Anne Lewis : Corporate Crime Scene in West, Texas

Putting on the makeup. Television reporter on the scene at the fertilizer plant explosion in West Texas, Thursday, April 18, 2013. Photo by Patrick Bresnan / The Rag Blog.

Getting the picture:
Corporate crime scene in West, Texas

How do we avoid the news story framework that gives us nothing but heroes and victims when tragedy strikes? How can those narratives, as seductive as they may be, possibly move us towards an honest search for the truth?

By Anne Lewis / The Rag Blog / April 30, 2013

See a gallery of photos by Patrick Bresnan, Below.

AUSTIN -- This is about the fertilizer explosion in West, Texas, on the night of April 17, 2013. It’s also about Patrick Bresnan who found himself in West on the night of the explosion and his photographs in the aftermath of the tragedy.

Governor Perry called it a crime scene; the progressive community says, yes, corporate crime. Neither the paranoid fantasy of Governor Perry who is stuck in an ideology that says that companies can do no wrong, nor the abstract politics of progressives blaming the state’s lack of regulation -- “We shouldn’t produce fertilizer anyway because it’s not good for the planet,” I overheard in a coffee shop -- seem to get at any real truth.

I ask myself the question: how one can be kind and dignified in the face of such sorrow and loss? I try to collect myself and cannot help but think about the Central Appalachian coalfields.

The dangers of coal mining both for the environment and the workers permeated my senses. I was married to an underground coal miner. I knew not to have an argument before he went to work. He might not come back. And we would patch things up, even when we shouldn’t have.

Time slowed in the hour that I expected him to come home. The most intimate relationship was distorted by the fear of injury and death. Then Rocky Peck, a young miner with a wife and daughter who wrote the song that ended my film about the Massey strike, was killed in a non-union mine three years after the strike was lost and the film was completed.

I saw raw footage of mining disasters -- family members waiting for loved ones who would not come out alive, calling to God for comfort, the exhausted children. I heard statements of attempted compassion by local mine managers who opened their offices to suffering families but protected the absent company, denying information and economic aid and never accepting guilt by apologizing.

I remember an eloquent piece by Michael Kline, a radio story with Sarah Koznoski who lost her husband in the Mannington, West Virginia, mine explosion in 1968. Seventy-eight men were buried alive. Michael asked Sarah to describe every moment of the last day with her husband.

That was all. There was no mention of Consolidation Coal Company, still the largest underground mining company in the U.S., or the corrupt United Mine Workers union that said Consolidation was a safe company after the explosion, or the lack of regulation or protection by the government. There was just Sarah’s voice describing an ordinary day with her husband. And it was enough.

Then came the rage. “They didn’t want us to know what was going on in their damn dirty filthy mines,” another of the widows would tell us five years later. Those seven widows, who refused the $10,000 death money from Consolidation Coal Company, organized a response across the coalfields. Coalminers and their communities rose up from the grassroots. They reclaimed their union for the rank and file, and they forced the new laws and regulations that have saved countless lives.

Field of first response. Triage area, West, Texas. Wednesday, April 17, 2013. Photo by Patrick Bresnan/ The Rag Blog.

We have heard none of these things from West -- none of the deep sorrow, none of the purposeful rage, no clear expression of collective purpose -- that this will never happen to other people in another community, especially not to those most loved in any community -- the firefighters and first responders. Perhaps it’s just too soon.

Patrick’s experience in West began the warm evening of the explosion. A European film director had wanted to document the last day of life of a young black man who was next on the Texas execution list. Patrick traveled to Waco to locate the man’s family and ask them to participate in the film. He was using the Internet at Starbucks when he saw a steady stream of ambulances and heard about a huge explosion in a nearby town. He drove to West.

There he found himself stalled in a traffic jam filled with ambulances, emergency responders, police, firefighters, people who had come from as far away as three hundred miles to help. A call had gone out to bring needed wheelchairs to the community center and community people waited to get through, wheelchairs in the backs of pickups.

Some tried to reach relatives in the community center but only the injured and the elderly were allowed in. Patrick described the smell of heavy chemicals and urine. 133 patients had been evacuated from the West Rest Haven Nursing Home and there was no way to help them use the bathroom.

He decided to see if he could get pictures of the fire and drove to the part of town that had been evacuated. He began to walk towards the fire but the air was hot. It was windy and so heavy with chemicals that he was forced to turn around. Patrick returned to his truck, took off his shirt, and went to sleep.

