Hello, everyone thanks for joining us this morning. Are we rolling . Hopefully. I havent seen them. Good morning everyone. On behalf of the virginia humanities which produces the festival of books, id like to welcome you all to the contemporary portrayals. We have a couple of quick notes to get through pertaining to this event, so first we want to thank the city of charles bell as a sponsor for this conversation and for hosting us. This program is being broadcast on the citys government Access Channel on tv ten and streamed live on the Facebook Page so if anyone is listening or watching at home and wants to see it on facebook is Charlottesville City Hall is the handle. Because this is a recorded event, during the q a portion of the event, please raise your hand and a volunteer will come to you and give you a microphone before you ask your question. So, a couple more logistical issues. Please silence your cell phone at this point in time. However, we encourage you to tweet about the event using the hash tag vabook2018. So by all means, take the lessons youve received from the authors here and share them with people. You should have received program evaluations. Fill these out before you leave, please. They will be useful to help keep the festival free and open to the public. If you didnt get an evaluation or have to leave quickly, you can do this online at vabook. Org survey. Please support the authors today and those that you encounter throughout the festival as well as the local booksellers. There are books for sale that we can peruse after the event. One of our guests today actually is a local bookseller and i would expect she would encourage you to please do the same. Shop local. The authors will be available for a book signing after the program. Okay. Lets get started. So, introductions, Elizabeth Catte is the author of what they were getting wrong about appalachia. All three are lined up on the table in front. It took a story from east tennessee and coowner of the historical consultants and phd in public history from middle Tennessee State university and currently lives in stanton virginia. Steven stoll is the author of ramp hollow this one. He is a professor of history at the university and the author of the great delusion and learning the earth. His writings have appeared in harpers magazine, a quarterly at the new haven review. And we have wendy welch the author of fault or fly the story of foster care and adoption in appalachia. Shes also the author and editor of three previous books including the bookstore of Big Stone Gap and she runs a bookstore in southWest Virginia. I want to see the thought at the start of the event to thinking about some of the topics. In his essay, James Baldwin has some thoughts about how the stories of device or comfort ahead of the greater understanding and that can weaken our ability to deal with the world as it is in ourselves as we are. He concludes with a fought but i try to bear in mind when encountering the works of history and what they have reached back over hundreds of years or what we are doing with contemporary issues. All of these books give us history often by the difficult work. To get started, id like to ask everyone to share the stories for these three books. When and how do the concerns and the ideas of these books for us to take shape, and if we could start with elizabeth and then go to steven and then go to wendy. I moved to texas with my partner as the 2016 president ial election started up. I consumed every piece of media that i could about what was happening in appalachia during the election and how you put feeling into thgot thefeeling ao the predictions were. It reminded me of the phenomenon that happened during the story when the photographers went to mine missouri and so i wanted to study the phenomena from the ground up and the president ial election gave me that. But what was happening is as ive made small talk and i got to know people in the University Communities and Business Leaders and the kind of people he hoped would be my colleagues, everyone wanted to talk to me about hillbilly elegy. And they were not curious what i thought about it, they wanted me to answer for it. What is wrong with people, why did they vote against their own interest, why did they miss behave and why cant they get it together and that made me angry when i went on job interviews this book was in my face and when i opened up the newspaper, his face was in my face. [laughter] and so, i happily connected with a publisher having similar feelings because people cant tell the rust belt and appalachia apart. And he was kind enough to give me a platform to work through these feelings and that is how my hope was born. [applause] i will interrupt quickly. We will probably talk a little bit more about j. D. Vances book. I dont have a story anywhere near that. Mine started at ten or 12 years ago i was trying to understand american capitalism and wanted to write about people losing their land as an essential element of how capitalism develops and grows and what is essential to it. I could have written a book about American Indians were about the greatest dispossession in the history of north america. I went looking for a story people dont often think about an hour considered to think about capitalism and something i myself did not understand there were the southern mountains and a complicated story about how the white settler. Its considered heroic and lost its land, so i set out to write a painted case study and it took over my life as i dedicated years to try to understand it as very much an outsider. My book is about capitalism. I am an environmental