Thursday, August 15, 2024

J.D. Vance shilled for a company that left workers hospitalized & hundreds jobless

The so-called "indoor vertical farming hub" was an intolerably hot greenhouse. Laborers worked long hours without breaks or promised health benefits.

Commentary by Greg Owen 
Wednesday, August 14, 2024

Mar 7, 2023; Washington, DC; Senator JD Vance (R-OH) listens as Jerome Powell, Chair, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, testifies in front of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee during a hearing on the Federal Reserve's Semiannual Monetary Policy Report.
Photo: Jack Gruber-USA TODAY via IMAGN


Just like Donald Trump, Trump’s vice-presidential nominee Sen. J.D. Vance has a pattern of overpromising and underdelivering. This pattern surfaced yet again recently in the story of a high-tech farming company that he invested in — it later imploded.

In 2017, in the wake of Vance’s blockbuster Hillbilly Elegy book debut, the then-venture capitalist met with the founder of AppHarvest, an indoor farming venture based in Eastern Kentucky. The company was seeking funding to build greenhouses, with the promise of high-paying jobs and benefits for workers in a chronically underemployed area, one Vance purported to know well.

Related:

JD Vance’s foreword to Project 2025 founder’s book says Democrats are “wolves” who must be killed

He also suggests that “liberals” have poisoned America’s soil.

Vance became a major backer of the so-called indoor vertical farming hub, joining the board of directors and attracting tens of millions of dollars in capital to the venture, according to an investigation by CNN.

“It’s not just a good investment opportunity, it’s a great business that’s making a big difference in the world,” Vance told Fox Business on the day the company went public in 2021.

The start-up attracted locals with high-tech hype over jobs that were essentially indoor farmworker positions.

“AppHarvest was the talk of the town,” said Anthony Morgan, who left his job at an automobile parts plant for a job as a “crop care specialist” pruning tomatoes at the company’s 60-acre mega greenhouse. “A major emphasis with them was ‘We want to bring work to Eastern Kentucky. This is why we are here.’”

Things went downhill fast.

When production fell behind, the company cut costs — including promised health care benefits — and quotas went up. This resulted in longer hours and fewer breaks.

Then there was the heat.

“I think about the hottest that I experienced was around 128 degrees,” Morgan said. “A couple days a week, you’d have an ambulance show up, and you seen people leaving on gurneys to go to the hospital.”

Locals began quitting in droves, so AppHarvest turned to the same people that farms across the country rely on to harvest crops: migrant workers.

“They brought Mitch McConnell into the greenhouse, and they sent every single Hispanic worker home before he got there,” one former employee recalled. “He then proceeded to have a speech about how we were taking the jobs from the Mexicans.”

By this time, investors in AppHarvest were revolting, suing management for misrepresenting company finances.

In 2021, the company’s valuation soared to over a $1 billion; two years later it went under with $341 million in debt.

By that time, JD Vance had moved on. While he remained an investor, Vance left the board in 2021 to pursue his race for Ohio’s U.S. Senate seat.

But even after employees filed complaints over intolerable working conditions and other investors began questioning management — and the company continued relying on Mexican and Guatemalan workers to make their quotas — Vance kept hawking the promise of AppHarvest creating jobs for the people of Appalachia as part of his Hillbilly Elegy narrative.

Said “crop care specialist” Anthony Morgan, “making the decision to go to work at AppHarvest, like many of us made, the livelihood just went right down the drain.”

“I blame all of the original investors,” he added.

Kentucky is a “right-to-work” state where unions are scarce. In an appearance before the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees in Los Angeles on Tuesday, Vance’s VP opponent Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota reminded his audience of the Trump ticket’s hostility to workers’ rights.

Trump and Vance have “waged war on working people,” the former union member said, adding, “When unions are strong, America is strong.”




VP nominee JD Vance to dissolve last vestige of mothballed charity, give its $11K to Appalachia

Republican vice presidential nominee U.S. Sen. JD Vance is preparing to dissolve the vestiges of a charitable effort he launched in Ohio after publication of his best-selling memoir ''Hillbilly Elegy,'' the Trump-Vance campaign said.


By JULIE CARR SMYTH and MICHELLE R. SMITH
Associated Press
August 15, 2024

JD Vance speaks at a rally July 27, 2024, in St. Cloud. (Glen Stubbe/Star Tribune)

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Republican vice presidential nominee U.S. Sen. JD Vance is preparing to dissolve the vestiges of a charitable effort he launched in Ohio after publication of his best-selling memoir ''Hillbilly Elegy,'' the Trump-Vance campaign said.

Vance formed two like-named nonprofits starting in 2016 to address problems in Ohio and other ''Rust Belt'' states. They were primarily supposed to focus on boosting job opportunities, improving mental health treatment and combating the opioid crisis. The original organization folded within five years and Vance put the other on hold when he ran successfully for the Senate in 2022.

He faced criticism during the race over how little the groups accomplished. Despite Vance's stated intentions to identify and produce national solutions to those problems, the nonprofits' only notable achievement was paying to send an addiction specialist to southern Ohio for a year who had questioned the well-documented role of prescription painkillers in the national opioid crisis. Vance has acknowledged that the groups' efforts fell far short of his aspirations.

One of the groups — a foundation — filed paperwork in April reinstating the corporate status it had allowed to expire in 2022.

Trump-Vance campaign spokesperson Taylor Van Kirk told The Associated Press that that filing was required because the foundation still had money left in its bank account and did not signal that Vance intended to resume the foundation's efforts. She said he plans to close out its accounts and distribute the remaining balance to causes benefiting Appalachia.

Records the group filed with the state and obtained by the AP through a public records request show it reported about $11,000 remaining in the foundation's account.

Vance's first nonprofit, Our Ohio Renewal, was formed not long after ''Hillbilly Elegy'' was published in 2016. It was registered as a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization. Such groups are able to endorse candidates, though this one never did. Its contributions were not tax-deductible. Vance said his goal was to raise $500,000 a year to fund its work.

A year later, he created the Our Ohio Renewal Foundation. As a 501(c)(3) charitable group, it operates with more restrictions but also allows donors to receive tax deductions for donations.

The groups failed to catch on, in part because a key organizer was diagnosed with cancer. Our Ohio Renewal reported raising $221,000 in 2018 — $80,000 of which was Vance's own money. It raised less than $50,000 a year thereafter, before being shut down in 2021, records show.

Meanwhile, the foundation appears to have raised and spent only about $69,000 from 2017 to 2023 — although figures in its annual reports don't all add up. Neither Jai Chabria, a Vance political adviser who formerly worked as a consultant to the foundation, nor the campaign was able to explain the discrepancies, citing the passage of time and changes in personnel.

The AP reported in 2022 that the residency funded by Vance's charitable efforts for Dr. Sally Satel in Ironton, Ohio, was clouded by ties between her, the American Enterprise Institute, where she was a resident scholar, and OxyContin manufacturer Purdue Pharma. Satel cited Purdue-funded studies in some of her writings while being paid by the institute, which at the time was receiving funding from the drugmaker, according to reports in ProPublica.

Vance's Senate campaign said the candidate — whose family's experience with addiction figured heavily in his book and helped inspire his charity work — was unfamiliar with Satel's reliance on Purdue research in her work when she was selected for the 2018 residency. But he said he remained proud of her work treating patients in one of Ohio's hardest hit areas.

Satel said at the time that she came to her conclusions independently, and AEI said it maintains a firewall between its scholars and its donors.

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