Ablogination

Democracy Now and Amy Goodman have a startling piece about how the Bush Regime and it's minions are about to fuck over the Mountain people yet again by eliminating regulations restricting coal companies in Appalachia. This is nothing short of an attempt on all of our lives.

From the Amy Goodman interview with Appalachian activist Vernon Haltom of the Coal River Mountain Watch...

"The Bush administration is poised to issue regulations today that would legalize and expand the controversial coal mining practice known as mountaintop removal. The technique involves blasting off the tops of mountains and dumping the rubble into valleys and streams.

The regulation was drafted by the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement. If enacted, coal operators would be exempt from a 1983 law that prohibits surface coal mining activities from disturbing areas within 100 feet of streams."

Dumping coal waste into water systems is illegal for a reason.

The coal industry has used the explosive equivalent (474,000 metric tons) of 27 Hiroshima bombs on the Appalachian area as it is.

The Bush Regime is now going to allow them to further deregulate by abolishing the 20 year-old requirement that mines need to get a variance (permission) to dump their waste within 100 feet of rivers. Already this rule is regularly ignored to the point where over 1200 miles of river have been poisoned, and 700 miles have been basically buried.

The Bush Regime is proposing abolishing the rules completely and allowing "valley fills". In essence, they clear-cut all the trees off the top of a mountain, bury or burn the timber, blow the top of a mountain off, then dump the top of the mountain into the valley, thus devastating twice as much nature as they're killing now.

The coal industry will probably use the deaths of the coal miners in Utah as a way to obliterate what's left of Appalachia citing the lie that mountaintop removal is "safer" than underground mining. That is simply a lie.

Underground mining PROPERLY REGULATED for safety, is safer for workers and the surrounding area than topping is. Underground mining provides more jobs and impacts surrounding areas less, but topping is cheaper. They can function with fewer workers and they can make erroneous claims such as the coal sickness that surrounding residents are suffering from comes from some other factor, letting them die slowly, while the company profits... Or quickly if one of their coal slurries collapses and buries a community as it did in one of the worst environmental disasters in American history, the Massey Energy Company Coal Slurry Spill in 2000.
That spill sent 300 million gallons of coal slurry (toxic black goop) cascading down onto people's property in Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia. The slurry contained hazardous chemicals including arsenic and mercury, and polluted 100 miles of stream. It killed everything in the water, all the way to the Ohio River.

And what is interesting about that spill is its relationship to the current head of the National Mine Health and Safety Academy, the coal industry shill and Bush recess appointment, Richard Stickler, who himself ran mines with shit safety records and shoulders much of the responsibility for the recent Utah Mine disaster.
Stickler had to be a recess appointment for Bush because even a then Republican dominated congress wouldn't approve his appointment.

The Bush Regime attempted to cover up the spill by interfering with the investigation of the disaster. Massey Energy and CEO Don Blankenship are BIG donors to the GOP. Ultimately Massey was only fined $110,000 in fines for a spill 25 times the size of the Exxon Valdez spill. In contrast, Exxon was fined $5 billion dollars for the Valdez incident, a drop in the bucket fine for all the damage they caused and this was 25 times bigger.

The man who blew the whistle on the Massey Energy Company Coal Slurry Spill was Richard Stickler's predecessor, Jack Spadaro The FORMER head of the National Mine Health and Safety Academy. After he revealed the problem, the Bush Administration illegally fired him and replaced him with a compliant industry hack the Bush Administration was confident would not enforce all those silly safety regulations.

Stickler didn't enforce them. And people died. And now they're trying to use those deaths to put even more people at risk.

These people are not just liars. They are MURDERERS.

More from the interview...

VERNON HALTOM: The political leadership in Appalachia is owned and operated by the coal industry. I’ll just say that straight up. In West Virginia, very, very few of our legislators are willing to take a stand, because the industry has so much money and they put so much into political campaigns and propaganda.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you name the companies that benefit?

VERNON HALTOM: Hello?

AMY GOODMAN: Can you name the companies that benefit?

VERNON HALTOM: Companies that benefit, you have Massey Energy, you have Arch Coal. Most of these companies, or at least a large number of them, are headquartered outside the state. The companies benefit, the politicians benefit, and the people suffer.

AMY GOODMAN: We're going to leave it there, but I want to thank you for being with us. We'll continue to follow this story. Vernon Haltom is co-director of the Coal River Mountain Watch, an Appalachian grassroots organization, as the Bush administration issues today regulations that will expand the coal mining practice known as mountaintop removal.

"we're treated like a Third World resource colony."
-Vernon Haltom

Massey and Arch aren't the only ones. Here, White's Creek Journal talks about Daniel Roling, the CEO of National Coal....

His employment contract is on file in Knoxville, TN and lists a very nice compensation package for Dan.
In addition to money and stock and a killer severance package, Dan and his family get health insurance...Good health insurance.
Now here is a map for you to think about. Dan and his company have a lot to do with this map. It is the power plant distribution of nasty little bits of coal ash that can go in your lungs and the lungs of your children and never come back out.
More importantly, the nasty little bits of coal ash kill about 30,000 people a year...slowly, as they suck on a little plastic tube connected to an oxygen bottle, if they are older...Or if they are younger, they carry a steroid inhaler around with them every day so that, when the airways in their lungs close up in the bodies defense mechanism that tries to keep us from breahing those nasty little bits of coal ash, the steroid inhaler will enable them to breathe again and not feel like they are suffocating.

They're killing us. For nothing more than a quick profit. These murderers have to be stopped, one way or another, they have to be stopped.
Who are we, Appalachia? Are we insects to be exterminated at the behest of George Bush, the Republican party and the mining industry?
Our children? What of the health hazards they will face growing up around valleys and rivers full of Slurry?

What do we do when our children's lives are threatened? All of our politicians are in the pockets of the coal mining industry. We have to elect someone that's not. Someone who is more likely to stop these murderers from harming any more of us. No Republican will stop this. Hillary Clinton damn sure won't stop it, she's in with them too. Let's face it, only another Southerner is going to care about us enough to help. A Southern Democrat with a history of fighting big corporations on behalf of average Americans and winning.

Either that, or we will have no choice but to take matters into our own hands.

Support the efforts of Vernon Haltom and Coal River Mountain Watch. Perhaps our final recourse won't be needed.

A special thanx to our good friend "5by5" at RRMB for his major (damn near wrote the whole thing) contribution to this installment and concern for our wellbeing.