SUNDANCE #2: RAGE, OUTRAGE, AND A VISION


The Last Mountain, which premiered today at Sundance, is about the fight to save one last mountain ridge in West Virginia from being blown up and strip mined for coal.

This is a must see, must share, film. It will be released in June. Lobby to get it to your town, your community, your school. It will enrage you. It will – hopefully – move you to action.

I saw it with my daughter, Ana. She watched in tears. We’re writing this article together.



Ana: The film focuses mainly on Coal River Valley, West Virginia, which is surrounded by extremely vivid examples of the devastating effects of mountain top removal. As I watched the film progress I met the people getting cancer from the pollution, saw their children developing asthma and being born with autism due to the greed of major corporations. I keep in mind that coal is being burned in 600 power plants across the country. The dangers of coal-fired power plants ARE close-to-home for all Americans, no matter where they live.

It’s a David v. Goliath story.

This time David is a waitress with two kids, Maria Gunnoe.


Goliath is Massey Energy.

And what a villain they are. As exploitive as Fagin in Oliver Twist, as rapacious as the Great White Shark in Jaws, as smug as Hannibal Lector in Silence of the Lambs, as imperious as Darth Vader in Star Wars. Except, of course, the company is real. Like all great villains, Massey’s CEO and it’s spokespeople, seem to sincerely believe that what they are doing is right.



Ana: Robert Kennedy, Jr. is a powerful part of the fight to preserve the Appalachian mountains and stop companies like Massey Energy from destroying people’s homes, their health and most importantly, their futures. There’s a part in the film when Kennedy speaks about when the bulldozers came to build a road through the forest next to his childhood home. The animated movie called Fern Gully immediately came to mind, and the feelings I felt as a child about the loggers coming to cut down the rain forest. Every child knows that cutting down forests is wrong, burying streams and rivers is wrong, and blowing up the tops of mountains and leaving only leveled ground and lakes of toxic sludge behind, is definitely wrong.



Think of coal as a center point.

The filmmakers, and Robert Kennedy, Jr. who is featured in the film, do. The most significant issues we face today, radiate out from that point.

On every level, coal mining and burning coal for energy, is destructive.

Mountain top removal and strip mining, “has destroyed 500 Appalachian mountains, decimated 1 million acres of forest, and buried 2000 miles of streams.” Processing the coal puts coal dust in the air and creates billions of tons of toxic sludge. Massey has 28 ponds filled with toxic sludge. In the last ten years they’ve spilled 24 times, “contaminating rivers with more than 300 million gallons of sludge; two times the amount released in BP's Gulf oil disaster.” When coal is burned in power plants, emissions pour out from their smoke stacks. If you happen to live near a power plant, expect to get cancer. The epidemiology shows clusters of autistic children in such neighborhoods.

The emissions drift across the whole country. Forty-eight states have issued warnings – ‘Don’t eat the fish you catch in our streams!’ The oceans have been polluted with mercury from coal-fired power plants, so don’t eat tuna more than once a week either.

Burning coal pollutes the whole earth. It’s one of the top producers of CO2 emissions and climate change.

The coal companies, the railroads – which get 40% of the their business from shipping coal – and power companies all join in reciting the same litany. Coal is necessary. Stop us and you won’t have electricity. Slow us down, and it’ll be like living in Baghdad, where the lights only come on half a day. We need it to be mined as cheaply as possible. Environmental regulations will make your electric bill go up. Coal mining creates jobs and prosperity. Stop it, slow it, regulate it, enforce the rules, any of that nasty stuff at all, will bring the American economy to it’s knees – alright, it’s already on it’s knees, face down in the mud – and cost jobs!!! Jobs being the triple exclamation point in all the industry’s arguments.

None of this, of course, is true.

Maria Gunnoe, Robert Kennedy, Jr., and all the people with them who are trying to stop Massey are not merely saying, “No.”

They have an alternative plan. The ridge they are trying to save is a prime spot for wind power. More jobs. Safer, healthier jobs. More taxes paid to the county. Less destruction to the environment. No harm to the air and water.

