Between The Lines - Paul Corbit Brown and Elise Keaton: Mountaintop removal coal mining's destruction in West Virginia and Appalachia (Week Ending March 29, 2013)

Award-winning Investigative Journalist Robert Parry (1949-2018)

Award-winning investigative journalist and founder/editor of ConsortiumNews.com, Robert Parry has passed away. His ground-breaking work uncovering Reagan-era dirty wars in Central America and many other illegal and immoral policies conducted by successive administrations and U.S. intelligence agencies, stands as an inspiration to all in journalists working in the public interest.

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Between The Lines' coverage and resource compilation of the Resistance Movement

"The man who predicted Trump presidential win now says Trump impeachment could happen," AM Joy with Joy Reid, MSNBC, Jan. 21, 2018
"Sketchy Kazakh money finds its way into Trump dealings," The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC, Jan. 15, 2018
"Red flags seen in many Trump real estate deals," The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC, Jan. 15, 2018
"Secret Money: How Trump Made Millions Selling Condos To Unknown Buyers," BuzzFeed, Jan. 12, 2018
"The Scandals of Donald Trump: Presidential Edition," The Atlantic, May 15, 2017
"Here's what we know so far about Team Trump's ties to Russian interests," Washington Post's ongoing compilation
"What Comey Was Investigating, Explained," The Moscow Project, Center for American Progress

"Donald Trump's Financial Ties to Russian Oligarchs and Mobsters Detailed In Explosive New Documentary from the Netherlands," Dutch TV documentary, Alternet.org, May 12, 2017
Ongoing compilation of Trump's creeping authoritarianism," MotherJones.com
Full resource list ...

SPECIAL REPORT: "The Resistance - Women's March 2018 - Hartford, Connecticut" Jan. 20, 2018

Selected speeches from the Women's March in Hartford, Connecticut 2018, recorded and produced by Scott Harris

SPECIAL REPORT: "No Fracking Waste in CT!" Jan. 14, 2018

Jen Siskind Jennifer Siskind, local coordinator for Food and Water Watch, describes the campaign to stop fracking waste in Connecticut, which so far has led to fracking waste bans in 34 towns around the state. Interviewed by Richard Hill on Mic Check, WPKN Radio, Bridgeport, CT

SPECIAL REPORT: "Resistance Round Table: The Unraveling Continues..." Jan. 13, 2018

Lindsay Kanaly The panel discusses Trump's long history of racism and the Republican voter suppression juggernaut confronting Democrats leading up to the 2018 elections. Special guest: Lindsay Kanaly, a lead organizer of the Women's Marches planned for Jan. 20, 2018. Panel: Scott Harris, Ruthanne Baumgartner and Richard Hill on Resistance Roundtable, WPKN Radio, Bridgeport, CT.

SPECIAL REPORT: "Capitalism to the ash heap?" Richard Wolff, Jan. 2, 2018

Richard Wolff, Economics professor Richard Wolff declares U.S. capitalism to be beyond repair and suggests the need for a radical alternative. Interviewed by Richard Hill

SPECIAL REPORT: Maryn McKenna, author of "Big Chicken", Dec. 7, 2017

Maryn McKenna, investigative journalist and author of Big Chicken, talks about the widespread use and dangers of antibiotics in commercial poultry, beef and fruit production. Interview by Bill Duesing, Richard Hill and Guy Beardsly on WPKN's Organic Farm Stand.

SPECIAL REPORT: Nina Turner's address, Working Families Party Awards Banquet, Dec. 14, 2017

Nina Turner, president of Our Revolution, talks about the fight ahead for progressives as she receives the Working Families Organization Award for Exceptional Leadership Towards Advancing Progress. The event was held in Meriden, CT. Produced by Richard Hill.

SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Dec. 12, 2017

Working Families Party of CT talks strategy and issues for 2018.
Lindsay Farrell, executive director of the Working Families Party of Connecticut, discusses the state's electoral landscape and lays out the issues and strategies that could lead to progressive victories in 2018. Interviewed by Richard Hill.

SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Dec. 9, 2017

Disturbing developments in the Trump/Republican Agenda
Focus on the tax bill, destruction of our public lands, North Korea and Trump's private CIA. Panel: Scott Harris, Ruthanne Baumgartner and Richard Hill. Special guest: Jo Macallero of Rise and Resist.

