Coal Barons sack W. Va. (size of Delaware)

[donsu]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/07/opinion/07mon3.html?adxnnl=1&pagewanted=print&adxnnlx=1131472907-7jxQ12slmoPIg+8Ho77/Ng


And Now to 'Streamline' King Coal's Beheading of Appalachia


-snip- (tells of the raping)

Estimates are that by the end of the decade, an area larger than the state of Delaware will have been laid waste by dynamite and bulldozer. The Bush administration's report, issued in the name of environmental impact, will only speed this course.

The Army Corps of Engineers, so busy lately repairing the levee devastation in New Orleans, has been just as busy rubber-stamping permits to mountain strip. Just across the road from Mr. Weekley's continuing stand against eviction, the Corps recently approved the decapitation of Blair Mountain. This is a historic Appalachian site where thousands of armed union and antiunion forces fought in 1921 in an epic confrontation that saw federal troops intervene with bombs.

With this piece of the past facing burial along with much of the present, the Corps spared 180 acres as a Disneyland-like oasis, but left far more for the dynamiters.

Thus does Appalachian history march on in earth-shaking fashion, with peep-peep punctuation sounds as the giant dozers move back and forth, shaving the mountaintops into the hollows below.
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america is a crime scene