Wednesday morning was cold and rainy. By the time Patrick got back to the community center, most of the firefighters had left. Then a mass of new people descended on the town -- roaming the streets, doing their makeup and practicing their lines out loud, “Live from West, Texas -- a town that will never be the same. This small tightly-knit community,” over and over. Anderson Cooper popped up and Patrick succumbed like many others and took a photograph of himself with Cooper.

Succumbing to the celebrity presence! Photographer Bresnan takes his own picture with CNN's Anderson Cooper. Photo by Patrick Bresnan / The Rag Blog.

Patrick didn’t see reporters doing any kind of research or having serious interviews with local people. They were in West to do their makeup and read a few contrived lines to the camera. At the West Cattle Auction the media appeared to him like a group of animals. Patrick returned a week later to take a few additional pictures and attend the memorial. He told me of a Catholic priest who spoke from the heart about what had happened, but nobody mentioned the fertilizer plant.

At about that time I was on a shuttle bus at the Austin airport coming home from a weekend trip. The Latina shuttle bus driver announced, “Welcome home.” A woman on the bus said that she had no home to return to, that she lived in West. She pulled out a newspaper with before-and-after pictures and pointed to her house which was within the 1,500 foot blast perimeter. She had been at a far off hospital visiting her son who had been shot in Afghanistan when the explosion occurred.

When another woman on the bus asked if the plant was old and dilapidated, the woman said she really didn’t remember. It had always been there. She was just glad that her family had survived. She would go home to look for her missing cat. As she got off the shuttle bus, the driver gave her a big hug and handed her all of her tip money. She said, “Take it” and the woman did.

How do we avoid the news story framework that gives us nothing but heroes and victims when tragedy strikes? How can those narratives, as seductive as they may be, possibly move us towards an honest search for the truth? The patriotic frenzy, the flag waving, the church going and singing of popular songs don’t come close to the pictures of mine disasters that stay in my mind’s eye. Patrick’s pictures, as scattered and spontaneous as they may be, seem to get closer to the truth than endless newspaper images of worship and sorrow.

Media gathered at the West Auction House, West, Texas, Thursday, April 18, 2013. Photo by Patrick Bresnan / The Rag Blog.

Thirteen people worked at the fertilizer plant in West, but we have heard nothing about them. The news talks about a close-knit community with few jobs, but I’m quite sure that many more livelihoods and lives were damaged at the nursing home, apartment complex, and three damaged schools.

Why didn’t the workers at the fertilizer plant complain about the danger they experienced every day at work and the potential disaster that their work imposed on the community? Was it alienation from their own lives, a lack of power over their own safety, a misplaced loyalty or belief in the power of a supposedly benevolent boss?

The plant had 250 tons of ammonium nitrate on site last year -- that’s more than a thousand times the trigger limit for oversight. That deadly factory somehow remained invisible to those who might have intervened.

What about the farmers in this “close knit community”? Surely they were aware of the dangers of the product they purchased and the conditions of its manufacture. Then there’s the religious factory owner who, we read, purchased the plant as an economic contribution to the community. Patrick couldn’t help but compare him to the young man on death row who was the cause of his trip to Waco. That man killed one security guard in comparison to the deaths of 14 people and more than a hundred injured including a child who was playing on a nearby playground when the blast blew him four feet in the air and broke his ribs.

The factory owner hired a Dallas public relations firm to represent him as he opened the doors of his church for the mourning residents of West and spoke through an outside source of his own broken heart.

A coal mine manager once said in one of my films, “If what we are doing in eastern Kentucky is wrong, then the whole country is wrong.” One could say the same about the murderous explosion in West, Texas. There’s something very rotten in our mistaken loyalties to companies over neighbors, our dependence on paternalism for our safety, our willed ignorance, the sacrifices we make to the dollar. Ultimately we all share some part of responsibility for what happened in West, Texas.

I think about the power of transformation, knowing that it must come from rage, knowledge, and love. I believe that deep within the community of West and our own, an independent, courageous, and collective voice can emerge to shake the foundations of what must change.

[Anne Lewis, a senior lecturer at the University of Texas and a member of TSEU-CWA Local 6186 and NABET-CWA, is an independent filmmaker associated with Appalshop. She is co-director of Anne Braden: Southern Patriot, associate director of Harlan County, U.S.A, and the producer/director of Fast Food Women, To Save the Land and People, Morristown: in the air and sun, and a number of other social issue and cultural documentaries. Her website is annelewis.org. Read more articles by and about Anne Lewis at The Rag Blog.]

