When Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) came to West Virginia earlier this week, she proclaimed that Congresswoman Shelley Moore Capito (R-West Virginia) stands with Wall Street, while Natalie Tennant, her Democratic opponent in the election for an open U.S. Senate seat, stands with Main Street.<\/p>\n
When asked after the Shepherdstown rally whether she supported a moratorium on mountaintop removal mining, Tennant said she supported \u201ca balanced approach.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n Bob Kincaid, president of Coal River Mountain Watch<\/a>,\u00a0took to the airwaves this week<\/a> to vent his frustration with Tennant and the Democrats.<\/p>\n \u201cWho funds mountaintop removal coal mining?\u201d Kincaid asked. \u201cWho funds the 5.5 million pounds of explosives that go off in West Virginia every day? Who funds the massive earth moving equipment that shoves rubble over into valleys every day, except Christmas, in the mountaintop removal sacrifice zone? Yes, of course, Wall Street does that.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cShelley Moore Capito supports Wall Street and the coal industry with every fiber of her being,\u201d Kincaid said. \u201cThose 5.5 million pounds of explosives when they go off and create all of that filth and toxic poisonous dust that billows and pours and rolls down over our mountain communities — yes, Shelley Moore is all for Wall Street funding that and the coal companies that do it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBut so is Natalie Tennant.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a balanced approach,\u201d Kincaid said. \u201cWhat kind of balance Natalie?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cA balanced approach? Is that what we call it when we pick up the caskets of 4,000 excess deaths in West Virginia\u2019s mountaintop removal counties every year and we carry them slowly to their graves? And we make sure that we don\u2019t tip one side more than the other or dump a corpse out into the dirt? It\u2019s a balanced approach. Yes you have to balance the casket as you approach the grave, Natalie Tennant. It\u2019s a balanced approach.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhen a family in a moutaintop removal community makes a decision on whether or not to consume the water as it comes out of their sink looking like tomato soup and smelling like grim death, they have to balance that against whether or not they would like to go on living on this planet anymore. It\u2019s a balanced approach.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhen the billowing, roiling, rolling cloud of poison filth from a mountaintop removal blast comes rolling down the holler, and people decide whether to breath or not, knowing that they are breathing tiny micofine particles of almost cancer itself, they are balancing whether or not they should go on being breathing human beings right now, versus whether they should sit in a doctor\u2019s office twenty years hence and hear him say — you\u2019ve got cancer and we don\u2019t know why.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a balanced approach.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou know where she picked that up from? She picked that up from Joe Manchin, who wants Shelley Moore Capito to win the election.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cEvery time you ask Joe Manchin about mountaintop removal mining, he says — well I think we need to be able to do it with balance.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cTo hell with balance,\u201d Kincaid said. \u201cI\u2019m sick of balance. I\u2019m sick of thinking that you can balance the needs of living, breathing actual human beings against the desire of coal companies to get every last scrap of value of out the ground here in the Appalachian sacrifice zone and call that balance.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m sick of being told that 4,000 people who have jobs that will get them a new truck every five years, a new four wheeler every two, that that somehow balances against people who have had their home values reduced every year from $120,000 to $10,000. You can\u2019t balance that.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBy saying balance, Natalie Tennant and Joe Manchin and all of the other balance buffoons are saying that what they prefer is a status that is out of balance.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNatalie Tennant is trying to beat Republicans by being Republican light. I\u2019m not playing that lesser of two evil politics no more. I will not if paid money go and vote for Natalie Tennant. I will not. If I want somebody who is going to be pro-coal and be in favor of poisoning my family some more, then why shouldn\u2019t I just vote for Shelley Moore Capito?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) came to West Virginia earlier this week, she proclaimed that Congresswoman Shelley Moore Capito (R-West Virginia) stands with Wall Street, while Natalie Tennant, her Democratic opponent in the election for an open U.S. Senate seat, … Continue reading