While Big Coal continues to bankroll the largest public relations campaign of "clean coal" denial in recent history, former US Representative and historian Ken Hechler has issued an urgent wake up call to Greens and liberal Democrats: Tragic lessons in history remind us that the coal crisis and its deniers call for more hellraisers, not compromise.
This is the truth: While Democrats in Washington, DC tie themselves into knots over regulatory inaction and Big Coal slogans, it takes a 94-year-old hellraiser to sound the alarm on the most overlooked environmental and human rights violations today.
Big Coal must be confronted, not coddled.
As one of our nation's liberal titans, Hechler understands the Democratic Party's vexing relationship with Big Coal and its 150 years of denial of the true cost of coal. While black lung was first diagnosed in 1831, it took Hechler's congressional leadership to pass federal legislation to deal with its ravages in 1969. Though scientists recognized the deleterious impact of sulfur dioxide emissions as early as the 1860s, it took an aggressive grassroots movement to pass the Clean Air Act of 1990 to overcome the denial of acid rain, which had scorched the forests from the Appalachians to Canada.
Hechler is no stranger to history and its crises. As a military officer in World War II, Hechler interrogated Nazi war criminals; as a history professor and author, he assisted Franklin D. Roosevelt with his 13-volume public papers. As a US Representative from West Virginia, Hechler was the only member in Congress to march with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at Selma, Alabama in 1965.
And this June, the 94-year-old coalfield hero took to the streets to stand up to the bankrolled wrath of union-busting Big Coal thugs and joined a protest at Marsh Fork Elementary in the Coal River Valley of West Virginia, where school children must play amid toxic coal dust and sit under the horrific reality of a 2.8 billion gallon lake of coal sludge as federally sanctioned mountaintop removal blasting takes place nearby.
Ken Hechler deserves a Medal of Freedom.
In truth, he would settle for a new generation of hellraisers to dislodge the Democrats and the nation from its indifference to the devastation of mountaintop removal mining, which has left his state of West Virginia in economic and environmental ruin.
In a commentary last month in the Charleston Gazette, Hechler wrote:
"I used to be an agitator, then an activist. Now I am a hellraiser. At the age of 94, and 95 in September, there's not enough time left.
It began rather suddenly on Oct. 21, 1966. Far off across the Atlantic in the little country of Wales, something happened which seared my conscience. In the little town of Aberfan, a joyful group of over 100 elementary school students in their morning assembly enthusiastically sang "All Things Bright and Beautiful."
Shortly after 9 a.m. a deafening roar resounded just after the assembly. Some of the teachers thought it sounded like a jet plane about to crash into the school. They hurried the students underneath their desks.
There had been a heavy rain the night before. On the mountain above the school a huge collection of coal refuse or "gob" suddenly broke loose. A 40-foot-deep mass of sludge roared down the mountain and crashed headlong into the school. More than 100 little students were entombed along with most of their teachers. They didn't have a chance.
Including adults in Aberfan, 144 lives were snuffled out that day. Less than a year later, just after the Fourth of July, 1967, I began getting phone calls from my friends along Buffalo Creek and other sections of Logan County which I represented in Congress, urging me to come down and see all the damage being done by mudslides of sludge after downpours over the holiday.
What I saw, particularly along Buffalo Creek, horrified me. I telephoned Gov. Hulett Smith and urged him to assemble a team of officials to see for themselves the danger confronting the residents, and to figure out what remedial measures were necessary to save people's lives. I had the disaster at Aberfan very much on my mind.
Gov. Smith said he would ask Finance Commissioner Truman Gore and officials of the State Road Commission and Department of Natural Resources to be ready for a call from me. I also asked two representatives on the Army Corps of Engineers to join the group of state officials to drive down to Buffalo Creek and other threatened areas of Logan County the following morning.
It was raining the next morning, but the officials all showed up. I also asked the local head of Island Creek Coal Co., Richard Herron, to come along, since one of the trouble spots was at Proctor Hollow near Amherstdale on Buffalo Creek.
News reporters from the Logan Banner, The Charleston Gazette and The Herald-Dispatch in Huntington ran accounts of our 1967 warning. But nothing was done -- and five years later, 125 people were killed in the historic Buffalo Creek gob pile dam collapse.
That's why 30 of us were arrested on June 23 this year for protesting the sludge pond that hangs like a Sword of Damocles a few hundred yards up the mountain above Marsh Fork Elementary School in Raleigh County. With 2.8 billion gallons of sludge close to the blasting of mountaintop removal nearby, is it any wonder that I think about Aberfan?"