historian at the political economy, so i was putting those two things together and so i hope you like the results. [applause] ibook was born out of kindness. Theres one that shall remain nameless, this was a lovely man who came to me about two years after the book was out and he set up a little bookstore if somebody sums it up in the radio the triumph of the human spirit so he came to me and said he can you do for Foster Parents with u2 for bookstores. I am like pardon . We need more Foster Parents and we are not getting them and its going to kill us all. Would you write about it, and im thinking self published center staple its an important story but its not going to be those inside of the sandbox because the other people dont want to hear it. How do you tell a story nobody wants to hear. So, we also got past the anonymous part of. If youre a Foster Parent who are already judged and the person talking to you has some you up. So, i said lets do this. He said thats fine. Remember this man is a pastor. Wwe set up the blog and i startd editing other peoples stories. They are holding their annual conference near my home and johnson tennessee. These people would feel a sense of accomplishment and mission. Theres a huge book of all these things that are going to happen. This woman says i know it was interesting your doing a blog on the stories of adoption and foster care. Is there a book associated in the project and i said no. She said would you like for there to be. I called the pastor and i said that was cheating, praying to get a book deal. [laughter] and that is how the book came about. [applause] im going to start off with a question from everyone. So each of these books exist directly or indirectly in a certain tension with other older accounts of appalachia in how those have affected the region and the people. There is a line where you write the dispersions of stupidity and volatility coincided in the environment these sorts of narratives and i is misleading the seizure. Sure. I would be happy to. People ask me what this book is about. People from the southern mountains kind of slid past. In effect, people who live close to the environment very often Administrative Authority call them savages. Even though it is the way that most people have lived over the last 10,000 years. In fact the very end are the largest class in human history. But its so easy for us to forget that and to forget in fact how to talk about them and how they actually lived. So, and i couldnt have shown you daniel boone going through Cumberland Gap with all the people behind him with that painting. I then said that this is the best image and the best kind of documentary image that i could find depicting these poor white folks. They are poor but they are sufficient. So, the remarkable thing is that if in 50 years and excuse me while i go through the entire thing if we get to this, we get to the georgia cranker. So i want to understand how this took shape and how it coincided with the rise of the extracted industry at the same time. And you can actually watch it as people begin to understand that there was a great deal of both to be pulled out of the appalachia. The role that those pioneers played with daniel boone was basically obscured. In other words, if there was a moment they coincided, they were dispossessed or. They were there to play that role and they were the pioneers and they were heroes. But just a few years later they became grotesque and the characteristics were just kind of grossly invented racialized. But if the group of poor whites in the United States could essentially become a separate race as a process on the way of having them be legitimized so they could be pulled out of those hollows and it could be given to coal and lumber companies so it was part of that. It wasnt like a conscious attempt. Like everybody was watching and seeing what was happening. By the way, the people were in their own ways off to recall that both. There are agriculture and their own way of life is impacted at the same time. Sure, great. Elizabeth touches on the same matter and for me one of the most effective moments is the writing of the seizure of land use for the National Park so when the process begins, writers, photographers, journalists, social scientists, im partially doing scare quotes here, so they all travel to Shenandoah Valley and document families are being misplaced and she writes about homophobic that is about the journalists and sociologists to and where this gets interesting and complicated she also brings in a photographer that goes into the same locations and takes pictures of. I wonder whether these people who are coming into these areas offer from outside. What do they see, what do they miss and how are the depictions in the photographs . How do they damage and what are the basic image of stol damage appalachia. Basically what happened in the 1930s and it matches very clearly the arc of the history which is the process of separating poor people from the richness of the land and that takes many shapes and it is the bestknown example, but the Natural Beauty and tourism is a part of the story is on the 1930s the power of the federal government thought it would be beneficial to the people of the region especially politicians and Business Owners if there is a natural park for the National Park was born. It was facilitated through the act through Eminent Domain and the removal of people from their home. In order to do that, the industry sprung up around them. Photographers and journalists, some employed in the government came to the valley to assess the people that were there at the university of chicago in the