It should be a national issue. Not just a local issue.

If we think of wind as a natural resource, Kennedy says, “the United States is the Saudi Arabia of wind.” The wind power we could generate from just three states – North Dakota, Montana, and Texas – could supply the power needs of the whole country. Even if we all switch to electric cars. In order to do that, we have to rebuild our electric grid.

Getting there is expensive. But once you do it, if we do it, it means essentially free electric power … well, as long as the winds shall blow. Instead of pouring money down the pipeline to Saudi Arabia or tearing apart the earth and poisoning our children to do it.

Plus it actually does create jobs. Coal mining does not.

That’s should be an easy sell. A no brainer.

But it’s not.

Because Big Coal has Big Money. The mining, railroad, and coal based energy companies have spent $1.5 billion in the last decade on lobbying and campaign contributions. Joe Manchin, governor of West Virginia from 2005-2010, shows up as owned and operated by the mine owners. He’s moved to become the Senator from West Virginia. The Bush Administration’s #1 constituency was the energy business, oil and coal. Expect the new Republican majority to try to destroy the forty year old Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, to defund, and declaw the EPA. After all, it was energy companies that funded their campaigns.

Who wins?



Ana: There are many images that will stay with me; the coal miners fighting the protesters, trying to protect the jobs that are killing them by defending the companies that pay them as little as possible and destroy the futures of their communities. The lakes of toxic sludge holding billions of gallons of harmful chemicals, sometimes even radioactive, in every state in this country. The faces of men making billions of dollars from the deaths of people and the steady decline of environmental health in this country and the world. The images that will stay with me the most though, are the faces of the people willing to stand up to big companies, corrupt politicians, and a world that often seems like it isn’t listening.


Watch the film to be outraged. And to be inspired.
Yes, ordinary citizens can make a difference.
No, it’s not just one battle. It’s a war. Big money, greed, and rapacity is on one side. Sanity, decency, and the future of America, is on the other.
They say in Harlan County,

there are no neutrals there ….

Don't scab for the bosses,

don't listen to their lies,

us poor folks haven't got a chance,

unless we organize. …

Which side are you on, boys.

Which side are you on.

THIS ONE IS BY ANA BEINHART

After the twelve hour journey beginning in an upstate New York snowstorm and ending in the surprisingly mild Park City resort town, I was finally ready to begin the Sundance experienece.
First things first, coffee. The offer of a walk to Starbucks gets me out of couch at around 8:30 in the morning and as my father and I walk towards our favorite beverages I start realize how excited I am to be here. We head towards the Holiday Village Cinema 4 to see “The Last Mountain” and when we arrive it turns out that the film actually started at 9 not 9:30 as the website stated. My father grabs the two tickets left for him by the publicist. Being late is clearly frowned upon and we’re told that the doors have already been closed and we will have to be cleared to be allowed inside. Finally we’re told that the manger of the theatre normally doesn’t let people in late but she’ll make an exception.
We take a seat in the front row and I lean my head back to watch the massive screen. We missed the introduction of the movie but I was immediately immersed in the movie anyway. The film focuses mainly on Coal River Valley, West Virginia, which is an extremely effective example of the devastating effects of mountain top removal. As I watched the film progress I met the people getting cancer from the pollution, saw their children getting asthma and being born with autism due to the greed of major corporations, I keep in mind that coal is being burned in 600 power plants across the country. The dangers of coal-fired power plants ARE close-to-home for all Americans, no matter where they live.
Robert Kennedy, Jr. is a powerful part of the fight to preserve the Appalachian mountains and stop companies like Massey Energy from destroying peoples homes, their health and most importantly, their futures. There’s a part in the film when Robert speaks about when the bulldozers came to build a road through the forest next to his childhood home. The animated movie called Fern Gully immediately came to mind, and the feelings I felt as a child about the loggers coming to cut down the rain forest. Every child knows that cutting down forests is wrong, burying streams and rivers is wrong, and blowing up the tops of mountains and leaving only leveled ground and lakes of toxic sludge behind, is definitely wrong.
There is no way that any person could truly think that there’s nothing wrong with what Massey Energy is doing to the planet and the people living on it. Greed is disgustingly unattractive, we know this, problem is it’s also a dangerous habit with massive amounts of collateral damage.
I’m not going to recap the film any more than I already have, all I am going to do is say that the 90 minutes you could spend watching this film would be well worth your time. There are many images that will stay with me; the coal miners fighting the protesters, trying to protect the jobs that are killing them, protecting the companies that pay them as little as possible and destroy the futures of their communities. The lakes of toxic sludge holding billions of gallons of harmful chemicals, sometimes even radioactive, in every state in this country. The faces of men making billions of dollars from the deaths of people and the steady decline of environmental health in this country and the world. The images that will stay with me the most though, are the faces of the people willing to stand up to big companies, corrupt politicians, and a world that often seems like it isn’t listening. My face rarely had time to dry throughout this film but I left feeling hopeful anyway.
We do have options, there are people who care, the future is ours to mold, and this film not only makes that apparent in the end, but can be used as a great tool to outline the possibilities to those unaware.

