2B z FRIDAY, AUGUST 9, 2019 z USA TODAY MONEY
AT&T and CBS have ended a nearly
three-week standoff that kept CBS
channels off DirecTV, U-verse and Di-
recTV Now in several major markets.
The telecom giant and the broad-
caster on Thursday announced a mul-
ti-year agreement returning CBS-
owned local stations, CBS Sports Net-
work and Smithsonian Channel to
AT&T’s subscribers to its TV services
delivered via satellite, fiber cable and
broadband.
The deal, terms of which were not
disclosed, brings back 26 CBS-owned
stations that went off AT&T’s TV ser-
vices July 20 in 17 markets including
New York; Los Angeles; Chicago; Phil-
adelphia; Dallas; San Francisco; Bos-
ton; Atlanta; Tampa, Florida; Seattle;
Detroit; Minneapolis; Miami; Denver;
Sacramento, California; Pittsburgh;
and Baltimore.
CBS Sports Network also returns to
DirecTV and DirecTV Now, while
Smithsonian Channel is back on Di-
recTV.
“CBS and AT&T regret any inconve-
nience to their customers and viewers
and thank them for their patience,” the
companies said in the announcement.
The dispute had raised some con-
cern about DirecTV’s NFL Sunday
Ticket package, which provides sub-
scribers out-of-market NFL games.
But DirecTV gets all of those regional
games from CBS Sports or Fox Sports
regardless of any ongoing carriage dis-
putes.
However, another dispute remains
unresolved: Some AT&T customers
have lost access to Nexstar stations–
including ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC af-
filiates – in 97 markets since July 3.
DirecTV gets
CBS back as
dispute ends
Mike Snider
USA TODAY
Soon you’ll be able to get Popeyes’
New Orleans-style fried chicken on a
bun.
The fast food chain is adding a new
chicken sandwich to its menu that will
be available nationwide at more than
3,000 restaurants starting Monday.
For $3.99, fried chicken fans can get
a buttermilk-battered and hand-
breaded white meat chicken fillet
topped withpickles and spicy Cajun
spread, served on a toasted brioche
bun, Popeyes said in a statement. For
those that prefer less spice, the Cajun
spread can be swapped out for classic
mayo.
“For a while, we’ve heard from our
guests that they wanted to see a chick-
en sandwich at Popeyes,” Felipe Ath-
ayde, Popeyes president for the Amer-
icas, said in a statement to USA TO-
DAY. “We are always evolving our me-
nu to accommodate guests’ tastes.”
Popeyes has offered chicken sand-
wiches at select locations in the past,
but this is its first nationwide chicken
sandwich, which will be a permanent
offering, the company said.
“Customers in our test markets
loved the product, and we knew it was
time to bring it to Popeyes fans across
the nation,” Athayde said.
Popeyes also has served Po’boy
sandwiches, but the fried shrimp
sandwiches are no longer on the menu.
The chicken chain serves signature
fried chicken, chicken tenders, pop-
corn shrimp and seven different sides.
Before launching nationwide, the
new sandwich will be available Thurs-
day and Friday at Sweet Dixie Kitchen,
a Long Beach, California, restaurant.
In 2017, the restaurant made headlines
when guests discovered it was serving
Popeyes chicken.
Contributing: Kelly Tyko
Popeyes’ chicken sandwich will be
available Monday for $3.99.POPEYES
Popeyes adding
chicken sandwich
to national menu
Rebekah Tuchscherer
USA TODAY
His wife, Melody, who stays home
to care for their daughter, who has au-
tism, got up to make breakfast for the
43-year-old former Blackjewel fore-
man. He drove his truck with a “Coal
keeps the lights on!” plate through 45
minutes of winding roads to his job at
Blackjewel’s Huff Creek Mine.
After attaching his methane gas de-
tector, he boarded a squat “mantrip”
transporter for the 70-minute ride
miles into the mine. He conducted a
“danger run,” checking safety for the
incoming day shift whose machines
would drill into a thin seam of coal.
Howard, who began helping deliver
coal out of a pickup at age 12 and never
finished high school, said the mys-
tique and danger of working in an in-
dustry woven deeply into Harlan
County’s culture always felt “cool,”
sort of “like riding a motorcycle.”
There were also few options in the
area, he said: “It’s either Walmart, coal
mine, hospital.”
Amid the downturn in recent years,
he left to work as a trucker but came
back after Trump’s election and se-
cured a job with Blackjewel. His expe-
rience meant he was earning nearly
$100,000 a year “bossing,” pay that
was nearly impossible to beat.