social sciences to come and document the condition of life in the valley and in the mountains. And almost most significantly to me the leaders of the movement were watching all of this unfold and celebrating with interest. It is the portraits that they were extracting from the region that is indeed what happened to them, many of them were children and they were taken from the land that they lived on and worked. It happened to be not in some isolated faraway land, but 2 miles away from one of the most wealthy resorts in the area but was eager to expand a. In order to make people that were wealthy even wealthier and that is the story so often. The subject that is very much a pressing contemporary issue is one that we discussed previously and there were not many newsrooms in america that have reporters that are assigned to cover up option fostering more the circumstances that really create the challenges that inform both the systems. One of the ways the depictions have been formed and have affected adoption and foster care. Okay. So this is ugly. What theyve been talking about in the stereotypes and the presumptions is very wellknown and very well held by the people it is aimed at. We are smart enough to know when we are being stereotyped. What is the awfu of the awful es the vengeance factor by people who enter it because it is layered and hard to set up. What is the most important industry how many of you are going to say coal. Its directed our past and rightly or wrongly i think elizabeth tackles this really well it is ingrained in some of the ways arguments play out. So, if you are suspicious of the government and the government is going to pay you to look after someone elses family, the worst thing you can be in central and global appalachia is best to your family. The worst thing you can be expanded to your family. Is bound to your family. So here is this government thats going to pay you to look after someone elses family. You have the moral high ground, economic background and Community High ground. It is absolutely hideous. The first time i was researching and i went back and explain it to some of the people he was talking to, you cant say that. It is not okay to say that. But the hideous thing that you are describing is what the people in the region are taking advantage of him holding the kids hostage. And at the first time they become Collateral Damage in the war between adult, we have all seen the divorce stories they now write it for the culture versus the government and the kids are in the middle. Western civilization is due, and it should be. One of the things with the research and writing is in the ability to kind of articulate something that has been overlooked or has been whitewashed by other cover for forces. So, i want to ask some questions about a breaking with previously published histories. With steven, early on as paul lo, he writes of hi that his bos predicated on the collision between the economy. Its invested in families and farms in agriculture itself. So, it is a basic unit for the agrarian communities. He writes it strikes the skills and traditions and it transmits to the vast ecological knowledge and catapults into adult hood. No other Human Institution does these things. Then so many pages later he talks about how there is no shorthand for how the material money moves through the household and there is a powerful moment where he writes this language seems that an artifact to eliminate all competing economic forums. Where im interested here is capitalism is also shaping our ability to tell other peoples stories. Its been shaping the language that they use to relay what we understand about past. This has huge ramifications for you as a writer in the history and a researcher, so can you tell me about the challenges of through the lens that isnt a capitalist one . That is really difficult. I mentioned this notion of savagery as closely associated with people who are called the koreans, they make agrarian. This money is an attribute to the household and isnt just the reason. It cant be organized around making money. But we have decided there is a hard time understanding we basically have two speeds. Theres the savage into the noble savage and i find one can be accused of either one. Anthropologists understand this. But in the general public either you are saying that this is a stage on the Human Evolution that think the us weve left behind because they were so poor and always starving, which of course is never true or you were accused of saying that this is a golden age where they have virtues that we have lost and there were giants in the past and they were happy insufficient and strong, and that wasnt true. Had we seen people for how they actually were and how they lived its the same problem. So what i tried to do is use it as much as possible especially economic anthropologists and write about them in a way that essentially described the sufficiency of a. No matter who they were, they drew upon the large area of Natural Resources that they didnt have to buy. And they didnt have to invest money because they could not. You can forage foods and these things cost money but they produce commodities that you then cant sell. So, just to come to the point what i found is when you attach people to their landscape and show how they lived on an actual tangible way its an effective way of teaching people what an agrarian is and to come back to the point, we kind of lost this language. The. Coming from the great plains or Something Like that it wasnt that long ago for us to. We are going to kind of jump forward in time to the. Of much of your book involves the episodes, voices