SUNDANCE BLOG #1 – ENTOURAGE

I wrote a book, Salvation Boulevard.

Cathy Schulman, the Oscar winning producer of Crash, optioned it for Mandalay.

Cathy gave it to George Ratliff, the fine young director of Joshua and Hellhouse.

George wrote a script with Doug Max Stone.
It was good enough to get Pierce Brosnan to play the charismatic mega-church preacher.

Then they got Greg Kinnear (Oscar nominee), Jennifer Connelly (Oscar winner), Marissa Tomei (Oscar Winner), Ed Harris (4 times Oscar nominee and he deserves at least one), Ciarin Hinds (Ceaser in HBO’s Rome), and, at the last minute, Isabelle Fuhrman.

It also has Jim Gaffigan. When I told my 19 year old son about the cast it was only after I mentioned Gaffigan that he said, “Props, dad!” Pierce Brosnan had the same experience with his kids.

Somewhere in there, Celine Rattray (The Kids Are Alright), also signed on as a producer.

The film got shot. It got cut. It got selected for Sundance.

It premieres Monday, January 24^th.

All I know about Sundance is from watching HBO’s Entourage.

For those who don’t know, Entourage is about a young guy – like Mark Wahlberg, who created it – who goes to Hollywood to be a star. He brings two friends and his brother, Johnny Drama, a struggling TV actor, with him from Queens, New York.

They all go to the Sundance Film Festival which takes place primarily in Park City, a ski town, with two more ski areas on its flanks, Deer Valley and The Canyons.

They decide to go skiing. They start ragging on Johnny Drama, “What do you know about skiing?” Johnny says, in his blustering way, “I’ve skied Hunter Mountain, and if you can ski Hunter Mountain, you can ski anywhere!”

I am a Hunter Mountain ski instructor (two days a week, usually Tuesdays and Fridays if you want drop by.) My daughter, Ana, started working in the ski school this year. My son, James, taught snowboarding there for a season. The above is, naturally, our favorite line in all of television history.

Originally, I was going out for ten days, my wife coming for two or three days, my daughter, maybe, and my son would maybe come up from Boulder, where he’s in college.

As it turns out, my wife, Gil, Ana, and Ana’s friend Trevor are all coming with me for the whole ten days. I have my skis, Ana has her snowblades, Trevor has his snowboard, and I can’t wait for the moment when we get to the top of one of the peaks, look down and cry, in unison, “If you can ski Hunter Mountain you can ski anywhere!”

Oh, yeah, there are movies, too.

The first up, at midnight tonight, Friday, January 21^st, is the documentary Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel.

