Welcome to our June edition of the Rapp Up!

This is a special edition for us - the one year anniversary of our Rapp Up! newsletter.

George Washington warned that, “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government”… Thankfully, the sustained involvement of Americans, of all stripes, in our unique form of self-government has always been the most effective antidote.

One year ago, our small group of Rappahannock residents set out to do our part, and launched Rapp Up!, New Rural Virginia‘s monthly newsletter, to inject facts and contribute our ideas to the local conversation. With your continuing support, we are excited to begin our second year with this month’s reporting.

This month Our Take section looks at:

—how Big Oil is reaping record profits while ordinary Americans are paying record prices at the pump!

—and the very real challenges that Virginian women and their families face in accessing reproductive health care.

In the Around the Commonwealth section, we feature a Cardinal News story that talks about an issue New Rural Virginia has written about already — rural Virginia needs fair access to capital in order to compete for business and jobs. Luckily there is a congressman on the case! Plus an article explaining the controversy over the causes of the recent decline in Virginia’s public school test scores.

In Other News, there is a great explanation of why Americans should look first at the Federal Reserve when asking why inflation is so high.

And in our Over the Fence interview, we ask Larry Wohlers to consider how America’s response to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine would have been different under a reelected President Trump.

So it’s a full issue! Happy reading. Is there a topic you would like to hear more about in future newsletters? Just click here to leave us a message. And, if you have not already, please  subscribe!

Over the Fence Interview with Larry Wohlers: Putin’s Invasion of Ukraine — What would a “President” Trump have done?

Blaming President Biden for increased as prices has become a national obsession of Republican politicians and their media channels. But profiteering by the oil companies, and many years of subsidies and support of the industry by Republican politicians, is where the blame lies. So does a dramatic post-pandemic imbalance between supply and demand – which is happening all over the world and not just in America.  

 Big oil disinvested in production when prices were so low during the global covid pandemic that they had to sell it at a loss. Production was cut by about 10% globally. Why have they been slow to increase production to keep up with the bounce back in worldwide demand? Because they are able to get much bigger profits on the same amount of oil they do sell as prices have skyrocketed. It does not help that the war on Ukraine by Putin, whom the radical right supported and praised, has reduced supply, further increasing prices.

 The top five oil companies reported 300% more in profits in the first quarter of 2022 than last year. One doubled its earnings from a year ago. Another notched its strongest quarterly profit ever, and a third posted its best earnings quarter in nearly a decade. Their first-quarter profits were almost 28% of the price Americans pay for gas.

 Republicans blame the problem on Biden’s efforts to turn to green technologies to combat climate change by reducing burning of oil. But the fact is oil companies are not investing to fill the surge in demand. They can make record profits from higher prices without increasing supply. They are sitting idle on 9,000 unused drilling permits on 12 million acres of leased public land, while generating huge profit increases for their shareholders.  They will use about $40 billion in profits for stock buybacks this year, and more for increased dividend payments to shareholders. 

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For Many Virginia Women, In-Clinic Abortion Care is Already Out of Reach

Having the legal right to seek an abortion doesn’t mean much to a woman and her family who cannot effectively access those services. For many Virginia women, those barriers are very high indeed. In fact, 4 out of 5 Virginia women reside in counties without a single abortion provider! For rural women in the south and west of Virginia, in particular, a clinic may be more than 3 hours away – a distance that makes managing the many other logistics of in-clinic abortions nearly impossible.

 Cost is also a major obstacle to Virginia women. The combination of distance, time off, cost and insurance is more than enough to prevent poor and rural women from receiving the in-clinic care that they need (and indeed many of these clinics also provide much needed family planning services too). Many insurance policies do not cover in-clinic abortions, which can be as much as $750. In fact, Virginian public employees are only covered when the woman’s life is endangered or in cases of rape, incest, or fetal impairment, making it financially inaccessible for many.

 Fortunately, alternatives to in-clinic abortions are becoming more common and accessible. Medical abortions, otherwise known as abortion pills, are available up to 11 weeks of pregnancy and can be supervised by an abortion provider via telehealth appointment (assuming you have internet access and can afford the cost of the pills).  

 The lesson, however, for Virginians who believe that women should be able to make their own reproductive choices is clear:  there are all kinds of ways to make it difficult for a woman to exercise her options, even when abortion is technically legal.

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What rural Virginia needs is more seed capital to transform its economy: in his June 13 commentary, Dwayne Yancey of Cardinal News covers the visit to southwest Virginia of Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna (https://cardinalnews.org/2022/06/13/could-tobacco-commission-be-a-model-for-other-places/). Khanna, a very successful product of California’s Silicon Valley, is convinced that a smart public-private partnership is needed to break the cycle in which just five American cities account for 70% of the nation’s venture capital investment. Khanna rejects the notion that rural communities don’t want or somehow can’t handle tech jobs. “In my travels,” he said, “people are desperate to embrace the future but the capital’s not there.” Khanna goes on to cite the example of Germany, which poured investment capital into the former East Germany in order to successfully transform that economy. Does Virginia, and America, need more targeted investment programs to help regions that lost old industries rebuild? Yancey writes, “I don’t pretend to be an expert on that. But it does seem to me that what we need here is some creative thinking, and Khanna seems to be one of the few people on the national scene who is doing some of that."  

New Rural Virginia has talked in the past about this problem. As we wrote in Rural Vision Needed in our January 2021 newsletter, rural communities tend to be land rich, but cash poor. That means that when a large corporation decides to build on rural land -- anything from poultry farms to solar farms, rural communities are often forced to accept very bad deals. Deals where all the work and production happen on rural lands -- but most of the profits go to corporate boardrooms. We are happy to see that there are visionary Congressmen like Ro Khanna who agree.

Virginia Board of Education Rejects Youngkin Criticisms, Virginia Mercury, June 16, 2022. Members of the Virginia Board of Education rejected the conclusions of a Youngkin administration report that blamed declining student test scores on lax proficiency standards. Board members said the real problem was underfunding, noting the low salaries of Virginia public school teachers and low per-pupil spending. New Rural Virginia has written in the past about the chronic underfunding of Virginia public education at all levels.

If You Must Point Fingers on Inflation, Here’s Where to Point Them, Christopher Leonard commentary, NYTimes, June 11, 2022. The popular narrative among some politicians pinning blame for the economy’s woes on Biden misses the true culprit: the Federal Reserve. This commentary explains how the financial earthquake of 2022 has been building for a decade, largely because of an enormous amount of cheap money that the Federal Reserve Board poured into the economy. That money artificially raised both stock and real estate prices. We are now paying the price. And there was nothing that any president could do about it.