that counter what you call the genre of journalism and i have a colleague that referred to a lot of the coverage of the 2016 elections and this term occurs over and over again in about of contemporary news coverage. Journalism is charged with creating pieces of the joint historical record. So, when does this leave out the contemporary history and what do we risk by those mentioned . The Trump Country narrative sort of reset the clock on appalachia in a way that is unfair and unethical. This is the history started in 2016. And that is all you need to know. Its existed for quite a long time. It hasnt always been called appellation that you read in the book people have always lived here. This is important for us to know to understand how we got to this place. Just to piggyback off of the subject of capitalism which is one of my favorite things to talk about as well, i think its important to understand whenever you see these narratives that rise to the top we have to understand theres a considerable amount of power and wealth. I dont think they are making bank off of writing down the stories but i think a publisher might be into the media conglomerate might be. Any time you see these powerful narratives come to us you have to think who is profiting from them. This is where our mind should be oriented. Who is making money off the narrative, its not the people on appalachia. Its no not the people that actually writing thebut actualle telling people to write them and who are advertising on the back of them and who benefit from them and get away by disguising their politics and giving the sleightofhand. But guess what is holding the country back, its always the poor people that decide, isnt the other way around. So that is my concern when i think about appalachia because it is the stories we tell ourselves to help make sense of the world and my place and your place in the world. We have very little control over them at this moment in time, and i would like to change that. From contemporary reporting and dialogue and to be largely absent from those things. And then in the previous conversation to consider yourself an expert and then to write about. So you talk to people who wants to talk to me and social workers and to have stories they want to tell. And in talking about two West Virginia university in appalachia the narrative on foster is absent unless it is voyeuristic. And the author is still living. But thats the only one that catches on this in the appellation environment. And that has says the random family about new york city and those narratives that with adoption but if you are in appalachia and foraging for food. And the place called cattle ranch that is the nickname i dont think she knows that but she only takes young teenagers there is something called permanent placement so basically it is the acknowledgment that they are no longer cute enough to get adopted. When you turn 12 the next is permanent placement. So think of yourself when you were 12 or 13. Right . How much rejection could you take . And this kid was told we will look for a permanent placement for you because thats the best thing we can do for you. And then and then five or six other kids one is in a vegetative state. But he is there because his two brothers are there. So how ugly can i get that is money in the bank for Foster Parents. But the children in cattle ranch were being taught to can beans and farm potatoes. They had hogs and doing the bacon and potato and being canning and teaching them life skills so when they graduated from high school they could get out and get a job. That is why she was considered a desirable foster home. She had no emotional investment in these kids. They were worker bees and she actually charged them rent they had fast food jobs and got a car summer already graduated from high school. And they rotated the car. The only person who had her own room in the house was the biological daughter of the family. The foster system like her because the kids are safe. The beds are their own. The three meals a day to have shoes and warm close and not on the street if they come drunk or high she disciplines them and in the appropriate way. So we have this agrarian history because a social workers say. So could you say how that was perceived in the mountains why the people in the communities. That is understandable way to make a living but theres nothing you could say that fits every situation and it is perceived as the cash cow or as gods destiny for you to have a place you are supposed to be able to take care of your family and appellation. And in an africanamerican communities in appalachia foster care is unheardof because that is wrong taking somebody elses kids is wrong on every level. We have to talk in such generalities here because it is a quick slice. It is a Necessary Evil or gods will. And in reference to how we have a cattle ranch episode so under the heading who is telling the stories so when the rights she introduces the four social workers throughout the course of the book and rights they are composite characters based on the key social workers i came to know well but they come from many workers interviewed and and then to make it that they are combined into these plus others. So certainly from a journalism perspective it is a phrase that immediately introduces questions of credibility. So i am curious how this approach enabled what felt like for you is telling the story. Gail is the name we gave the pastor he went to his supervisor how many of you work in a Corporate Structure . He said i have this journalist storytelling lady writing in his book and she is willing to grow and interview