Some of the photos accompanying this article were also published, under the name Otis Ike, in a gallery at the Austin Chronicle.

The next morning. House in West, Texas, Thursday, April 8, 2013. Photos by Patrick Bresnan / The Rag Blog.

School in West, Texas, Thursday, April 23, 2013.

Evacuation area, Thursday, April 18, 2013.

Missing dog sign. Thursday, April 23, 2013.

Car and flag. Thursday, April 23, 2013.

Residents respond to call for wheelchairs. Wednesday, April 17, 2013.

Memorial service at Church of the Assumption, Thursday, April 18, 2013.

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Ted McLaughlin : For Massey Energy, Safety Fines Just a Cost of Doing Business

Image from BNET.
Cost of doing business:
Paying fines cheaper for Massey
than making the mines safe

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / May 5, 2011

"Despite the tragedy at Upper Big Branch last year... some still aren't getting it." -- Joseph Main, Assistant Secretary of Labor for Mine Safety and Health

Last year (on April 5, 2010) there was an explosion at the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia. This coal mine disaster killed 29 miners, and has still not been reopened for mining operations (and is now probably going to be sealed off and never reopened). In addition to losing the mine the company (Massey Energy) also settled with the families of the dead miners for $3 million apiece.

A reasonable person might think that losing a producing mine and paying out about $87 million to the families of fallen miners would have taught Massey Energy a valuable lesson -- that putting mine safety first would save both dollars and lives.

But it looks like that lesson didn't register on Massey Energy. Forcing miners to work in unsafe, even dangerous, conditions is just the way they normally do business -- and the payouts resulting from that are just considered the cost of doing business.

It turns out that in the year before the mine explosion (2009), Massey Energy had been fined a total of $382,000 for serious and repeated mine safety violations. And in the month before the explosion the mine had been cited for 57 separate safety violations.

It seems that paying fines for making miners work in dangerous conditions was just considered a cost of doing business for Massey Energy -- a cost that was cheaper for them than actually making the mines safer.

This willingness to pay repeated fines rather than clean up their act is what eventually resulted in the deaths of 29 of their miners. (And believe it or not the Massey CEO received a $2 million bonus for the company's exemplary safety record for 2010.)

Have they changed now that 29 of their employees were killed? Not even a little bit. Federal investigators from the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) showed up at another Massey facility recently -- the Randolph Mine in Boone County, West Virginia. The MSHA investigators found multiple safety violations that were "nothing short of outrageous" and posed a "serious risk" of fire and/or explosion.

Joseph Main, Assistant Secretary of Labor for Mine Safety and Health, said, "Despite the tragedy at Upper Big Branch last year... some still aren't getting it." He's wrong. They "get it." They just care more about their profit margin than about the safety or lives of their workers. They'll mouth the expected words about safety, and then continue to worry only about the bottom line (ever growing profits).

And Massey Energy is by no means the only corporation that cuts corners in safety to increase corporate profits. Another prime example is the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico caused by Transocean/BP cutting corners. That not only dumped millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf, it killed 11 oil workers when the rig exploded.

The management of Transocean also received huge bonuses for "the best year in safety performance in our company's history." That's corporate-speak for their huge profits are more important than the lives of 11 workers. Do any of us doubt both these companies are still cutting corners in safety to get bigger profits?

Far too often both the politicians and the general public buy into the public relations material put out by corporations -- the stuff that says corporations have a heart or soul and want the best for their workers and their communities.

None of that is true. Regardless of what the Supreme Court may think, corporations are not people and they don't have a heart. They are cold and calculating entities -- with bank accounts, and the only thing they care about is making those bank accounts ever larger (regardless of how that affects their workers or anyone else).

Right-wing politicians would have us believe that the government and unions just get in the way of warm-hearted corporations, and if they were eliminated the corporations would be able to make a better world for all of us.

They are paid to say that by the very corporations they defend, but that does not make it true. The truth is that they care only for profits, and they will not share those profits with workers or spend any of it to create safe working conditions -- until they are forced to do so.

That is why government safety inspectors (OSHA, MSHA, and others) and strong unions are both necessary. These are the only organizations that can protect American workers. They are the only organizations that can and will put pressure on corporations to insure safe working conditions.

Too often unions are portrayed as only caring about getting their workers large salaries, and it is true that getting workers a decent and livable wage is one of their purposes. But equally important are two other functions -- insuring workers are treated fairly and insuring workers have safe working conditions. Government is necessary and does what it can, but unions are also needed to protect workers.

