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“People are overwhelmed with all the economic hardship, most of which has been caused by the bad decisions of the people in power,” said Teresa Stanley, the South Hampton Roads Organizer with Virginia Organizing. “And politicians are focusing on issues that are not where the people are.”

Stanley, a long-time activist and Hampton Roads resident, spends her days organizing people in Norfolk and Hampton Roads to get active on issues affecting their community, which has been hard hit by the economic downturn. She tries to get people active on issues such as predatory lending, the privatization of roads to the area (which has resulted in new tolls) and the lack of jobs.

“Young people are the future,” she said, “and the jobs are not there like they were when they’re getting out of school now.” Plus, she said, politicians “are still no focusing on jobs like they should,” and are instead focusing on everything from limiting access to abortion to attempting to kill unions.

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“Supervisors [of contract employees] reportedly told people, ‘If you go organize or go to a meeting, you’ll be fired,’” said Susan Fraiman, a professor at the University of Virginiaand a long-time activist for living wages for staff and contract workers on campus. In a right-to-work state like Virginia, that isn’t illegal — but, according to an advisory opinion issued to UVA in 2006 by then-Attorney General (now Governor) Bob McDonnell (R), taking into account the wages your contractors are paying the employees that work on campus when awarding contracts might be.

David Flood, one of the student organizers behind the Living Wage at UVA campaign, said the university “acknowledged [in private meetings] that the opinion isn’t legally binding nor is it intended to be,” and Fraiman said, “we have it on good authority from the law faculty that the Attorney General’s opinion is advisory only and not legally binding” on the university. Nonetheless, the university appears to be determined to rely on it to explain why they don’t plan to force contractors to pay their employees even the same wages as university staff (which start at $10.65 an hour), let alone the $13 per hour the campaign is demanding for employees and contractors alike.

Emily Filler, who runs the campaign’s media outreach, said, “Almost everything they cite is economic.” In fact, she added, “The president and the chief financial officer [of the university] during the most recent action issued statements pleading a lack of available funds” to pay higher wages to the lowest-wage employees.

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Nell Boeschenstein is angry. “I take birth control to minimize my risk of ovarian cancer,” she said. “To have that be potentially denied coverage makes my blood boil in ways I can’t articulate.”

Boeschenstein once wrote, “I’ve never sprained an ankle. The only bone I’ve ever broken is the forefinger of my left hand.” But when she discovered that she carries the BCRA1 gene, which carries a 90 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer, she had some serious medical decisions to make — especially as her graduate program’s health insurance coverage would run out once she finished her degree. So after spending $10,000 out of pocket to qualify for the surgery — her insurance covered only 80 percent of the bills for the necessary MRIs, mammograms and ultrasounds — the 31-year-old Boeschenstein went under the knife for a double radical mastectomy.

The total cost of the procedure, pre-reconstructive surgery, was $100,000, most of which was covered by her health insurance. But the $10,000 in out-of-pocket expenses put her in a deep hole, so she moved from Brooklyn, NY back to Charlottesville, Virginia. She was just in time to bear immediate witness to the GOP’s efforts to restrict access to reproductive health services and force women to have unnecessary medical procedures — like transvaginal ultrasounds, which Boeschenstein has to periodically undergo to check on her ovaries.

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Karen Caltrider retired recently as the partner in an accounting firm in Parkersburg, West Virginia, giving her enough time to reflect on politics at her local Cracker Barrel — “the closest restaurant to my house,” she said, a reflection of an unspoken economic reality that repeats itself throughout much of the American heartland. In fact, belying the classist stereotypes about West Virginia, Parkersburg faces many of the same challenges as other cities that have lost their major industrial employers and are trying to figure out how to fit into the 21st century.

“It used to be that most people here were employed at the factories,” Caltrider said. “Now the major employers are the school district and the government,” a fact born out by employment statistics from the federal government. In many former factory towns in proximity to government centers — like Schenectady, New York, once where General Electric once employed 40,000 people and now employs less than 4,000 — government jobs often fill in the gaps. In the case of Parkersburg, former Sen. Robert Byrd’s (D-WV) plan to move much of the Bureau of the Public Debt to the area has made it the go-to place for jobs, especially for the city’s young accountants.

Every day during Lent, at least one member or follower of the Greater Columbus Right To Life can be seen praying outside of Complete Healthcare for Women — one of 4 clinics in the area that offers abortion services — from sunrise until sunset as part of the annual 40 Days For Life action. On Saturday morning, executive director Ruth Yorston was joined in her prayers by a group from the St. Paul Catholic Church in Westerville praying rosaries, which they do on the first Saturday of every month. “This is the most-prayed sidewalk in Columbus,” Yorston said proudly.

Unlike the typical anti-abortion protesters that clinics, their escorts, women’s rights advocates and patients have come to expect (and which were once satirized by Amanda Palmer in her “Oasis” video), Yorston asks participants to sign a “statement of peace” that they will stick to praying. “There is a lot of violence that goes on behind those doors,” she said, “but it’s never good to return violence with violence.”

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“Industry likes to say, ‘We’ve been doing this for years, it’s not new technology, trust us, we know what we’re doing,’” said Brad Kelley, a professor in the Science and Technology Studies Department at Virginia Tech. “But that doesn’t mean the regulation or the oversight is really there.”

Most everyone — except for the fracking industry — in Ohio would likely agree. Dr. Jeffrey Dick, the Chair of the Geology Department at Youngstown State University and the Direction of the Natural Gas and Water Resources Institute, said “We’ve been doing hydraulic fracturing [known as fracking] since the 1950s.” But, he added, “We’ve been doing it in vertical wells.” Ohio, he said, has 85,000 vertical fracking wells, with about 60,000 currently producing, to what’s known as the Clinton Sandstone formation. But the first permit forhorizontal fracking of the Utica-Point Pleasant Shale Formation was only issued in March 2011. By November, there were already 8 rigs drilling; today, there are 17. The Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) lists 75 more permitted wells on the public record, but Dick estimates there are closer to 100, because the staff can’t keep up with listing the permitted wells online.

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“I was a nursing assistant for 30 odd years before I got my last job that required I be in a union,” Georgeanne Koelher (pictured) told Raw Story in Pittsburgh. “But it was the biggest perk that could’ve come with that job.”

Koehler, formerly a lifelong Republican, became a member of SEIU when she took that job — and it was to SEIU she turned when her brother, Billy, died of a preventable heart attack in March 2009. Billy, who had health insurance prior to being laid off in 2003, had used that insurance to cover his internal defibrillator and the periodically necessary battery replacements. But when he was hospitalized in 2007, uninsured because of his pre-existing condition, he was told to come up with the $10,000 on his own to have the surgery. Instead, he died, and Georgeanne called her union. “I asked if they wanted to go on this journey with me,” she said, to try to make sure what happened to her brother didn’t happen to anyone else.

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“This area is difficult,” said Mark Volk, the president-select and current executive vice president of Lackawanna College in Scranton, PA, “because there is not a lot of industry, there is not a lot of turnover in positions and there is not a lot of higher-paid positions for young people. But right now, the economy makes it even more difficult for returned vets to find jobs.”

Geoff Smeltzer, the co-host of WVMW radio station show “What Vets Need To Know,” agreed. “There’s nothing there for them,” he said bluntly. “After World War II, the economy was booming. My dad and all his brothers went to work in the steel mill…. Even coming out of Vietnam, jobs were around.” But, he said, “the economy now isn’t even like it was in the early nineties or even two years ago. There’s no place in those industries now.”

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