I'm not certain if the report about the coal industry's latest toxic spill in West Virginia heading downstream towards Cincinnati is true or not, but I do know that when Compton educator Roland Charest saw the photo above, he could be heard saying, "I wouldn't be drinking anything that came out of those taps for at least a year."
Imagine Freedom Industries with a charter to operate on the Moon!
Most West Virginians never seem to learn any lessons about the natural resource exploitation companies that hold absolute power in their state. Their bottom lines-- the only priority they care about-- trump the well-being of the rest of society. That simple. It's why healthy societies protect themselves from predators with regulations and effective government.
"Career-long tool of the mining industry" Shelley Moore Capitoby KenAs I've mentioned, I sometimes get my best insight into the minds, such as they are, of the far-far-far-right-wingers from the merely far-right-wingers. (Wasn't it Freud who said, "It takes one to know one"?) By now it's no surprise to hear the MFRWs tsk-tsk-ing the FFFRWs.
A couple of weeks ago the Charleston Daily Mail speculated that if West Virginia Secretary of State Natalie Tennant enters the race for the open Senate seat, the Democrats will have a chance to hold onto it. Citing a telephone survey, they said Republican Shelley Moore Capito got the thumbs up from 45% of the voters and Tennant from 40% (which is within the margin of error), with 15% unsure.
Conservative Democrat Joe Manchin is very popular in West Virginia and he is widely associated with the state's coal mining industry, not necessarily with the coal miners and their families, but with the coal mine owners and managers. When Cecil Roberts, United Mine Workers president, in the video above, yells, "They tried to bamboozle us, they tried to rob us, they tried to steal from us.," no one could have mistaken him for the state's junior senator.
