Here’s how intensely strange the conflict around mountaintop removal is getting. Poster child of mountaintop removal Massey Energy’s CEO Don Blankenship must have hired some new PR people trying to improve his public image (not that it doesn’t severely need it) in the world of online social networking.
Now we’re seeing him blogging and twittering all up and down the information super highway.
Besides whipping his employees up into drunken violent frenzies, he’s just penned an online article, or something akin to a blog, on a website ironically called “americanthinker.com” where he argues that global warming is a “superstition.”
He’s also on Twitter. Check that out for some pretty classic stuff.
My two favorites are:
“If you support democracy in developing countries, you must support coal. It gives them economic freedom. Denying coal keeps them in poverty5:50 AM Jul 29th from web”
“Californian’s talk of legalizing pot while Los Angeles plans to ban energy from coal plants. No wonder that state has a $26 B deficit4:58 AM Jul 28th from web”
Me? I am just waiting to join his fanpage on Facebook. Hopefully, I won’t be the only one on it.
Appalshop is currently streaming it’s film about the 1984 UMWA strike against Massey. A younger, but no less charming, Don Blankenship is interviewed and defends capitalism as social darwinism and apartheid in South Africa.
http://appalshop.org/film/minewar/stream.html
Thanks for the post, Sparki. This is some crazy stuff… I can only take small doses. As a point of information though, only 2 people in the “drunken frenzy” video are actually Massey employees. The man with his shirt off was recently laid off from a Massey mine at the time of the video. We can’t say that Donny B directly encouraged or enabled those people to do what they did. I don’t doubt he felt some sick joy that the “miners” (they weren’t all miners!) disrupted the “environmentalist” picnic (they weren’t all enviros!).
However, I know that sometimes the inaccurate details alienate people from anti-mountaintop removal activists and their work. It contributes to the image that we are “ignorant out-of-staters” who came to take away all the jobs.
This instance isn’t a big deal, but it’s something to keep in mind in future.