Here's an interview from the protest:
It took a disaster in 1968 to finally convince President Richard Nixon and the US Congress to act on black lung disease--which still kills three coal miners daily.
Here's a clip on Hechler's heroic role in that crisis:
Earlier this summer, Hechler, as the most knowledgeable person on the complexities of the coalfields, issued a call to President Obama for a "Harry S. Truman moment":
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-biggers/rep-hechler-to-president_b_211996.html
What is it going to take to get President Barack Obama and the US Congress to stop mountaintop removal?
Answer: More hellraisers.
Yes, we need to form a viable third party. that is our, only, hope. The Green Party must get serious and clear out insincere members. Some are halting progress. Arkansas "politicos" are trying to get the Green Party off the ballot for the next election, I've just heard. The Green Party has done so well in other countries, but I don't think, the Green Party,US makes sure that all of its "managing" members are fully dedicated to "Green" principles. It will take mostly young people to do this battle; because it will take many years and much energy, but I have given up on the "Democratic" Party. I am old and can't be an organizer. If I were young, I would be active in this battle, but I am maintaining a web site for information: http://www.informationsources.us.
"A man who hasn't found something he is willing to die for is not fit to live." MLK
We know that THEY are scared, but are we?
There is no such thing as clean coal !!!!!
The Big Biz Mafia in this country is determined to drag the rest of us back to the obscene practices (business and religious, among others) of the 1800s -- when the robber-barron biz model was so "fashionable" and accepted, even expected!
That's why so many jobs are disappearing to cheaper overseas locations . . . and salaries for those that remain are shrinking -- along with benefits (if you can call them that) . . . and the reichwingers are yelling and screaming about "less government" -- which is just fascist jibberish for NO government at all!
What they'd really like to see, is the US turning into something resembling Mexico or Zimbabwe, where citizens are commodities just like natural resources -- to be exploited and disposed of at the whim of the corporate aristocracy . . . and when conditions are ripe for economic chaos and dissent is rampant, it just makes their coup d'etat that much easier to pull off.
Doubt it? Just watch what happens next. They are determined in their goals
It is a great disappointment that the Obama administration is incapable of action on the very core issues which swept them into office. The destruction of the Appalachian mountains and it's people for the extraction of coal is an issue which could provide the administration with a legitimate triumph for the economy, the environment, and the citizens of this nation who live in the region. It is the great American tragedy and to many absolutely unconscionable.
Whereas many of his supporters believed Barak Obama as a candidate offered a change - a statesman with vision and integrity - it would seem what we got was yet another politician who talked the talk.
President Obama, Secretary Jackson at the EPA, and Secretary Salazar at DOI, should personally visit Appalachia, meet the people who are suffering from economic oppression and whose homes, health, and safety are all being sacrificed to destroy the oldest mountain range on this planet for the sake of short term profits.
And then they should appologize for not acting sooner.
Sen. Bernie Sanders was on Rachel Maddow's show last night, and he advocated for a Progressive media voice, like the reichwingers have on Foxsnooze, to counter the fascist filth that's being spewed out in the public forum.
I think he's hit on the problem.
No one can hear the sane point of view any longer, b/c the MSM has been effectively bullied and muzzled to discuss only the extreme far right agenda -- and by their rules, too!
We fought the Nazis in WWII and beat them . . . only to lose the peace and let them co-opt our political system.
The intelligensia will be one of the first groups to go to the detention camps . . . and eventually the ovens . . .
Read your history.
It is worse than that. My husband is a geologist. When I told him I was going to do something about this politically, things got ugly in my life. I think he was put under a lot of 'political' pressure in an effort to stop me or slow me down.
If they insist on creating hazards like gob ponds, that we all know sooner or later are going to kill those children, they are not going to hold back on interfering in the lives of a few activists. Killing us just won't bother them.
Who would be so murderous?
Well I just started reading Jeff Sharlet's book, "the Family" in hopes of finding out. He is my new hero, I am soooooo glad he wrote that book. Thank you, Jeff!
Look at the mountaintop removal issue: WV Rep. Nick Rahall encourages and promotes the destruction of his own congressional district by coal companies, and does nothing as the people of his district are poisoned by water contaminated with coal slurry.
Thanks for recognizing the heroism of Ken Hechler.