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Energy Bill Committee Meets Monday-Call your Legislators in DC
Nov. 13 Clean Elections Forum; Lunar Eclipse Tonight
Dennis Burke and Granny D's Speech The explosive equivalent of one Hiroshima bomb is use against your mountains every eleven and a half days. --Granny D, Nov. 4 at Marshall University. Granny D's entire speech is at the bottom of this Action Alert.
"MUCKED" IN SHEPHERDSTOWN TONIGHT
Bob Gates' 52-minute documentary of the 2001, 2002 and 2003 floods, "Mucked: man-made disasters--flash floods in the coalfields," will premiere in Shepherdstown tonight, Nov. 8, at the American Conservation Film Festival. See it at 7 p.m. at the National Conservation Training Center. Bob's film won honorable mention in the investigative reporting category at EarthVision, an international environmental film festival in California. It will be shown during the coming year on Santa Cruz public television. "Mucked" will also be shown on WBGN in Pittsburgh during the Independent Filmmakers series Nov. 16-20. Bob and journalist Penny Loeb frequently work together to document the state's devastating mountaintop removal and logging-related floods. The flooding section of Penny's website won second place in online reporting at the Society of Environmental Journalists 2003 awards. Penny has a column in this month's Blue Ridge Country magazine.
ENERGY POLICY VOTE MONDAY-CALL YOUR LEGISLATORS IN DC
The Bush Administration/Energy Industry's odious energy bill is set to be presented before a Senate-House conference committee Monday, Nov. 10.
In a Nov. 7 Reuters article, "Written in Private, Energy Bill to Go Public," WV Senator Byrd is quoted as saying on the Senate floor, "The administration's national energy policy plan will do about as much to improve the nation's energy security as the administration's invasion of Iraq has done to stem the tide of global terrorism." You can read all of Byrd's remarks in, ''The GOP Energy Bill: An Infinite Mirage and a Boundless Facade".
Also see: www.buzzflash.com/contributors/03/11/con03330.html
Express your opinion on the Energy Bill to politicians! Find their contact information.
Let's amp up the numbers! We have word that the EPA is getting quite a few comments on the draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on mountaintop removal. Apparently, the agency got 1,700 comments in one day last week! Most of these were form letters. We cannot emphasize enough the importance of drafting your own individual letters-and getting your friends and family to do the same. To get some ideas for building your comments follow the EIS links that are posted near the top of the OVEC's website homepage, www.ohvec.org. The newest link we have added is http://amriversaction.ctsg.com/action/index.asp?step=2&item=12824.
To inspire you-well, actually, to enrage you, check out OVEC's mtr photo galleries. Our newest high-resolution photos are especially terrifying.
To help spread the word about mountaintop removal, please consider printing off and distribute these fliers:
Mountaintop Removal
Mining Fact Sheet
What You Can Do to
Help Stop Mountaintop Removal
CLEAN ELECTIONS FORUM AND MORE ON NOV. 13
Some highlights from our events calendar page.
Nov. 13: 7 p.m. at the Suncrest United Methodist Church in Morgantown. Clean Elections Forum, co-sponsored by the Morgantown League of Women Voters and Citizens for Clean Elections. Speakers: Senator Jon Blair Hunter, lead Senate sponsor of the WV Clean Elections Act in 2003; Janet Fout, Coordinator for Citizens for Clean Elections. For more info on the West Virginia Clean Elections Act, see the Nov. 13 entry on our events calendar page and our campaign finance reform web pages.
Nov. 13: Join students from the Student Environmental Action Coalition's Youth Power Shift campaign , the Climate Campaign, and Greenpeace's Clean Energy Now campaign in a National Day of Action for Clean Energy Campuses National Day of Action for Clean Energy Campuses. Take action on your campus or in your community to build collective power with other students and youth in the Clean Energy Revolution! The list of actions around the country is growing everyday! Visit http://www.seac.org/energy/ndoa.shtml for a complete list of planned events. Contact Maureen Cane at maureen.cane@sfo.greenpeace.org to announce your plans for November 13th.
The partial eclipse phase begins at 6:32 p.m. when the moon begins entering the Earth's shadow. The totality phase starts at 8:06 p.m. and ends at about 8:31 p.m. The final partial phase ends at 10:04 p.m. During totality the moon's upper face will turn dark red, contrasted with a lighter tone on the moon's lower part. This dual-tone disk happens because the moon's upper edge is deep within the shadow while the lower part is near the shadow's brighter edge.
Dear Friends,
We now have exactly a year before the election.
Doris "Granny D" Haddock is plying the hills and hollows of West Virginia. Yesterday she registered people to vote in historic Cabin Creek, where Mother Jones once railed against the inhumanity of the big corporate mines and raised a rebellion of miners.
