JP Morgan Chase, enabler of Homicidal Corporatism

Posted by Reverend Billy Talen at 12:13 pm
April 7, 2010


Chase Bank Helped Finance Massey Energy’s Recklessness — Pay Them Back With Dirt


You can’t say “Chase bank kills people to make money.” You can’t say “Chase kills people with YOUR money.” Now – this is a true statement, sadly proven again and again by their mountaintop removal strip-mining in Appalachia. Certainly Chase’s guilt was proven over the weekend by the results of its financing of Massey Energy’s recklessness at Performance Coal in West Virginia. The proof has been there for us to be shocked by – for years.

Beyond the proof is the common sense. Blowing up mountains with communities living in the valleys below? Leveling whole eco-systems and tossing the dead and dying earth like garbage into the streams below? Yet, somehow, even the common sense doesn’t work nowadays. Somehow the facts (AND the common sense) are defeated in our present-day American culture by corporate spin campaigns about “jobs” and “the economy,” and “clean coal.”

Then there is the 19th Century-style corruption of regulatory agencies and electeds and judges in Appalachia. But when we talk to activists on the ground in West Virginia those explanations aren’t enough. There is something else besides corporate disinformation and standard corruption. A veteran resister to Big Coal will look at us and then the voice trails off… We all sense something else is making it impossible to stop this violence. Our talk goes to “People are so bored…” “It has been so long since there was a social movement of any kind…” “People are angry but essentially… silent…”

Yes our shouts of outrage seem to disappear into black holes that hang in the air. There is a landscape that has silencers buried in the pavement, behind the billboard faces, inside the black plastic gadgets people smash against their heads. Our words disappear. The meaning fades. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/04/07/theres-a-mountian-in-my-lobby/