Corporations have the right to make a good profit, but they don't have the right to do it at the expense of worker safety (and community safety). There is a happy medium, and it is the function of government and unions to help find it.

[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger.]

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Jeff Biggers : Thousands Honor Environmental Visionary Judy Bonds

Julia 'Judy' Bonds. Painting by Robert Shetterly from his Americans Who Tell the Truth series.
Coalfield visionary:
Thousands pay tribute to Judy Bonds

She has been to the mountaintop, and now we must fight harder to save it.

By Jeff Biggers / CommonDreams / January 4, 2011

She was a tireless, funny, and inspiring orator, and a savvy and brilliant community organizer. She was fearless in the face of threats. As the godmother of the anti-mountaintop removal movement, she gave birth to a new generation of clean energy and human rights activists across the nation. In a year of mining disasters and climate change setbacks, she challenged activists to redouble their efforts.

As one of the great visionaries to emerge out of the coalfields, Julia "Judy" Bonds reminded the nation that her beloved Appalachians had been to the mountaintop -- and in her passing last night, thousands of anti-mountaintop removal mining and New Power activists from around the country are reminding the Obama administration and the country's environmental justice movement of Bonds' powerful legacy and parting words to "don't let up, fight harder and finish off" the outlaw ranks of Big Coal and end the egregious crime of mountaintop removal.

In a special email message last night, Coal River Mountain Watch director Vernon Haltom announced the passing of Bonds, the Goldman Prize winner and Executive Director of Coal River Mountain Watch. Bonds, 58, had battled advanced stage cancer over the past several months. "One of Judy's last acts was to go on a speaking trip, even though she was not feeling well, shortly before her diagnosis," Haltom wrote.

"I believe, as others do, that Judy's years in Marfork holler, where she remained in her ancestral home as long as she could, subjected her to Massey Energy's airborne toxic dust and led to the cancer that wasted no time in taking its toll. Judy will be missed by all in this movement, as an icon, a leader, an inspiration, and a friend."

Here's a clip from a special tribute to Judy by On Coal River filmmakers Adams Wood and Francine Cavanaugh:

Judy Bonds from On Coal River on Vimeo.

Judy Bonds from On Coal River on Vimeo.

A little more than a decade ago, sitting on the coal dust-swept front porch with her grandson -- the ninth generation of their family to reside in Marfork Hollow in West Virginia -- Bonds was outraged to hear her 7-year-old grandson describe an escape route should a nearby massive coal waste dam break and flood their valley. "I knew in my heart there was really no escape," Bonds told an interviewer in 2003. "How do you tell a child that his life is a sacrifice for corporate greed? You can't tell him that, you don't tell him that, but of course he understands that now."

Forced by an encroaching strip mine to move from her family's ancestral land, Bonds spent the next decade as a full-time crusader (and coal miner's daughter) to bring her grandson's message of central Appalachia's role as a national sacrifice zone from the devastating impact of mountaintop removal strip mining to millions of Americans across the country.

Judy Bonds delivering a speech in Washington, D.C. 2002
calling for the end to mountaintop removal. Photo by Deana Steiner Smith / Living on Earth.
For fellow activist Bo Webb, who went to jail and organized side-by-side with Bonds for years in the Coal River Valley, Judy was one of the better angels of our nature:

Judy was one of God's most loyal and dedicated Angels in the battle of good vs. evil. I will miss her, we will all miss her. After much suffering, she now stands before God, without doubt holding a very special place in His heart. May God bless and comfort those that love and adore Judy. May God bless and comfort her wonderful family, and may God give us the unity and conviction to fight on in her honor and His name.

"Judy Bonds was our Hillbilly Moses," added Bob Kincaid, president of the Coal River Mountain Watch board. "She knew better than anyone that we WILL make it to the Promised Land: out of the poisonous bondage of coal companies. She will not cross over with us on that great day, but her spirit will join us, and inform the freedom that sings from our hearts. Mother Jones, meet Judy. Judy, Mother."

In a special Living on Earth radio interview with Jeff Young in 2003, Bonds recalled her grandson holding a handul of dead fish contaminated by coal waste. "And I looked around him and there were dead fish laying all over the stream. And that was a slap in the face."

From the United Nations to the halls of Congress, and at universities and conferences from Maine to California, Bonds testified to the ravages of strip mining on her community's waterways, economy and culture. Her riveting speeches galvanized activists from the hollers to the urban neighborhoods, and among national environmental organizations.