At the top of that hollow, Doris yesterday paused atop Kayford Mountain at Larry Gibson's cabin. During the last dozen years, the destruction wrought by mountaintop removal coal mining has turned Larry's once-idyllic landscape into a horror of blasting and flattened mountains and buried forests and streams. The surviving streams run black with toxic goo. Larry has refused to leave the mountain to make way for the destruction, despite being shot at, burned out and driven off the road. Great stones have fallen from the sky onto his family cemetery from the blasting. Doris prayed and cried with him in that place. From that shattered landscape the coal flows down in seemingly endless freight trains and barges to the electric plants that spill toxins into the wind and into the water and even now the mother's milk of American women. It continues at such a pace, instead of being reduced with the introduction of alternative energies, because of political payoffs at the highest levels. The biggest local coal baron takes credit for spending the millions of dollars that brought West Virginia's electoral votes to Bush. He did it, and successfully, to protect mountaintop removal coal mining. So we stood there at ground zero of this new American era and feeling very full of emotion for the work.
The night before, very tired after a long day, she was nevertheless in a loud and rocking music club in Morgantown, packed with students from the University of West Virginia. They signed up individually and by group to help her table for new voters at Wal-Marts and other stores, beginning in December (you can too, at http://GrannyD.com, thanks to the help of Working Assets). She electrified the young people with a rap number that had them shouting along, with their fists waving to the refrain: "We have so many dreams / They run the gamut / The only way up / Is to Vote, Dammit!" She gave out "Vote Dammit!" lapel buttons and stacks of self-mailing registration forms.
Today she was on the Marshall University campus in Huntington, West Virginia. Her address to students is below. I hope you will pass it along to your friends and allied organizations. We need your personal participation. You will notice in the speech that she is purposefully projecting personal strength. That is what this election is all about. All the talk of war and danger has turned the electorate toward strength. Those candidates who express personal strength get the attention of voters. Those who do not, don't. We are learning that the strength factor even applies when it is a 93 year-old talking up registration and voting.
She was also tabling on campus and people lined up to register and to get their "Vote Dammit!" button. This is something that you can do wherever you are, and we will be happy to send you the buttons and registration forms that are self-mailing and can be used in any state.
I hope you will support her work with your participation. We also need some financial help to buy banners, lapel buttons and other supplies for all the Wal-Mart teams --coming to a neighborhood near you. WE HAVE TEAMS FORMING IN OVER HALF THE STATES ALREADY. If you can support the effort, look for the link on http://GrannyD.com. She expected that getting to Wal-Mart employees would be difficult or even require her to risk arrest. Instead, Wal-Mart opened the doors to her of all their stores in the US, and we need your help in getting to ALL those employees and customers.
We also need more organizations interested in voter registration to adopt Doris for a week along her trek. There is a link for that on the site, with an explanation of what is involved.
Sincerely,
Dennis Burke In coal country with Doris
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Doris "Granny D" Haddock speaking at Marshall University, Huntington, West Virginia, Tuesday, November 4, 2003.
Thank you.
I'm sure you expect to now hear something about my life, but I am here to talk about your own personal biography, not my own. So I will only briefly touch on my life.
I am 93. Three years ago I walked from California to Washington DC in order to gather up more support for the effort in Congress to get corporate money out of our federal political campaigns. The bill I was walking to support, the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Bill, passed Congress, though not just from my efforts but many people's efforts. It now awaits action by the Supreme Court to see if it is Constitutional.
When I walked into small towns, the newspapers and televisions did their stories, and I used those moments to talk about how there is too much money in politics and how we must write our Congressmen to pass the McCain bill. It was a fairly effective thing to do, as the towns and cities piled up. Even large newspapers had me in to talk to their editorial boards, like the Dallas Morning News, and many papers, including that one, got on the campaign finance reform bandwagon. So one person can make a difference, even if a small difference. A small difference is often the difference between victory and defeat.
It was hard walking across the deserts, as it was summer and very hot. I walked across 1,600 miles of deserts and the hills of Texas, and 3,200 miles in all.
When I got to the Appalachians it was snowing hard and I had to walk uphill in blizzards, but I had some volunteers with me and we made it, though it was very cold and hard. The harder it was, the better the news stories were, of course, and the more people learned about campaign finance reform. Sacrifice is an important part of political reform.
When I was in Cumberland, Maryland, my 90th birthday, it snowed so hard that I worried we could not go on, as the roadsides were piled high with snow from the snow plows. But miracles come to those who put their full hearts into important work. I discovered that there is an old canal, the C&O canal, that runs from Cumberland all the way into Washington, DC, and so I sent for my old skis and I skied along its bank for over 100 miles. That way I finally got to my destination. There were about 2,300 people there to greet me, including many Congressmen. We all walked together those last miles, making a racket down K Street, which is lobbyist row, to tell them their days were numbered.
Well, they are still there, but we clipped their ears back a bit with the McCain bill, and democracy is about keeping at it. So we will keep at it.
That is quite enough about me.
Let's talk about you.