SPECIAL REPORT: On Tyranny - one year later, Nov. 28, 2017

Professor Timothy Snyder, author of the highly acclaimed resistance manual On Tyranny, discusses his book and offers a fresh assessment of the state of our beleaguered republic. Timothy Snyder, history professor at Yale, is introduced by Stanley Heller, administrator of Promoting Enduring Peace, a Connecticut-based organization that sponsored this event at the United Church Parish House in New Haven on Nov. 28. A brief interview with Snyder conducted by WPKN radio producer, Richard Hill, follows his talk.

SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Nov. 12, 2017

Lynne Ide, director of program and policy with the Universal Health Care Foundation of Connecticut, talks about the current state of health care coverage in Connecticut. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Nov. 11, 2017

Focus on the Republican tax plan, the just-released autopsy on the Democratic Party, and Internet censorship by Google, Facebook and Youtube. Including an interview with Hilary Grant, a lead organizer with Action Together Connecticut, who discusses the local results of the recent election, with hosts Richard Hill, Scott Harris and Ruth Baumgartner WPKN producers

SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017

Two leaders from Redneck Revolt, an anti-racist, anti-capitalist movement, talk about their work organizing with white working class people in Suffolk County, New York. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017

Bruce Gagnon, coordinator for the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, describes the extent of -- and motives underlying -- the vast US network of military bases around the globe. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Resisting U.S. JeJu Island military base in South Korea, Oct. 24, 2017

Joyakol, South Korean peace activist and singer, discusses the crisis on the Korean peninsula and focuses on the resistance to the U.S. huge military base being constructed on Jeju Island. The event was sponsored by the Greater New Haven Peace Council and this audio was recorded by Richard Hill, WPKN producer.
Joyakol discusses Americans' biggest misconceptions about the conflict between North and South Korea and the U.S., Interview by Richard Hill, WPKN producer.

SPECIAL REPORT: John Allen, Out in New Haven

John Allen, founding director of the New Haven Pride Center, Connecticut, talks about his new LGBTQ television show, Out in New Haven, which presents a range of political and cultural issues to the community. Interviewed by Richard Hill on WPKN's Rainy Day Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2018.

2017 Gandhi Peace Awards

Promoting Enduring Peace presented its Gandhi Peace Award jointly to renowned consumer advocate Ralph Nader and BDS founder Omar Barghouti on April 23, 2017.

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who helped make our 25th anniversary with Jeremy Scahill a success!

For those who missed the event, or were there and really wanted to fully absorb its import, here it is in video

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Between The Lines Presentation at the Left Forum 2016

"How Do We Build A Mass Movement to Reverse Runaway Inequality?" with Les Leopold, author of "Runaway Inequality: An Activist's Guide to Economic Justice,"May 22, 2016, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York, 860 11th Ave. (Between 58th and 59th), New York City. Between The Lines' Scott Harris and Richard Hill moderated this workshop. Listen to the audio/slideshows and more from this workshop.

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JEREMY SCAHILL: Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker "Dirty Wars"

Listen to the full interview (30:33) with Jeremy Scahill, an award-winning investigative journalist with the Nation Magazine, correspondent for Democracy Now! and author of the bestselling book, "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army," about America's outsourcing of its military. In an exclusive interview with Counterpoint's Scott Harris on Sept. 16, 2013, Scahill talks about his latest book, "Dirty Wars, The World is a Battlefield," also made into a documentary film under the same title, and was nominated Dec. 5, 2013 for an Academy Award in the Best Documentary Feature category.

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Activists Educate Public on the Destruction of Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining

RealAudio MP3

Posted March 20, 2013

Excerpt of a speech by Paul Corbit Brown and Elise Keaton, activists with Keeper of the Mountains Foundation, recorded and produced by Melinda Tuhus

The fight to end mountaintop removal coal mining in central Appalachia is a part of the bigger campaign to end coal extraction altogether, as it is the most polluting fossil fuel, both in terms of greenhouse gases and in its devastating health and environmental impacts. In the past decade, coal has dropped from providing 50 percent of the electricity used in the U.S. to a little over 35 percent, mostly replaced by natural gas. Renewable power sources also claim a small but growing share of energy production.

Still, blowing the tops off mountain ridges to get at the coal seams beneath – and dropping the rocks and other debris into mountain streams below – continues unabated, mainly in West Virginia. The mining method accounts for about 60 million tons of the total 150 million tons of coal produced annually in West Virginia each year.