"Judy was a strong, powerful voice that always sang wisdom, inspiration, passion and determination to my soul," wrote Chris Hill, the National Field Organizer for the Hip Hop Caucus in Washington, DC. "She was a voice that will forever speak volumes to the reasons why I fight for justice from the mountains to the inner cities."

"Judy often remarked how she proudly stood shoulder to shoulder with outside groups like Rainforest Action Network," added Scott Parkin, Senior Campaigner for RAN's Coal Campaign.

"During an E.P.A. action last March, I saw her beaming with a big smile and much excitement as we worked together to make mountaintop removal a national issue and take the fight to end it out of the hills and hollers of Appalachia into offices of the power-holders in Washington D.C."

"She inspired thousands in the movement to end mountaintop removal and was a driving force in making it what it has become," Haltom wrote in his email message to national activists.

"I can't count the number of times someone told me they got involved because they heard Judy speak, either at their university, at a rally, or in a documentary. Judy endured much personal suffering for her leadership. While people of lesser courage would candy-coat their words or simply shut up and sit down, Judy called it as she saw it. She endured physical assault, verbal abuse, and death threats because she stood up for justice for her community."

"One of the happiest days of my life was when we announced the funding for a new school to replace Marsh Fork Elementary," said filmmaker and activist Jerry Cope, who worked with Coal River Valley residents to move a school imperiled by coal dust and a dangerous coal slurry impoundment. "Without Judy's inspiration, I would have never become involved and she will forever be a source of inspiration to me."

In a special tribute to Judy by filmmakers Jordan Freeman and Mari-Lynn Evans, Judy asked for the right to go home. "I miss my home," she pleaded. "I want to go home."



Like generations before her, Judy Bonds has finally gone home to her Marfolk Holler.

And thousands of coalfield residents, activists and leaders will continue the battle to ensure that Coal River Mountain -- the last mountain -- remains in her view, and mountaintop removal is abolished once and for all.

[Jeff Biggers is an award-winning journalist and cultural historian. He is the author of Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland, winner of the 2010 David Brower Award for Environmental Reporting and the Delta Award for Literature. This article was published and distributed by CommonDreams.]

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Anne Lewis : Don Blankenship and the A.T. Massey Crime Spree

Don Blankenship, a "plump, soft-spoken accountant with a smirk." Image from treehugger.com.
The porcine man:
Don Blankenship and the
Sordid history of A.T. Massey

By Anne Lewis / The Rag Blog / April 16, 2010

[See Mine War on Blackberry Creek, the 30-minute 1986 documentary by Anne Lewis about the 1984 United Mine Workers of America strike against A.T. Massey -- including her interview with now CEO Don Blankenship -- here.]

Who is this porcine man (all apologies to the noble pig) wrapped in our country’s flag saying that federal regulation of mine safety is as “silly as global warming?” Why it’s Don Blankenship, CEO of A.T. Massey, the fourth largest coal extractor in the United States and now the source of the worst killings in a U.S. mine in 40 years.

The context is an anti-union rally last Labor Day in Holden, West Virginia, hosted by Sean Hannity and starring Ted Nugent and Hank Williams, Jr.

First a few highlights of the A.T. Massey crime spree, going backwards over decades:

• 2010 -- the latest and worst of four fatal accidents in 12 years at Massey mines: 29 men killed in the explosion at Upper Big Branch mine.
• 2009 -- $3,000,000 contribution to elect a state Supreme Court justice that would rule in favor of Massey. Found guilty by the U.S. Supreme Court in Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Company.
• 2009 -- at company’s behest, Raleigh County West Virginia judge blocks anti-mountaintop removal activists from peaceful protests on A.T. Massey strip mining sites.
• 2006 -- two miners killed in a fire at Aracoma Alma Number 1 Mine in Logan County, West Virginia.
• 2000 -- 300-million gallon spill of toxic sludge from Massey strip mine impoundment in Martin County, Kentucky, three times the size of the Exxon Valdez. The EPA called it “the nation’s largest man-made disaster east of the Mississippi.”
• 1984 -- UMWA strike against A.T. Massey Coal concludes with 400 union men blacklisted and permanently fired and an unconditional return to work for the rest of Massey’s workers without a union.
• 1980 -- St. Joe Minerals and Royal Dutch Shell, which owned mines in South Africa under apartheid, create the Massey Coal Partnership.

The consistency of the record and its intersections are truly amazing -- from neo-liberalism to ecocide to corruption to murder, this is a huge lesson in the dark side.

