How easy to be cynical on this Labor Day, and declare it a day that will live in infamy for coal miners and coalfield residents and green job advocates across the nation.
But thanks to United Mine workers like Terry Steele, and West Virginia military veterans like Chris Carey, and green job advocates like Van Jones and Eric Mathis in Mingo County, Labor Day remains a hopeful reminder of the resiliency and epic campaigns by coalfield residents for economic and environmental justice.
Less than 48 hours after a bizarre witch-hunt by right-wing Fox News commentator Glenn Beck brought down our nation's hardest-working and respected green jobs advocate, Van Jones, Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship will host an equally bizarre Labor Day spectacle -- or Don-A-Pullute-Za, as West Virginia Blue activists say--in the name of union-busted jobs and climate-change denial in Logan County, West Virginia.
Keep in mind: Verizon Wireless is not only a defiant sponsor of Massey's mountaintop removal-climate change-denying carnival, but now says Verizon Wireless didn't pull its ads on Glenn Beck as reported. UPDATED: Over 40 organizations, representing millions of Americans, have called on Verizon Wireless to withdraw its support.
Coal miners -- and coalfield residents around the country -- have lost one of their greatest advocates in Van Jones; and coal miners, in the hands of Big Coal and Massey Energy's mountaintop removal operations, will continue to lose their jobs, livelihoods and communities.
Not for the first time. Eighty-year years ago this same weekend, brave World War I veterans and coal miners endured bombings by hired coal company thugs to march on and liberate the same Logan County residents in West Virginia from the stranglehold of union-denying Big Coal. The Battle of Blair Mountain was the largest armed insurrection since the Civil War--and today its hallowed ridges are once again threatened by destruction, mountaintop removal.
Do Fox News' Sean Hannity and Ted Nugent, the speakers for today's Massey gathering, know the level of Big Coal ruthlessness that forced thousands of armed miners to march for union rights along the very roads they drove today? Do Hannity and Nugent know the despair and lack of economic development due to the same stranglehold of Big Coal on the coalfields today?
Heroic UMWA coal miner Terry Steele understands the importance of Blair Mountain, and the shared fate of coalfield residents. Yesterday, he wrote:
"What the UMWA had better realize is that some of its strongest union men are fighting with the environmentalists against MTR. These miners, like this writer, have lived and worked all their lives in W.Va. We have watched the deep mines close; MTR mines take our jobs, our land and our union. More recently, we watched the muddy flood waters pour off these sites, as it took roads and homes. Just a few MTR mines chained the union to the real enemy.
There are only two sides to this issue. On the right is Don standing at Logan, wrapped in the pretense of American freedom, with his bought judges, DEP agents and many misled souls. Don stands with promises of jobs and security. In one hand, is a new mining permit, and in the other is dynamite. In his heart and mind is power to put down the UMWA, the environmentalist, and to mine coal his way: nonunion, unregulated, any way he wants!"
In truth, despite Massey's anti-environmental rants and climate-change-denying manifestos, more jobs have been lost or subjected to the whims of the volatile energy market, super mechanization, including the often overlooked bane of longwall mining in the northern panhandle, and mountaintop removal than any environmental regulations.
Two brave security guards hired last week at a Massey Energy mountaintop removal site understand this reality. In the tradition of courageous Blair Mountain war veterans and Appalachian natives, Navy veteran Chris Carey and Patrick Curry walked off the Massey site last week after being offended by the brutal harassment and lawlessness of Massey thugs against two nonviolent tree-sitters, who sought to protect local coalfield residents from reckless blasting, fly rock, silica dust and mountain devastation.
In a rare interview, Carey and Curry delivered an insightful analysis of the stranglehold of Massey on the region:
When Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship was born in 1950, 130,000 West Virginians worked in the coal mines. Today, roughly 20,000 actual coal miners saddle up on heavy equipment to strip mine the ridges, or head into the underground mines.
In Blankenship's native Pike County in eastern Kentucky, nearly 50 percent of the coal mining jobs have been eliminated over the past 25 years, thanks in large part to highly mechanized strip mining. Here's a chart:
Not that Massey has lost any profits. During their 4th quarter 2008 Earnings Call last spring, Massey Energy executives crowed that "2008 was a very exciting and successful year for Massey, by many measures, the most successful in our history." Massey turned a $20 million profit in its last quarter in 2009.
And yet, these are the headlines from Massey:
Massey Energy Black Castle Mine, 300 Affected: Due to Market Conditions
Massey Pays Largest Settlement in Coal Industry History: Massey Pays $4.2 million for miners deaths
Massey Cited in Miner's Fatal Conveyor Belt Fall
Massey Energy to Pay Largest Civil Penalty Ever for Water Permit
Is this world of Massey violations that future for coalfield residents?
Even Big Coal's biggest supporter, Rep. Nick Rahall (D-WV), recently noted that "the state's most productive coal seams likely will be exhausted in 20 years. And while coal will remain an important part of the economy, the state should emphasize green job development."
Unlike Don Blankenship, Van Jones and West Virginia-based green jobs advocate Eric Mathis not only understand and respect the rights of coal miners, but they also have a plan for a sustainable economy and future for coalfield residents.