You have come of age in extraordinary times. History is poised on a sharp edge, and you don't know how it will turn out. Will your America become a fearful land, less free than my old America? Will you tell your grandchildren that, when you were young, you could go into any library and read any book and never fear that the government was taking notes over your shoulder? Will you tell your grandchildren that, when you were young, you could walk into any music club or restaurant or bus and never even think of worrying about the dangerous young stranger entering with the explosive backpack--there because America allowed itself to become a symbol not of freedom and justice in the world but of the opposites of those things? Will you tell your grandchildren that you remember an America when the government was not all-powerful, that there was a time when you had a right to a lawyer, that you could not be held secretly in jail for years at a time or just disappear into the system? Will you tell your grandchildren that you remember an America when families owned small businesses and when America had a strong manufacturing sector --and when there was a strong middle class on account of these things? Will you amaze them with the information that old people used to be cared for with a system of social security? Will this seem amazing to your grandchildren, whose lives will be lived in fear and insecurity as underpaid service workers and regimented consumers of giant corporations? Or is this some science fiction -will it all turn out differently?
Will your grandchildren live in an America that taps the full potential of each person's life -a life lived in freedom and plenty?
Will you, in short, have lived your life in a heroic enough way so that your children and grandchildren find themselves in a better world, not the nightmare world of the oppressive economy and the police state?
We are in a time of trouble. The glaciers indeed are melting; the temperatures and weather patterns and harvests are changing. The collapsing harvests are driving people into cities where they live miserably and die. Some 150,000 people die before their time each year now because of global warming. That number will of course grow to a great flood. We cannot fix it entirely, but we can certainly stop making it worse--we can halt the wasteful burning of fossil fuels. The easy energy reserves are dwindling anyway, and if we go after them we will trash what is left of our mountains, streams, air and wilderness areas.
West Virginia is such a beautiful state, but how will your grandchildren know it? In the coalfields of southern West Virginia and Kentucky you are allowing the total destruction of the mountains and the filling in of the hollows with rubble. The explosive equivalent of one Hiroshima bomb is use against your mountains every eleven and a half days. Your grandchildren may ask you why you allowed this--why you did not form human chains across the roads used by this monstrous corporate undertaking? Or your grandchildren may praise you for your courage in saving this beauty for them.
The environment of democracy is also under siege. The freedoms supposedly guaranteed by our Bill of Rights are under extreme pressure from those who would lead with force instead of creativity. And it is in times of trouble that great leaders rise to lead their people to better times, better ways of living, and survival itself.
The creative leader must be willing to look today's situation in the eye and see past it to a better world. The creative leader leads from the heart and sees in color the dimensions of possibility unseen by others.
Leadership is easy. It only requires that you care, that you have an idea of what must be done, that you have the courage and expertise to do that job with some chance of success, and that you ask people to act with you.
They will not always follow. I know that very well. In my own effort to get more women registered to vote, I have asked many to help me. I now ask you to do so. I ask you to go to GrannyD.com and sign up to help register people at our tables that will be in front of Wal-Mart and other stores. I know what we are doing is necessary and right, and if some groups will not help me, I will find others. For it never goes the way you think it will --you rewrite your story as you go and the resources come to you if your heart is fully in it. Hundreds of people and small organizations have signed up to help me, and we are enough to change history in our way.
Leadership, even at your age, and even at my age, requires us to stay with our passion and never say die.
For in my heart I can see that better world for my great grandchildren, and I can see the nightmare, too. And who am I and who are you to sit by as cogs in someone else's wheel when it is our life and our world and our personal America?
I am an old Democrat. I don't care if you are a young Democrat or a young Republican, or a Green or an independent or if you are an anarchist because you like to be so bad and you look so good in black.
I don't care what you believe, so long as it is a belief in the future and in a better world. For this life is about service to each other. It matters little what you do or how successful you are, or what your old sins or crimes or shortcomings might be. If you give your life to the service of others, that is love and it is redemptive and joyful and will make your life and your soul complete.
And I am saying that this it not an ordinary moment in the history of the planet. It is a glorious time of trouble, a time of change and challenge, and the forces of heaven look upon us now and say, well, what are you going to do, little one? Do you, as an American, have the courage of your Constitution? Are you to help lead the world to happiness, or to ruin? And who of you will lead? And who of you will follow? And who of you will be but the furniture of this age, the hapless consumers, the glazed-eyed and hypnotized? Who will be awake and brave? Who will say, I am for love in the world?
And will you help me awaken others? Will you sign up to help me? Will you ask me to help you, to follow you? I will, you know. If you need to do a great thing or a small thing -if you need to write a letter to a senator or get arrested saving your mountains, I will stand with you. You will be my leader if you ask for it.
For I happen to know your secret--that you are the center of the world, that your actions ripple out and change everything, that your life is not only important to the world, but critical to it. I believe in you and in the biography that you are beginning to write in the world. I am reading your book right now and it has a wonderful beginning. I am excited to turn the page, and so must you be for yourself.
And all I ask of you so that we may be brothers and sisters in the work of our hearts is that you will at least vote and help others to vote. That is the baseline, the beginning point of our citizenship as Americans.
We are blessed to be Americans. But this blessing came by way of blood and toil, and we must respect the sacrifices made for us and for our freedoms by finding our own voice, taking our own stand, and by voting, dammit!
Thank you.
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