Verizon Wireless: supporting mountop removal, union-busting, and science-denial.

Posted on: Tue, 09/01/2009 - 13:43 By: Tom Swiss

From Peter Rothberg's blog at The Nation:

Do 87 million Verizon Wireless customers know that the company is a co-sponsor of a major climate-change-denying, union-busting, pro-mountaintop removal Labor Day rally staged by Massey Energy in Logan, West Virginia?

...

Massey Energy, the largest producer of Central Appalachian coal...[in 2008] agreed to pay $20 million in fines to the EPA to resolve more than 4,500 violations of the Clean Water Act for polluting waterways in West Virginia and Kentucky with coal slurry and wastewater.

One of the country's foremost practitioners of mountaintop removal, a radical form of coal mining in which entire mountains are blown up, devastating hundreds of square miles of Appalachia and polluting the headwaters of rivers, the company has fiercely lobbied against Obama administration and EPA efforts to crack down on the practice.

These anti-environmental sensibilities will be well represented at the company's Labor Day "Friends of America" celebrations next weekend. The gala's featured speaker, Lord Christopher Monckton, a science adviser to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, is one of the world's most infamous global warming-deniers. Other "distinguished" speakers include Sean Hannity and Ted Nugent.

So why is Verizon sponsoring this pro-mountaintop removal rally on a strip mine site? Calls to the company have so far gone unanswered.

This "Friends of America" thing sounds like something from the next stage of teabagging we've previously discussed.