolina, Protest

The grassroots movement that's led to the arrest of about 1,000 people since 2013 for engaging in nonviolent protests against the policies of North Carolina's Republican-controlled government is getting ready to kick off another year of action. Led by the N.C. NAACP, the movement behind the high-profile Moral Monday protests will hold a Moral Week of Action next week with daily gatherings at the legislature followed by the Moral March for Love and Justice through Raleigh on Saturday, Feb. 14 -- the eighth such annual event known asHistoric Thousands on Jones Street for the thoroughfare where the legislature is located. "HKonJ" promotes a 14-point people's agenda for North Carolina that includes well-funded public schools, livable wages, and health care for all.

Thousands Join Moral March In North Carolina

February 16, 2015 David Swerdlick, www.theroot.com Resist! March, Moral Mondays, North Carolina

It’s that kind of come one, come all event. And even though this year’s ninth annual march wasn’t as big as last year’s—one that The Nation’s Ari Berman reported as “the largest civil rights rally in the South since the Selma to Montgomery march in 1965”—organizers again brought together a diverse coalition of activists on a chilly Valentine’s Day to protest what movement leader and state NAACP president Rev. Dr. William Barber II described as the state’s—and the nation’s—“heart problem.” And while Moral Mondays movement is left-leaning, Barber told supporters that he wanted them to be political “defibrillators” because “we find we’ve got, not a left problem, or a right problem, or a conservative problem or a liberal problem. We’ve got a heart problem.

Faith, Labor Leaders Ask Pols To Focus On Morals

January 14, 2015 Matthew Hamilton, www.blog.timesunion.com Resist! Faith, Labor, North Carolina

Community, faith and labor groups took advantage of the silence at the state Capitol Monday to hold a brief vigil to call for state politicians to concentrate on passing what they say is morally sound legislation this year. The “Moral Monday” vigil comes two days before the state Senate and Assembly will convene for the first time this year. Those gathered outside the Senate Chamber didn’t call for anything they haven’t already; rather, they placed the emphasis on the morality of raising the minimum wage, upping public school funding and assisting non-wealthy New Yorkers. “This year, this group is calling on our legislators to start paying attention and start listening to the people of New York who need them to create good jobs, institute systems of fair taxation and invest in public education and a social safety net,” Labor-Religion Coalition of New York State Executive Director Sara Niccoli said.

Duke Energy Fined Penny Per Ton For Massive Spill

October 14, 2014 Lisa Evans, www.earthjustice.com Educate! Energy, Environment, Law, North Carolina, Regulation

Although the North Carolina Department of Natural Resources found Duke Energy in gross violation of the federal Clean Water Act, the state agency placed so little value on public health that they were willing to settle for a pittance—a penny per ton of toxic coal ash stored at Duke’s two illegally polluting plants. To rub ash into the wound, the agency didn’t even require Duke to stop the flow of arsenic, cadmium, chromium and other toxic metals from the millions of tons of coal ash at the plants, much less clean up the pollution. The state was willing to accept $99,000 in settlement with the utility giant. Duke Energy can spare this chump change. The utility just announced a 50 percent increase in corporate profits in 2013, amounting to $2.6 billion per year for a company already valued at $50 billion. Duke’s $99,000 penalty was nothing—it’s like one of us, earning $50,000 a year, getting fined $1.90. Barely amounting to a library fine, this is no deterrent for the likes of Duke.

Moral Mondays Protest Restrictive Voting Law

July 8, 2014 Lauren McCauley, www.commondreams.org Resist! Elections, Moral Mondays, North Carolina, Protest, Voting Rights

Hundreds of people were turned away outside of a packed courtroom in Winston-Salem, North Carolina on Monday where inside voting rights activists demanded a halt to what they said was the most restrictive voter suppression legislation since the Jim Crow era, local news reports. The plea, brought forth by the North Carolina NAACP, is calling for temporary injunction of House Bill 589. The law—which was passed by the state legislature immediately after the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act last June—mandates that voters show government-issued identification; rolls back early voting; and eliminates same-day registration as well as a high-school civics class that encouraged 18-year-olds to register to vote, among other provisions. "This law—passed by Speaker Thom Tillis, Senate Leader Phil Berger and their extremist counterparts and then signed by Gov. Pat McCrory—represents the most egregious attempt at voter suppression since Jim Crow," said Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II, president of the state chapter of the NAACP. Speaking on MSNBC's The Reid Report on Monday, Barber explained that after the Supreme Court ruling—which eliminated federal government "preclearance" to changes made to voting laws in certain states, including North Carolina—the bill grew from 12 pages to 57 pages.

Moral Movement Launches ‘Freedom Summer’

June 26, 2014 Lauren McCauley, www.commondreams.org Resist! Elections, Moral Mondays, North Carolina, Organizing, Protesters, Religion

Protesters who for over a year have railed against the "extremist" policies of the North Carolina legislature are now bringing their fight to the voting booth as the movement known as Moral Mondays launched a bold initiative to get-out-the-vote this week. “We have exposed the hypocrisy,” Rev. William J. Barber II, chief organizer of the protests and head of the state chapter of the NAACP, said during a rally outside the General Assembly in Raleigh on Monday. Now is the time to organize.” Organizers estimate that upwards of 3,500 protesters from across the state attended the mass demonstration before splitting up into smaller factions for "teach-ins" to discuss the group's new voter outreach strategy. In what the group is calling an "aggressive" statewide voting campaign, several dozen youth activists who have undergone extensive training are now being deployed to hundreds of communities in North Carolina to initiate "deep organizing work and voter registration." Dubbed the Moral Freedom Summer, the new campaign is a nod to the 1966 Mississippi voting rights drive when youth activists partnered with local civil rights organizations to educate and register disenfranchised African American voters.