Jones told an interviewer in 2008:
"I think it's important that we be respectful of all the contributions that have been made by all workers. Even our coal workers are heros in a way... in that they've been asked to sacrifice their lungs, their health, their communities. We're now asking our coal miners to blow up their grandmother's mountains! Awful... Mountain top removal and strip-mining... Those coal miners don't set the energy policy in this country but they have to make the sacrifices to carry it out. I think that sometimes we aren't respectful enough, that we're not as encouraging and honoring of the people who have gotten America to this point."
Update: And, of course, we honor our modern-day redneck activists, Nick Stocks and Laura Steepleton, along with all of the coalfield residents and activists working for a sustainable Appalachia.
I invite you to test you realist tendencies and anyone else for that matter. Please join us for our wind tour the second Saturday of October where we will visit a working example of what a community owned wind farm may look like (they vary from project to project). Mountaineer wind farm is partially owned by a local farmer who does not lease the land to outside companies but who participates in making a profit from the revenue generated from the farm.
We may also visit a biomass facility, which operates in the same manner that a coal fired power plant does except that it uses wood instead of coal.
I am unsure what you mean by communes? I myself am not a hippie or a communist. As far as living off the land, I assure you that we are in no way associated with the "back to landers" movement or any other movement that would strip us of modern luxuries. I have to say, I enjoy hot water and my computer way too much.
Please feel free to email me at thejobsproject@gmail.com if you would like to participate.
Good question though...
Perhaps Milton Friedman said it best when he stated that:
1- "The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government."
And,
2- "Economic freedom is simply a requisite for political freedom. By enabling people to cooperate with one another without coercion or central direction it reduces the area over which political power is exercised"
I cannot speak for Jones but I can speak for myself. You stated: "communist inspired community energy concept needs to be banished... The concept has been dismissed by even those that have tried it."
I AM IN NO WAY INSPIRED BY ANY SOCIALISTS AND/OR COMMUNIST AGENDA REGARDLESS OF MY ASSOCIATIONS IN THE MEDIA.. I am working with an array of community developers, venture capitalists, community organizations and many others in order to stimulate a free-market within the coalfields of Appalachia. This simply does not exists. The community-owned models have been proven time and time again throughout history . In fact, it is the birth place of the very innovation that has brought human civilization to where it is today (source: Fernand Braudel).
Pointedly, the JOBS Project is for the free-market. Not the Orwellian nightmare that it is today which is riddled with its own double speak. A version which promotes, oligopolies, monopolies, and a monolithic "Washington consensus" all of which is turning our forefather's dream of a democratic government into a corporate nightmare.
In response to being duped. We have all been duped into believing both a liberal and conservative agenda of free-market capitalism. Even Don Blankenship himself stated earlier today at the "Friends of America Rally" that this was an essential problem of our government albeit Massey functions locally in the same manner that a strong centralized government would nationally - as a monopoly.
I completely agree that green jobs is not the way, at least for myself. The JOBS project has time and time again, been associated with this "green" movement. This is simply not the case as the "green" movement, as it is called, claims to be for the betterment of society and more importantly, America. The JOBS project is about being smart. This means smart-growth, smart-markets, smart-schools, smart-technology, and perhaps most importantly, smart-solutions. Smart means sustainable jobs that will endure the boom and bust realities of any market. This is the fundamental problem that we are trying to resolve, not transitioning completely away form coal.
The problem, as I see it, is the fact that the majority of Appalachian coal communities are dependent upon one primary resource for sustaining their economy, in this case it is the coal industry. This is our fundamental goal: to diversify these communities while stimulating as much community participation as possible. This simply stimulates more technological innovation and more importantly, Democracy!
Anti-coal attitude of environmental elitist are driving Appalachia into a depression. The lame efforts by those proposing windmills capable of producing the economic equivalent of the coal industry need to be stopped. Their efforts exist only as means of poising the illusion of an alternative to those calm the conscious of those gullible enough to believe that coal is the sources of all evil. Innocent stooges like Erik Mathis have been duped into believing they are doing something good. The only thing green about "Green Jobs" is the color of the unemployment welfare checks we will all need once all the coal jobs are gone.
In addition, Jones' fixation with the communist inspired community energy concept needs to be banished along with his name plate. The concept has been dismissed by even those that have tried it.
The UMWA position is inexplicable. They traded MSHA for support of Cap and Trade. Cap and Trade is nothing more than a repackaged 1990's BTU tax resurrected as part of a climate change scare. Climate change is a constant. It will continue to change. To think that we can affect a system as large and complex as the earth's weather when we cannot even predict the weather next week is the ultimate conceit.
If the rest of the country doesn't want their lights to work - fine - return to the wale oil and wood used before a few Hill Billy's showed the world how to use coal, oil and natural gas.
What about the two treesitters Nick Stocks and Laura Steepleton, who by sitting in a tree barey three hundred feet form the blasting zone, held off Massy Energy's dynamite crew for over a week? There has still not been any blasting in Pettry Bottom since the came down, and it is quiet there for the first time this year.
They wore their red bandannas in honor of the Blair Mountain strikers and I believe we should salute them as well today.