Back home that evening, Howard
learned the company had declared
bankruptcy and the mine was closing.
The closure affected a handful of
mines in Harlan County and put 1,
miners out of work in Kentucky, Vir-
ginia, West Virginia and Wyoming.‘Financial distress’The company, run by CEO Jeff
Hoops, had purchased marginal mines
and found itself struggling, he said in
court papers, amid familiar pressures
of abundant natural gas, more renew-
able energy and tougher environmen-
tal regulations.
“The entire industry either has gone
through, or is currently going through,
a period of financial distress and reor-
ganization,” he said in an affidavit.
Blackjewel and affiliates, including
Revelation Energy, were the nation’s
sixth-largest U.S. coal producer in
2017, according to the Mine Safety andHealth Administration. It came after
other major coal producer bankruptcies
in recent years, including Blackhawk,
Westmoreland Coal Co. and Cloud Peak
Energy in May.
Howard figured the shutdown might
last a day or two but the mines would
reopen after a financial reorganization.
The next day, miners’ phones started
ringing: “Check your bank account,”
friends warned.
Howard’s June 28 paycheck
bounced. Across Harlan, Howard and
other miners found their bank accounts
overdrawn, jeopardizing payments on
houses, cars and utilities.
Some miners said their 401(k) contri-
butions and child-support deductions
hadn’t been credited.Bad checksSome local mining suppliers and
businesses were owed hundreds of
thousands of dollars. At Don’s Super
Saver, a local family grocery cashed
more than $93,000 in bad checks.
“Jeff Hoops screwed everybody,”
Howard said recently as his wife got her
daughter ready for vacation Bible school
and he laid plans to get his GED and
change careers. “He better never come
back to Harlan County.”
That same feeling washed over Sa-
mantha Lawson as she sat in the open
door of her truck far up a narrow and re-
mote hollow, where ramshackle homes
clung to either side of a creek.
Jason Lawson, her husband,
crouched next to the truck in a Def Lep-
pard T-shirt.The couple’s dining table sat outside
their house, covered with a blue tarp.
Furniture was stacked nearby. They
were waiting on a rental company to
pick up furniture, a TV and iPhones for
nonpayment after her husband’s layoff
left them more than $2,700 overdrawn.
Worst still, she said, they had to can-
cel a long-anticipated mobile home
they’d ordered – their first new home –
to replace the crumbling cottage where
they live with four children.
“It was beautiful. It had a fireplace
and a kitchen island,” said Samantha
Lawson. “You think you’re on top of the
world, and the next minute, you’re at the
bottom.”
Two of their children blew off steam
and disappointment by riding a small
motorbike up and down the narrow
road. What would they do?
Jason Lawson hoped the bankruptcy
proceedings would go quickly. Maybe
the mines would reopen or be pur-
chased by a new owner. There were oth-
er mines, but not enough openings to
absorb all the miners.
Samantha Lawson was trying to find
local work at a medical facility or a retail
shop as far as an hour away. There was
Walmart or other lower-wage employ-
ers.
They also were considering a move to
Alabama or Western Kentucky, where
they said the coal is cheaper to mine and
work more steady. But that would mean
uprooting their family.
“I don’t want to move,” said their 16-
year-old son, a junior at Harlan High.
Jason Lawson squinted and looked at
the ground, his dog lying nearby.
“Everybody says coal is done,” he
said. “There just ain’t much else around
here that pays.”The heart of coal countryAcross Appalachia, coal production
continued to fall, by nearly 45% overall
between 2005 and 2015, according to
the Appalachian Regional Commission.
U.S. energy provided by coal-fired pow-
er plants has fallen sharply.
As mining jobs shrank, so too did the
county’s population, which reached
higher than 75,000 in 1940 but has
dipped to 26,400.
In the first quarter of 2019, 3,959 min-
ers were working Eastern Kentucky,
down from 15,147 a decade earlier, ac-
cording to state figures.
Depopulation, declining property
taxes, and drop-off in coal tax funds
have recently made it hard for some
Eastern Kentucky counties to fund ba-
sic services, said Jason Bailey, director
of the Kentucky Center for Economic
Policy.
At City Hall, Harlan County Judge-
Executive Dan Mosleysaid he’s working
to attract new employers. He cited new-
er ones such as a business that wraps
firewood for sale at grocery stores.
