The Register-Herald, Beckley, West Virginia

Our Readers Speak

July 20, 2009

Our Readers Speak - July 21, 2009

Companies exploit; legislators turn backs



Now I know what’s behind the Bilderberg and Trilateralist call for a one world government. It’s the exploitation of the human condition: cheap labor and cheap wages.

Coal River is booming with different nationalities and the coal companies are bringing them in by the scores. The bosses of the labor gangs don’t take a cut in pay (everyone in the house has a horse and a four-wheeler) but the men doing the work sure do. The relationship of company and employee around here is much like that in the Bill Withers song: “Just keep on using me ’cause I sure am using you to do the things you do.”

It seems to me that a little union organizing is needed on Coal River but the consumer goods-hugging wives of coal miners would never stand for that. Being a union miner might bring a little order into the life of the wild mountaintop miner seen on the Internet at http://www.youtube.com/watchtv+Gje7Jg_gMyo.

This area has never been adequately represented in Charleston or in Washington. Nick Rahall comes back to Raleigh County now and then, but he never gets any further than Beckley where he reads to the school children at Hollywood or Maxwell Hill. He doesn’t tour mountaintop removal sites and he doesn’t get himself a dipperful of water out of the creek to show how beautiful and safe both things are.

Sen. John D. Rockefeller even supplied us with the name Mountaintop Removal in a March 2, 1977, speech: “‘mountaintop removal’ and ‘controlled placement’ (which must be valley fills) should certainly be encouraged, if not specifically dictated, by proposed legislation.” Rockefeller ran for governor in 1972 on an anti-strip campaign and was soundly defeated. He ran for governor again in 1976 but this time as a dedicated stripper (These are my principles and, if you don’t like them, I’ve got others — Groucho Marx).

How come we’ve got poor, or marginally poor, people here when this is one of the richest areas in terms of natural resources in the state? How come?

How come we’ve got to buy bottled water to drink when we’ve got so much free-flowing water? How come?

How come the FBI and the Justice Department were called in when the black cemetery near Chicago was decimated but nothing is done, not a word said, when mountaintop miners run a bulldozer through an ancestral Appalachian graveyard or a gigantic shot is let off and blows someone’s casket and bones hither and yon? How come?



Richard A. Bradford

Edwight

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