people to tell their stories we get more posture parents to be Foster Parents. The supervisor said thats a wonderful idea i never want to hear about it again. [laughter] so with that deniability he started to invite foster workers to call me to give them my number and email and said if you want to talk talk to her. When say knew they were safe, they blew. So in order to tell the individual stories, you have to set up each particular situation. The stories that people told me tended to fall into patterns i have five different parents tell me almost exactly the same story of something that happened and told me i could not tell it because it would be too recognizable in the community. But when you start to realize where the patterns are falling is just the individual the new ones that makes it different then you start to combine the stories. All of the old wise foster workers are gail all of the angry ones are cody all of the sad our best all the fired up i will change the world less than three years are barbie and that is how the composite character. All the barbies had a lot to say. So it was a storytelling convenience that made the book easier to understand because if i had gone into the nuances of each individual story people would be identifiable and we are not going there. And then to pick up the book and read it. And then we pulled one story from the book because of what the woman at risk and it actually involved a shotgun. And i was up on the mountain. And without a shotgun it was a repeated story, im sorry ask your question again. What is the risk to those who are identified. And then there was the actual physical threat then of course in appalachia and then to manipulate the system for their financial benefits and then to believe that was about them and threatened to sue then of the actual physical threats and thats why the book is scrambled and the names are all made up in the characters composite and a few of the stories that are similar or one could have one from each story so they are overrepresented. So talk about the fourth book with hillbilly elegy that sounds like many of you have read he said he wrote the book because they want people to understand what happens in the lives of the poor and the psychological impact of poverty has on children so i like to point out that a number of things including the most biggest occurrence with the necessity with the emphasis on the strong and uncompromising grandmother those that will be abandoned and that is despair interviews than most will be stuck but does this have this very popular and set what risk does that pose for us in appalachia quick. One of the things that drives me crazy about hillbillelegy its not a luxury but i think we are granted but i would like to point out that would you blame poverty on the poor when you make money doing it then that is your politics. When you have a said politics that says the failures that are holding us back as a country are rooted in certain individuals, and in this case we know who normally gets criticism those are your politics. So hillbillelegy is not a deep political text that has any form of politics aside because politics are everywhere and they are historical because the politics reach right back into the past to the people i talked about and then to get rid of the pesky devious people going back to the 1970s. And then to see if they set up that sterilization clinic to fix the gene pool their imprints for politics all of the book and then to bring them right back into our living room and into the classrooms there are good and liberal people universities across the country and then say hillbillelegy is great and those are the ideas that you should talk around. And then that appalachia is what you want to see appalachia is not a place it is a problem. And then like jd vance. On a more granule level what caught my attention immediately the story of the couple that work in the warehouse and cannot understand why they dont show up for work and ultimately they lose their job. And this is a problem these people dont want to work nobody wants to put in an honest days work and what upset me is she doesnt know anything about these people and has no idea what is going on in their private lives. And how in the world and draw conclusions on people and has no concept whatsoever. And a particular narrator everything he writes about his deeply political and it is possible and is not rag to riches it was called luck am plot and his grandmother and he pulled himself up and other people in the room is lock and pluck and they will not make it. And then at one point of the book that Public Policy can help and cannot really help and there is no Government Program that will save appalachia. And social solution and leaving his relationship as his grandmother and it is called powerlessness. And hes the real deal and comes right out of the mountains himself. An actual genius and a rhodes scholar. So basically he talked about three different realms and i give this to you because ultimately that is what we are talking about and the different reactions but powerlessness is something that has to be understood historically. The first realm of power is like what happens in this room there was a conflict over a social situation one group wins and another loses but its all out in the open of conflict. Just so we understand that and then what you described the journalist would lose the job how do we illuminate the press altogether . And then to think about a social situation. That third realm of powerlessness is when party a can make party be see the world from their point of view essentially with the thoughts and the