The Medicaid expansion has helped
create more health care jobs in the re-
gion, and there have been efforts to ex-
pand tourism, Bailey said.
Despite some progress, “We just
don’t have enough jobs for the number
of people who are here,” said Jared Ar-
nett, executive director of Shaping Our
Appalachian Region, a nonprofit formed
in 2013 to coordinate economic develop-
ment.
U.S. Rep. Hal Rogers, R-Ky., has spon-
sored a bill that would provide $100 mil-
lion to Kentucky for cleanups of aban-
doned mine lands to add jobs and spur
development, but it hasn’t passed Con-
gress.Jason Lawson, from right, kneels deep in thought as wife Samantha Lawson and
son Dustin Caudill try to figure out what they will do about their furniture being
repossessed after Jason’s work and pay was frozen by the Blackjewel coal
company. PHOTOS BY ALTON STRUPP/USA TODAY NETWORKDon’s Super Saver, a family owned
grocery store in Harlan, Ky., cashed
more than $93,000 in miners’ checks
that ended up being returned for
insufficient funds after Blackjewel’s
accounts were frozen.CoalContinued from Page 1BOver a longer time frame – 50 years –
August is the third weakest month for
stocks behind September and June.
September often spells trouble because
investment fund managers do even
more unloading of bad stocks and bull
markets tend to run out of steam, the
analysts say.
The good news is that a bull market
usually recovers from the August dol-
drums. Since 1928, when the S&P 500 is
up through July, it averages a 4% gain
the rest of the year, according to Be-
spoke, a good sign for this year’s gener-
ally strong advances so far. When the
broad index is down through July, it
slips another 1.73% the rest of the year.
But Detrick says it’s too early for in-
vestors to view the recent fall as a buy-
ing opportunity because there’s likely
more volatility to come. “We don’t think
it’s over quite yet,” he says.
Typically, August starts off with a de-
cline and levels off after a week or so, ac-
cording to a Bespoke analysis. That may
be staying true to form, with Thursday’s
371-point jump. But since 2009, the lat-
ter part of the month has brought more
turbulence. The U.S. trade war with Chi-
na and the slowing global economy are
likely to continue to rile stocks, Detrick
says.But by later this year, he expects at
least some kind of truce in the trade
fight.So far this month, the Standard &
Poor’s 500 index had dipped 1.4%, and
the Dow Jones industrial average has
slipped 1.8%, even after the Dow
erased a 589-point drop Wednesday
and surged 371 points Thursday. Yet
while the S&P 500 is down from its all-
time high, it’s still up 17.1% for the year.
That means if you invested
$100,000 in an S&P index fund at the
start if the year, it would be worth
around $117,100 today, down from a
peak of about $120,700 on July 26.
Since 2009, the S&P 500 has aver-
aged a 0.78% loss in August, making it
the worst-performing month during
the 10-year period, according to LPL. A
big reason, the firm notes, is that tu-
multuous events have occurred in Au-
gust. Among them: Iraq’s invasion of
Kuwait in 1990; the Asian financial cri-
sis in 1997; the Russian debt crisis and
Long-Term Capital Management col-
lapse in 1998; the U.S. credit rating
downgrade in 2011; and the Chinese
currency crisis in 2015.
“There’s no larger reason why ran-
dom events happen in August but they
seem to,” Detrick says.But bad luck isn’t the only factor. “We
tend to do different things in the sum-
mer,” says Jeffrey Hirsch, editor of the
Stock Trader’s Almanac. “There’s less
trading and less activity in the market.”
As a result, when Wall Street pros sell
stocks, there are fewer buyers around to
limit the drop in prices, says Paul Hick-
ey, co-founder of Bespoke Investment
Group. That’s the case even when no
major news events are roiling markets,
Hirsch says.
When global shocks do happen, “It
can make a bad situation even worse”
by exaggerating any sell-off, Hickey
says.
Other forces may also be at work. In-
vestment fund managers often start
selling poorly performing stocks in the
third quarter as they start trying to bol-
ster their overall results for the year,
Hirsch says.
And a market that has performed
strongly the first half of the year, as it
has in 2019, is often due for a pullback by
August, Detrick says. Since 1983, in the
13 years when the S&P 500 was up at
least 10% the first seven months of the
year, it averaged a 0.89% slide in Au-
gust, according to Bespoke. By contrast,
when the broad stock index turned in a
smaller gain or a loss through July, it
notched a smaller loss or a gain in Au-
gust.MarketContinued from Page 1B