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| Some honest words from retiring Senator Rockefeller |
Part of me is thinking
that this is a day late and a dollar short, but at the same time it’s one of
the most amazingly honest assessments to come out of a political leader from
West Virginia. As Joe Manchin does his best to deflect and distract from Rachel Maddow’s questions about the poor state of affairs in West Virginia, the
Mountain State’s other senator, Jay Rockefeller, who is retiring from the
Senate after 20 years in office, has been saying some very honest things about
the state of affairs in West Virginia.
I
blogged about Rockefeller yesterday and the honest words he had to say during a
hearing of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee’s water
subcommittee. Well, West Virginia’s senior senator is continuing his frank talk
about the state in which he made his political career since the early
seventies. The water that was poisoned for 300,000 residents a month ago has
been declared safe by the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection
and the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention, but Rockefeller is having
none of it. The former governor of West Virginia, citing the state’s history of
“lack of regulatory control” said, “And even if some expert group told me it
was safe I don’t think I’d believe it. They can say it’s not hazardous or this
or that, but it doesn’t mean anything.” Rockefeller made his statement to WCHS,
an ABC affiliated television station that broadcasts to Charleston and
Huntington, West Virginia. Rockefeller continued his remarks:
It just gets into the degree of control
that corporations have over people. They dominate in West Virginia’s life.
Governors get elected—and I was a governor once—and they appoint people to
regulatory jobs who helped them in campaigns. What does that tell you?
Indeed, Senator
Rockefeller, what does that tell you? I applaud and very much appreciate your
present honesty. We need more of it, what you said yesterday and today. This
broadcast should be played and replayed throughout West Virginia—as well as the
rest of the United States, for corporate control of the way we think goes
beyond the borders of the Mountain State—until the folks whose tap water was
poisoned by Freedom Industries wake up to the fact that untainted drinking
water is not optional and should never be at risk from an unregulated storage
tank; until the folks whose wells have dried up or otherwise been fouled by
mountaintop mining realize that precious resources have been unfairly stripped
from their lives; and until all those whose lives have been unduly plagued by
cancers, kidney stones, learning disabilities, and other diseases see that their health and their lives have been sacrificed
for the profits of outside corporations.
And
yet my applause is muted. I know you mean well, Senator Rockefeller. But I do
not think that the chemical spill in the Elk River last month was your personal
wake up call, your moment of clarity on a Road to Damascus. You’ve known the
score in West Virginia for decades. You knew how King Coal controlled the state
when you were governor in the seventies. Back then you played along. Perhaps it
can be said that the grip of the coal industry is so tight on the politics and
the mindset of West Virginia that no politician who does not toe the line for
King Coal will make it into office. So perhaps politically you were caught
between an anthracite rock and a bituminous hard place. If you didn’t play
along with the powerful people who own the mines and the minerals under the
land of West Virginia, you would have never sat in the governor’s office and
never become a senator to my home state.
You
played along. But wasn’t there somehow—as the mines grew larger and larger, as
more and more miners lost their jobs to the huge draglines, as the valleys
filled with debris from the mountaintop removal operations, as hundreds of
miles of West Virginia’s streams were buried forever—that you could have said,
“Enough” to the mining companies. Wasn’t there a time to tell them that they
had scored their hundreds of millions of dollars and that it was time to treat
the land and people of your state with the respect due them?
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