In 1984, I sat in Blankenship’s office looking out at a community (including the post office) that was hemmed in with barbed wire and armed guards. Blankenship was then president of Raul Sales, a wholly owned subsidiary of A.T. Massey. Don (I might as well use the familiar -- he called me Anne) was delighted to show me the bullet pattern that marked the edge of his television set.

A plump, soft-spoken accountant with a smirk, he explained the progress offered by A.T. Massey to South African miners. He offered a social Darwinist analysis of capitalism, calling it “survival of the most productive.”

The interview and the rest of my film about the 1984 United Mineworkers (UMWA) strike against A.T. Massey -- Mine War on Blackberry Creek -- streams on www.annelewis.org. Rather than quote from the film or try to describe visuals, I would suggest a free viewing. The end of the film is a defeat of the strike, but a victory in the spirit of the men and women who fought for their right to have a union.

At the time I was making the film, my future partner was working underground less than 40 miles away from the Upper Big Branch Mine that exploded April 5. He worked in similar conditions, on a long-wall section in a gassy mine. The difference was that the mine was unionized. The union safety committee shut the mine down at least three times and the miners walked out. None were hurt and none were fired.

That’s one part of the story that’s missing. In all the talk of federal regulation there’s been no talk of the power of union rank and file miners to protect themselves. There’s one notable exception -- Rush Limbaugh. Rush asks, referring to the explosion, “Where was the union?” Rush, that may be the best question you ever asked.

Less than 20% of the miners in this country are unionized at present. That’s scandalous and has a lot to do with Blankenship, his industry buddies, and reactionary labor law. In Canada, nearly every miner is in a union and there are almost no mining accidents. Strange coincidence? How about passing the Employee Free Choice Act so that miners could make the decision to be unionized.

And why aren’t we hearing anything about what the union thinks in the mainstream press? Here’s Cecil Roberts, President of the UMWA saying that Blankenship should be “handcuffed and in jail.”

The United Mineworkers fought for and won those regulations that Blankenship called “silly.” There’s miners’ blood on every coal mine health and safety regulation.

The other part of the story is just as sad and far more complex. There’s a picture of a floral arrangement taken at one of the 29 funerals this week that includes a hard hat with a sticker that reads “Friends of Coal.” Friends of Coal? That’s the group created by the West Virginia Coal Association that wants to educate us about the “new war the Environmental Protection Agency is waging against West Virginia coal” (would that it were so). That's who brought us the Labor Day rally where Don Blankenship spewed his ecocidal and murderous garbage.

A miner's hard hat was placed in a floral arrangement at the funeral of William Roosevelt Lynch. Photo by Amy Sancetta / AP.
And so the divisions within coal mining communities between the haves and the have-nots; the fight between those who would protect the environment and those desperate for jobs; the so-called individual “rights” of scabs versus community survival are used by Blankenship and A.T. Massey to do even more damage to a ravaged land and people.

I’m reminded of the great Hazel Dickens song -- you can substitute “Blankenship” or “A.T. Massey” or “coal” for "black lung,” or leave the words to stand in their original power.

“Black lung, black lung, oh, your hand’s icy cold,
As you reach for my life and you torture my soul.
Cold as that water hole down in that dark cave,
Where I spent my life’s blood digging my own grave.”

[Anne Lewis is an independent filmmaker associated with Appalshop, senior lecturer at UT-Austin, and member of TSEU-CWA Local 6186 and NABET-CWA. She is the associate director of Harlan County, U.S.A and the producer/director of Fast Food Women, To Save the Land and People, Morristown: in the air and sun, and a number of other social issue and cultural documentaries. Her website is annelewis.org.]

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Coal Mining : Union-Busting and the Massey Disaster

Deaths in West Virginia
Did not have to happen

By Jay D. Jurie / The Rag Blog / April 14, 2010

With the death of 29 coal miners at the Massey Coal-operated Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia, the United States has experienced its worst mine disaster in close to 40 years.

It is widely understood the deaths were caused by safety violations that allowed methane gas to build up to explosive levels. What is not so well understood is that this was no "accident" that just "happened" because coal mining is "inherently dangerous."

The explosion was preventable, and was brought about by lesser-known causes: increased demand for coal, and measures taken by mine owners to meet this demand and generate higher profits through cost-cutting and greater productivity.

Chief among those measures has been union-busting. Massey Coal has a long track record in this regard, even though, according to labor writer David Moberg, unionized coal mines have only a quarter to a half as many fatalities as do non-unionized coal mines.

Actively supporting safe working conditions for those who provide our electricity is the best way we have of showing our appreciation.