feelings of the people who are doing the manipulating this is where the bread is buttered and to have job creators and what all of you think how this plays out with the things that you have writte written. On april 7th we will be on a panel together. [laughter] in cincinnati at the appalachia association and is the product of his grandmothers care and i find myself in a terrifying position to be the apologist for jd vance which it is nuanced that cannot happen in seven minutes or in a discussion like this so please dont hear me say i am there with jd vance if you dont understand you dont have to buy my book to talk to me if there is something going right in that one foster care in appalachia it is the individual people for one reason or another become emotionally invested in the kids. I dont care if you started for money or because god told you or you were mad if you are emotional to invest in your kids you are doing good for future generations. Jd vance grandmother invested in him. He may have turned out to be a scumbag. [laughter] but his grandmother invested in him. That is the reason he is a walking and functioning adult now. Is the reason he went to yale. I do care deeply what he said especially the eugenics approach but what came out of the good there is the emotional investment in the individual and thats what i care about the most and the whole story. Screw the politics and economics a woman said i will not let those kids go down. And that is where good stuff happens a little points of light were people say i will not let this kid go down. I hope you did not hear me say i like hillbillelegy or his politics or approach i do think hes been very detrimental to appalachia but i do like he chronicles a woman who invested in her family even when it cost her a lot to do it thats all i have to say about that. You actually have more than those seven minutes we have significantly more time. Hello. I am a hillbilly you are writing about and i came here to hear what you people have to say because i keep hearing about hillbilly elegy and i thought it was terrible. I have not read your book but i am confused about you say people come in to take over the land. My grandfather lost a leg my father lost his life when the coal people came in and so the killed appalachia and watch him die over 20 some years. I remember the war on poverty came to save us and they were given a stuff that tasted like antifreeze. [laughter] i got out of there. But my question is i know in the Shenandoah Valley 500 families were displaced but you seem to be talking about that in your book from what i read from the reviews i understand that and that never happened where i am from. I understand the people wanted to intervene so they didnt have to buy it the people didnt buy the land to cut down the trees so they would save money and cut the trees and leave where does that fit . Basically there is a number of different ways in which people were not every family who lived in a log cabin lived in a lumber camp. Not everybody did. But those who are left behind who lost those words lost the entire life and the way they made a living. But i understand how. In a number of different ways sometimes they never owned the land in the first place so the 18 forties and seventies the First Investors basically the people who took over from George Washingtons generation were interested in the actual extraction of resources from the mountains as a passive investor but when the other generation came in they needed to figure out a way to get the people off of better get the minerals from underneath it. So they went to the county and state records and found out you dont own this land at all you have been writing deeds and trading at around so basically there were two different deed systems one was amount indeed one a mountain deed and then official deeds but we are talking about figuring out and then the judge said i will give this link and to this owner but not this owner so there was outright blatant dispossession from the courts so another way to do it is if in fact that i can cut the woods around it so then you will go down that you cannot maintain your life as you had it before. And then to be unwilling. [inaudible] it is the Coal Mining Community i understand there are other places. He is not trying to explain every single case i appreciate you bringing this. And we can talk after. More questions. I have a question about the secrecy i understand the foster one foster care situation but in the greater realm of the stories, think its important to start naming names. I can share stories i am a defendant from shenandoah National Park i recently moved to the area so you probably recognize my car im the shenandoah National Park plate that says descendent also a daughter of a man my fathers family is from Orange County near here the mother has 14 children for various reasons they were all put into foster care but the foster care system now that i have learned it was a replacement for slavery. These children were sent out to work on farms and sent all over and the more i dig i came across churches who deny they had anything to do with the system i found the churchs name on land deeds and they denied having any activity in that area but the name is on the court records. So what can we do about the secrecy . I think adam cohen tried to address this with imbecile and i applaud that book but this is part of a greater Economic System because something has to be done post civil war to replace and this is the way it was done the attitudes are the same toward single mothers we dont give credit and to make it more current for everyone . Where we are