Two activists with the Keeper of the Mountains Foundation toured Connecticut recently, speaking at area colleges and other venues. The foundation was established by Larry Gibson, whose ancestral home on Kayford Mountain is surrounded by an enormous mountaintop removal operation that created a moonscape, destroying virtually all the native flora and fauna. Mountaintop removal has been shown to contaminate air and water, as well as increase the incidence of several serious illnesses. Elise Keaton is an attorney and fundraising director of Keeper of the Mountains Foundation. Paul Corbit Brown is a board member of the foundation and a photographer who built a solar home off the grid to demonstrate that people in West Virginia don't have to depend on coal. Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus recorded their talk at Quinnipiac University Law School on March 18. Here are excerpts of their talk.

PAUL CORBIT BROWN: I went down there and people in these communities told me what MTR is doing to their homes. They told me how every day, the houses would tremble on their foundations. They told me how every day you could wipe the coal dust off of everything inside the house. They told me how their wells were going dry, or they were getting water that was bright red, or black, or gray. They told me how they were harassed by the coal companies, because when the coal companies want to expand a mining operation, they'd come in and ask you to sell your home, and if you say, "No, I don't want to sell," they would harass you until you did. People always talk about Appalachia as being the greatest coal region – "the best coal, the best coal." Guess what? Appalachia used to be the source for the best drinking water for the entire Eastern seaboard of the U.S. That's what we really made the best, drinking water. Now three-fouths of the water in West Virginia is compromised beyond any reasonable use, including not just eating out of it, not just drinking it; you're not even supposed to swim in it, it's that bad. And guess what? Two weeks ago, the House of our West Virginia legislature passed unanimously House Bill 2579 that says, "We think the EPA is full of crap. We can put more selenium in the water than this. Go ahead, put more selenium in the water." Not a single dissenting vote, no abstentions. Everyone voted for more selenium in our water, even though 20-some peer-reviewed scientific studies in the last few years have proven beyond any shadow of a doubt that the water quality and the air quality and the soil quality as a result of this mining is causing record numbers of cancer, birth defects, heart attacks, liver disease, lung disease, kidney disease – including genetic mutations in the aquatic wildlife downstream from these fines.

The fascinating thing about coal production and one of the big arguments you're going to hear is that, well, this is job creation. But it's not job creation. When my dad was a union coal miner there were 150,000 men – mostly men – mining coal 30 years ago. Now, at this point in history, they're mining the same amount of tons every year, but with about 10,000 or 12,000 miners – about 150 tons a year in West Virginia, about 87 or so million of those tons comes from underground mines; the other comes from mountaintop removal mines. So what's happening is, start doing the math and you say, Wait a minute. If we've reduced our need for coal by 15 percent of our nation's electric supplies, why are they still mining that much coal? Little by little we build a social will, and we encourage people just like you, and you join us. Many fibers make the rope, and we move forward, a step, a step, a step, until we do these things. We create one house off the grid, then a small community off the grid, then a whole town off the grid, and we just keep educating and drawing people in about what's right about sustainable energy and what's not right at all about fossil fuels.

But it's exciting working with people and getting people involved and getting people motivated. Last week, we had a huge rally at the Capitol that said, No more MTR! No more fracking! And all these folks came from colleges and universities all over the place, and it was unreal! Because they marched through the entire Capitol building singing and chanting and just full of energy and passion.

ELISE KEATON: It's a strange site in West Virginia, actually. And what's interesting about this rally was it was the first time that the folks who are really trying to move away from fossil fuels – those folks outnumbered the coal miners who went out to protest against us, and that's because we joined forces with the anti-fracking folks, and this is really a critical point in this movement. We have Idle No More, we have the XL pipeline, we have the tar sands protests, we have the fracking protests, we have mountaintop removal. There are a lot of individual movements around this country that are all about the same thing, and that is preserving our communities and moving away from extraction. I hosted a tour up on Kayford (Mountain) that morning; I couldn't go to the rally, but all of those students came up to Kayford after the rally, and they were so excited. Nobody got arrested – great day! You saw the pictures of the cops with their knees and feet on the throats of people who are begging for clean water and clean air...

PAUL CORBIT BROWN: That was at the governor's office just a few years ago.

ELISE KEATON: That's really where we are here. We're fighting for our lives and the state police are aligned with the coal companies who are aligned with the courts who are aligned with the legislature. And it's really going to take all of us around this country coming together and saying we're not going to take it anymore; we're not standing up for it anymore. That's my mantra when I go talk to legislators, I say, "You don't understand – my generation, we're done with coal. We're moving toward wind and solar, and if you're not there with us, we got no place for you in the state house."

Learn more about mountaintop removal coal mining by visiting Keeper of the Mountains Foundation at mountainkeeper.com.