How To Build A Powerful People’s Movement

June 24, 2014 Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, www.thenation.com Strategize! Barack Obama, Civil Rights, History, Labor, Moral Mondays, North Carolina

How do we build a people’s movement? We start with vision. Prophetic moral vision seeks to penetrate despair, so that we can believe in and embrace new futures. It does not ask if the vision can be implemented—questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The slaves didn’t get out of slavery by first figuring out how to get out; they got out because they were driven by a vision that said, “Oh freedom over me. / And before I’d be a slave / I’d be buried in my grave / And go home to my Lord and be free.” If we are going to have a real populist movement in this country, we have to reinstate an imagination that is not driven by pundits but by a larger vision. Most of the time, your greatest vision comes in your darkest night, because it is then, Martin Luther King Jr. said, that you see the stars. Populist movements don’t build when everything is fine. A populist moral vision is a form of dissent that says there’s a better way, there’s a moral way.

Repealing Tax Cuts Makes Moral Budget Possible

June 23, 2014 William J. Barber II, www.portside.org Resist! Budget Cuts, Moral Mondays, North Carolina

A budget is a moral document. Through it, we can measure a state’s values and its vision for the common good. In North Carolina, we toast ourselves as a place “where the weak grow strong and the strong grow great.” But there is no greatness in our current budget proposals. The draft budgets pushed by Speaker Thom Tillis, Senate Leader Phil Berger and their allies deepen the flood of extremist policies that they unleashed into law last summer. I am no lonely voice crying in the wilderness here. Only 18 percent of North Carolinians approve of the work our state legislators are carrying out this June. This short session, the Forward Together Moral Movement called upon our legislators to repeal huge tax cuts for the wealthy that hurt the most vulnerable among us. Those harmed by these policies – the sick without Medicaid, working families without the Earned Income Tax Credit – spoke for themselves. But the extremists look away. They veil their immoral choices behind the rhetoric of economic necessity. There simply isn’t enough to go around, they say.

1,500 Protest For Worker’s Rights In NC, 20 Arrested

June 18, 2014 NCNAACP, www.naacpnc.org Resist! North Carolina, Protest, Protestors Arrested, Worker's Rights

In a fourth week of peaceful protest at the North Carolina General Assembly during this legislative session, more than 1,500 people from across the state gathered on Monday to challenge the state legislature's extreme agenda and the regressive policies passed last year that have hurt workers. Members of the North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, labor unions, the fast food workers' organization Raise Up, as well as teachers' and women's groups highlighted the many ways in which budget proposals from state lawmakers are devastating for the poor, working people and most vulnerable residents of the state. Yesterday, the Forward Together Movement introduced youth organizers who are kicking off Moral Freedom Summer - in which 50 trained organizers will be anchored in 50 communities across North Carolina to register and mobilize voters. "The main reason for the short session is to pass budgets, but the budgets that we've seen pass here violate the constitutional principle to govern for the good of the whole," said Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, president of the North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, during the rally on Halifax Mall.

Republicans &Democrats May Rue Progressive Awakening

May 30, 2014 Rob Schofield, www.ncpolicywatch.com Organize! Democrats, History, Moral Mondays, North Carolina

There is a bit of mythology percolating through the mainstream news media these days that the Moral Mondays/Forward Together movement led by Rev. William Barber of the North Carolina NAACP is somehow acting as stalking horse for the state Democratic Party and Democratic politicians. Associated Press reporter Katelyn Ferral even “reported” as much in a “news” story this week that several media outlets ran under the headline “NC’s protests are Democratic tool in election year.” This is from the story: “The weekly protesters at the North Carolina legislature call their charge against Republican policies a moral imperative. But it is a moral imperative replete with a Democratic agenda in an election year. The “Moral Monday” movement has become a de-facto campaign tool for Democrats to publicize their platform and recruit volunteers to help them win elections. In a year where North Carolina’s heated U.S. Senate race can decide the direction of the upper chamber, results will hinge on the movement’s ability to translate the voices to votes come November.” Ferral’s conclusion is, of course, plainly and utterly off-base.

NC State Regulators Colluded Against Environmentalists

March 15, 2014 Sarah Lazare, www.commondreams.org Educate! Coal, Energy, Environment, North Carolina

Internal emails released Thursday by environmental lawyers confirm what activists have long charged: the North Carolina authorities tasked with regulating Duke Energy — the company responsible for the Dan River coal ash disaster — have been colluding with the corporation behind closed doors to undermine concerned environmental groups. "These documents reveal a very cozy relationship between the N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources and Duke and a deferential approach from DENR to Duke," said Nick Torrey, Associate Attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, in an interview with Common Dreams.

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