going to see a return to the work houses and theres no way in america is ever going to call anything a work house but the Foster Care Group homes we have now come individual group homes in the Licensure Group home and of the larger Institutional Group homes are in many ways directed to teach the children life skills, and that includes a lot of work. I think the future is going backwards and we are going towards places where those that are inconvenient or gathered to be harnessed in some way for the greater good of the society that is inconvenienced by them and i dont think it is limited but it is going to be heading because the minute you say whats going to happen, people get mad. But by golly there will be comments on facebook. I dont think blowing the secrecy will hope for naming names will help. I think destroying this, individuals stepping up will help. I would suggest to contact your lawmakers or representatives because some would need to be changed for you to people to get the information that you want to get. The records probably still exist but theres privacy laws that regulate. It isnt good but it could be changed and i wrote about reparations. The. There is room to agitate and advocate on the issue id like to honor the time we have with our guests and enable some more questions. If we could please give your question and in as direct a way as possible that would be helpful. Thank you. I lived there for 12 years in Eastern Kentucky and also southWest Virginia and we havent talked much about cold. In kentucky and West Virginia because the students with whom i worked as far as the male pairings worked on the coalfield and its basically the only job there was. When i inquired about what their parents did, they would say my father is on. So if some of you could approach cold and whether that was a trap or not it was kind of a doubleedged sword. It was a way to get out of poverty but it was also a trap on at least the way that i look at it. And i would say by design. You pay them less than the value of their land and then they cant remain or you buy their rights so then its the kind of rip up the entire mountain and then you say we can go down the coalfield so the stories that ive seen people would go down and they would say we just want to make enough money into the neighbors would say we said that, we have been here for three years. And then what happens in a place where there was very little government and the counties were basically subcontracted by the sheriffs and police basically were there and there was such little money flying around for the companies very often you have an enormous amount of control so now you dont have enough to win over the printer i would advance against the wages and pay you little tokens and it wont be enough. I will write on the differences of what you owe to me but now you are in debt and therefore you are not going anywhere. So, yes i think that the trap door is exactly how i think of it. It slams shut behind them. And i would quickly add Eastern Kentucky and appalachia is one of the most concentrated areas of prison growth and has been for at least three decades now and so this is the pattern of substitution when the coal mines by, the land is ruined, the workforce is captive and despondent so it is prime area for the present becomes the because there is a compliant workforce and subpar land and a place to hide people who do not value in this country so that is the story now in central appalachia is the story of prison growth. One more question and then we will allow people to look at books. This question is for you. I was in newport virginia last sunday for two Hours Service and solidarity in the community as the Mountain Valley pipeline is coming through. My question in the last couple of years going on around Eminent Domain and i think that you have given me the seeds for that but the question is how can the corporation come in and i feel like we are perpetuating the story that happened in the coal industry so there is a Small Community for four generations, people lived in this wonderful little town and now two weeks ago i think the lawsuits around the Eminent Domain, but the companies with the money just keeps allowing this to happen and i dont know if it is the citizens it doesnt seem like they have the power to be effective enough but my question is around Eminent Domain and how the corporations can keep that going. I dont know the exact story. I cannot comment on what is happening in that town. Eminent domain is the notion that the government can essentially pay you market value because there is a greater social value to that land than you are giving it. It is a series of walls and relationships in the corporations in which localities were under any authority if the town could vote all kinds of regulations or if they wanted to say you cant mine coal in this county or this town. So, the state needed to take over the degree of the sovereignty or the economy of the towns in order for it to be able to make money in the companies have been benefited by having the departure of clients. The owning needed to convince the little sister or the governor of what their plans were. The deal is made and no one else in the state would be able to change it. Im just a historian. It isnt so much just Eminent Domain which is supposed to be a transparent process that is supposed to be resulted from some impetus into the private industry but purely for the public good so we use the word of the relationship between the state and the corporation. I want to thank everyone for coming [applause] i import you. If there is time i will be happy to speak with you. Thank you