Claude joined a group on Facebook called “Viva La Revolucion de Appalachia”. I joined, too, because I’m a joiner. It reminded me of a paper I wrote in college, in West Virginia, that compared the economic plight of WV to that of Third World Countries.

At the time I wrote the paper, I’m pretty sure I quoted a source that stated the value of WV natural resources made it the 3rd richest state in the country behind Alaska and Texas. Astute readers will note that those states are both significantly bigger than WV. I couldn’t find anything that said that during the brief research I did today (and that’s the way it’s going to stay since I don’t blog for a grade) but the West Virginia Development Office’s website claims that WV ranks 33rd in oil production and 11th in natural gas production and that it’s the leading exporter of coal in the US. So we’ll go with that since it still sounds pretty impressive.

So you don’t have to read however many pages of bullshit it took to fill some arbitrary page count requirement I’ll just skip straight to the thesis. Given the abundance of natural resource wealth in the State of West Virginia, why is the populace so impoverished? West Virginia has the same problem that most Third World Countries have. Foreign ownership of resources. In WV, “foreign” mostly translates to New Yorkers.  The Rockefellers and the railroad baron types owned (own) most of the mineral rights to the state. That’s why the Rockefellers sent (probably) the most retarded of their clan down to supervise their interests as a political hack. He’s never held an actual job… at least not since 1969.

The time has long since come and gone for WV to stand up to the people raping their state. The government in WV has been owned for so long by New York corporations that the kind of tax levied by Alaska on the value of resources removed from their state is just not going to happen.

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL

Leave a comment