One important step would be to contact your Congressional delegation and insist they pass the Employee Free Choice Act, and especially its card-check requirement, that would enhance the ability of all employees to form a union.

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NASA Scientist, Actress Hannah, Arrested in Coal Mining Protest

Actress Darryl Hannah is arrested by West Virginia State Police Tuesday, June 23, 2009 following a mountaintop removal mining protest in Naoma, W.Va. She was among several hundred protesters who held a rally outside Marsh Fork Elementary school that sits about 300 feet away from a Massey Energy coal processing plant. Photo by Jeff Gentner / AP.
Foremost authority on climate change arrested at mountaintop removal protest.

By Roger Baker / The Rag Blog / June 25, 2009

For those who follow the climate issue, a top NASA scientist, James Hansen, foremost authority on climate change, was arrested at a non-violent protest of mountaintop removal coal mining in West Virginia. (Actress Daryl Hannah was also arrested at the protest.)

For an account of the action organized by Rainforest Action Network (RAN), go here, and here(from Michael Brune, executive director of Rainforest Action Network:

...I can't remember a more charged atmosphere. The majority of people surrounded one-half of the stage, supporting each speaker calling for an end to mountain blasting. Separated by police, the remainder crowded around the rest of the stage, wearing Massey t-shirts and shouting their disapproval.

I spoke shortly after Ken Hechler, the 94-year-old former Congressional Representative who has decried the effects of mountaintop removal in his region for more than three decades. "I want to thank Don Blankenship for inviting me to this rally," I began, to a mixture of catcalls and applause. I told the crowd that mountaintop removal isn't just a local issue, it's an American problem -- brought to us by Massey Energy and other coal companies...

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If the World Stopped Burning Coal, This Would Be 80% of the Solution to Climate Change

Paul Nolley, sophomore English and political psychology major, admires Beehive Designs artwork. Media Credit: Martha Warfel / Daily Vidette Photographer.
Beehive Design Collective share stories of activists
By Sam Schild / April 24, 2009

"Clean Coal Dirty Lie" is a sign held by a depiction of a bee, meant to represent an Appalachian person, in the Beehive Design Collective's newest collage drawing project: "The True Cost of Coal: Mountaintop Removal and the Fight For Our Future."

There was much happening on the quad in celebration of Earth day on Wednesday. But somewhere off the quad, the distant sound of bees could be heard. A buzzing could be heard all over campus coming from the activity room of the Bowling and Billiards Center.

While there were not actually any bees in the Bowling and Billiards center, the Beehive Design Collective were creating quite the buzz. With original activist artwork and a presentation related to their newest project, the Bees brought social and environmental activism in the form of giant mural collages.

The Beehive Collective is a group of traveling artists and activists. They go from location to location spreading the messages behind their "anti-copyright" images. This group of 16 Bees work collectively, "as horizontal and non hierarchically as possible," Tyler Bee said while giving a brief introduction about the Beehive Collective organization.

The Beehive Collective is a not for profit organization. Their collages tell stories that can serve as "an activist's cheat sheet," Tyler Bee said.

They take their artwork all over to tell their stories. They take the collages to organic fairs, protests, schools and many other locations, spreading the messages behind each meticulously created collage. Normally, there would be a whole swarm of "bees" with Tyler at an event like the one in the BBC, but for this particular presentation he was alone.

Based out of Machias, Maine, The Beehive Collective spends months, or more often years, creating gigantic murals of our smaller drawings.

"[We] collage and quilt smaller drawings together," Tyler Bee said. "All the little stories, little projects, little communities all do their parts to create this bigger picture," Tyler Bee continued, "[We try to] make sense of smaller stories to make a larger narrative." This is how the Bees' artwork relates to the world, on a theoretical level.

But, the Bees' artwork relates to the world on a literal level as well. Past Beehive Collective collages deal with important topics such as globalization, corporate colonization and human rights, to name a few. And with their latest piece, environmental justice can be added to the list of important issues the Beehive collective's artwork deals with.

In the collages there are no humans depicted, the only living beings in the Bees' artwork are plants and animals. The Bees use different animals to represent people. They ask groups of people which animal they identify most with, and then use that animal in their drawings to stand in for those people.

"[This way we] avoid really stupid stereotypes of people," Tyler Bee said, and also this is to serve as a reminder that humans are animals as well.

"The True Cost of Coal" is still unfinished, but even in its work-in-progress form it still struck awe into audience members.

"[The piece is] Really, really cool" Kyle Riley, a freshman history major, said.

