Same as it ever was

I got to go see this brilliant woman speak live and in person last night:
Her name is Vandana Shiva and you can read more about her by clicking here. I was going to write a post about my thoughts on some of what she said but when we got home I heard about the coal mine disaster in West Virginia and since Ms. Shiva talked about mining in her lecture tonight, I'm going to do the same.

The words 'coal mining disaster' and 'West Virginia' go together like 'ketchup and mustard' and 'salt and pepper.' You can't have one without the other and if you had to describe what coal mining has done to West Virginia, then you can't go wrong with using the word 'disaster.' Coal mining has been an unmitigated disaster for the residents of West Virginia since the first day the dug that black stuff out of the ground.

They, the coal companies and their lap dogs in business and industry, have told us and told us that West Virgina is rich with coal. They like to tout the made up factoid that West Virginia is the Saudi Arabia of coal. What they like to hide though is that it's like Saudi Arabia in that only a very few people make any money off coal and that the vast majority of it's citizens are energy slaves for a wider market. And just like in Saudi Arabia they use religion to justify their actions in raping the earth and exploiting the workers who mine the coal and their families too. They say God gave us dominion over the earth and that when Jesus comes back he'll be mad if we didn't use all the stuff his daddy hid under ground. It's God's will that big energy companies mine the coal, exploit the workers, ruin the mountains, and make huge profits that hardly ever see any taxation in the process.

Government in West Virginia is as guilty as the coal companies, chief among them is Massey Energy, which is headed up by the most venal amoral snake American business has ever produced, Don Blankenship, in keeping the workers down and of ruining the land, sky, and waterways of West Virgina. They are owned lock, stock, and barrel by the coal companies and the banks who love to invest in them. Senator Jay Rockefeller ran for Governor of WV back in the 1970's and he ran on an anti strip mining platform. When he lost he decided to stop running against the coal companies and to embrace them. As if by magic he got elected to the US Senate the next time he ran for public office. And he's stood beside them right up to this present day, as has the old KKK member Sen. Byrd. You can't win statewide office in WV and be anti coal.

But what has coal brought the citizens of WV? It's brought death, either by black lung disease, which you get from years of inhaling mine dust which smothers you to death slowly, or cancer. It's brought low wages and no benefits for the miners. Sure, at one time the United Mine Workers was strong and most of the miners were protected but Blankenship and his boys broke the union and stole the gains the workers had made over all those years. It's brought an environmental disaster to the state and soon it will spread to all states that border it due to the polluting of the ground water due to mountain top removal mining.

In her talk tonight Ms. Shiva, who is a marvelous and warm woman who overflows with intelligence and common sense, said the most important places inside of mountains are the places where fossil fuels are not and those are the places we need to be saving. Mountains provide us all with soil, water, and vegetation that drives our world, ripping them apart to get the coal, gas, oil, gold, or silver, out of them does nothing but benefit a few greedy people. Mining ruins our planet and keeps us locked into this consumption/fossil fuel death spiral we're currently locked into now.

Ms. Shiva and the women from her village stood up to the mining companies in her home area in India and they got an end to mining in the mountains where they lived. The mining companies cried that they were stopping progress, but she made the Indian Supreme Court see that real progress was not made through mining which ruins things but instead was made through conservation and natural farming. And that's what we need to do in West Virginia. The technology exists today for energy producing solar panels to go up on every home, church, business, and government building in this country and each one of those panels could be producing energy that flows into the local power grid thereby reducing our dependence on the burning of dirty coal. But Don Blankenship and his cronies won't make a fucking dime off of a solar panel on your house or mine and he pays lobbyists a lot of money to keep his business going, politicians in his pockets, and those panels off our houses.

And he does it so he can line his greasy greedy pockets with our hard earned cash.

And more miners will die because he's allowed to keep his coal operations going.

And the citizens and landscape of West Virginia will be raped and ruined as long as he's allowed to keep his coal operations going.

Until we're ready to think differently and get the idea that we've got to keep energy cheap so that we can build more Wal-Marts so we can buy more cheap shit made in China, then the Don Blankenships of this world will continue to rape working families, the state of West Virginia, and our world.

Me, I'd rather live in a world where Vandana Shiva holds more sway than an asshole like Don Blankenship does.