The Bees' latest project and the object of Wednesday's presentation contained an extraordinary amount of detail. The approximately 5 foot by 12 foot canvas the piece was printed on contained countless individual scenes which each had its own little story.

Each of these scenes was interwoven and flowed seamlessly into the next scene. This makes it so one could find themselves looking at the other end of the collage just after starting to look at the fir end.

"It's refreshing to get some insight on this issue," Paul Nolley, a sophomore political science major, said.

Tyler Bee demonstrated how a piece of Beehive Collective artwork can serve as an "activist's cheat sheet" with the presentation he gave. He told the story of America and its relation to coal.

The collage is separated into five sections, and when it is folded so that only the outside two sections are showing, there is a pleasant picture of the world before coal burning began. Then, the picture "opens up to show how mountain top removal mining rips the environment apart."

Mountain top removal mining is the modern "mechanized" method of mining coal.

"If the mountain is a layer cake, the coal is the frosting in between layers," Tyler said.

The mountain is blown up and the coal is scooped out by a machine called a dragline. After each layer of coal is removed, the next layer of rock is blown up and dumped into the valleys in between the mountains.

"There are [at least] 500 mountains no longer in existence [in Appalachia because of mountain top removal mining]" Tyler Bee said.

Mountain top removal mining reduces the amount of manpower needed. Approximately 200 miners are needed using traditional, less environmentally damaging deep mining techniques. But with mountain top removal mining, only 12 people are needed to do the work that previously would have taken 200. Therefore, Tyler Bee said, when coal companies say "coal means jobs for America," it is a lie.

Mountain top removal is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to discussing the true cost of coal. Burning coal is just as environmentally degrading, if not more.

"If the world stopped burning coal, this would be 80 percent of the solution to climate change," Tyler Bee said.

Source / Daily Vidette at Illinois State University

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'Justice in the Coalfields' : The Pittston Strike, April 5, 1989

Trailer: 'Justice in the Coalfields' by Anne Lewis

Anne Lewis' provocative and skillfully produced documentary of the strike, Justice in the Coalfields, has had a profoundly formative influence not only on my understanding of the struggle, but larger issues of American culture and Appalachian collective politics... Justice in the Coalfields is a remarkable oral history narrated by persons on both sides of the nearly year-long dispute. -- Tal Stanley / Southern Changes

By Anne Lewis / The Rag Blog / April 6, 2009

Yesterday was the anniversary of the Pittston Strike that began April 5, 1989 in Virginia’s coal country.

The reason I know is that I had one of those flashback moments last week. The Richmond Times Dispatch wanted clips from my film "Justice in the Coalfields" to run on their website for a major retrospective on the Pittston strike. Then they laid off the reporter (one of 28 lay-offs) on Friday so they didn't run the story. And just when they were doing something good about the coalfields. Folks in southwest Virginia (and I was one of them) believe that the only time the rest of the state recognizes their existence is when the governor declares martial law.

The Pittston strike rings out as an example of worker and community solidarity. More than 1,700 coal miners in southwestern Virginia and West Virginia walked out after the company revoked the health care of pensioners, disabled miners and their families, and widows. There were 4,000 arrests for nonviolent civil disobedience against Pittston which owned Brinks armored trucks as well as coal mines.

The strike was about so many current issues -- the demand for universal health care, global energy, lay-offs, worker/community alliances, the Right to Work law, that "Justice" might have renewed usefulness.

You can also view a trailer from the film at annelewis.org. If you have any problems, you might want to right click on the link and open with quicktime player. The trailer is also available at Appalshop's General Store.

Here is a review of the film by Tal Stanley. It appeared in Southern Changes in 1995.

[Anne Lewis is an independent filmmaker associated with Appalshop, senior lecturer at UT-Austin, and member of TSEU-CWA Local 6186 and NABET-CWA. She is the associate director of “Harlan County, U.S.A” and the producer/director of “Fast Food Women,” “To Save the Land and People,” “Morristown: in the air and sun,” and a number of other social issue and cultural documentaries. Her website is annelewis.org.]

See these related articles:

• April 5, 1989 -- Remembering the Pittston Strike by Shirah / Daily Kos / April 6, 2009
• Tension Easing, but Miners' Strike Against Pittston Goes On by B. Drummond Ayres Jr. / Special to The New York Times / Nov. 26, 1989
• The Place of Justice by Tal Stanley / Southern Changes / Vol. 17, No. 3-4, 1995

And:

• 'Rednecks' and Greens Beat Big Coal in Appalachia by Jeff Biggers / The Rag Blog / March 30, 2009

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