It was produced by Stone Douglass. Stone started in the business as a grip. Which I did (key grip, Lords of Flatbush, look it up). Then he made money in a dot.com start-up. He has the option on The Librarian, another of my books. He loves to ski. He is also a mensch. Or if you prefer Italian to Yiddish, a stand-up guy.

As it happens, my wife was in a Corman film, Rock’n’Roll High, as Angel Dust, the Ramones #1 groupie.

I told Stone. He invited us to the pre-movie dinner with Roger Corman, to the premiere, and to the after movie party, starting at 1:30 AM. We left home at 5 AM this morning to get on a flight from Newburgh to Atlanta to Salt Lake. There’s a two hour time zone shift. I normally pass out two minutes after the The Daily Show, so starting to party at 3:30 AM, my body’s time, is going to be interesting.
On Saturday, I have a 9 AM screening of The Last Mountain. That’s serious stuff, about mountain top removal to strip mine coal. The sort of thing I want to report on for Huffington Post.

This has been the set-up. To let you know who I am, and where I’m coming from. My first Sundance blog of many, hurriedly hashed out in Atlanta airport.

The others will be a mix of political and social significance – presuming the films I see have political and social significance – celebrity gossip, and ski reports.

Thursday, Jan. 20 ... We're packing ... leaving for Sundance Film Festival tomorrow.

From Newburgh/Stewart to Atlanta to Salt Lake City.

Myself, my partner in life Gillian Farrell, our daughter, Ana, and her friend Trevor.

Get a bus to Park City, find the condo, unpack, change, shop for food ... go to first event!

Oh, yeah, glad I'm writing this down. Get Credentials!

Dinner with Roger Corman, hosted by Stone Douglass producer of

CORMAN'S WORLD: Exploits of A Hollywood Rebel

a documentary. Then, see the film at midnight. Then the after film party ... yeah, I can really stay up that late.

And I have a film to see Saturday morning at 9AM, The Last Mountain, a documentary about mountain top removal for coal mining.

I will be blogging from there, writing more formal articles, meantime ... here's a political piece

Class Warfare – Part II

Summary of Part I: We’re losing, they’re winning. (see below for full article)

Who are they? The richest 1%. And maybe the next 9%.

Who are we? All the rest.

Which poses an interesting question.

How has a tiny fraction of the population – which is diverse in many ways – arranged for their narrowest economic interests to dominate the economic interests of the vast majority? And, while they’re at it, endanger the economic well being of our nation, and bring the financial system of the whole world to the brink of collapse.

They have money.

We have votes.

Theoretically, that means we should have the government. Theoretically, government should be a countervailing force against the excesses of big money, take the long view for the good of the nation, and watch out for the majority. Let alone for the poor and downtrodden.

What we actually have is one political party that is flat out the party of big money and another party that sells out to big money.

Well, at least we have safety nets.

George Bush’s biggest regret is that he didn’t privatize social security. Why so eager?

One reason is that it is a big pile of money. Absolutely gigantic. It drives the bankers and brokers crazy that they can’t get their hands on it.

The other is ideological hatred. Stephen Moore - Senior Fellow, Cato Institute, Contributing editor, National Review, and President of the Free Enterprise Fund - wrote, "Social Security is the soft underbelly of the welfare state. If you can jab your spear through that, you can undermine the whole welfare state."

Where Bush failed, Obama has now taken the first step.

His recent tax deal includes cuts on employee contributions to Social Security. Which means defunding, weakening, and setting a new precedent, that Social Security contributions can be cut to “stimulate” the economy.

The crash has put the states in trouble. Rather than raise taxes, or borrow, several have decided on cuts to Medicaid, the program that services several categories of low income people: pregnant women, children under 19, the blind, disabled, or who need nursing home care. If you’re a poor kid who needs a liver transplant, you can beg, rob a convenience store, or die.

This shift to the right is a triumph of long and very well funded propaganda campaign.

Every time I read an op-ed in the New York Times and it says it was written by a “Senior scholar” from the Hoover Institute or “Fellow” from the Cato Institute, I want to scream, please replace that with “paid whore funded by psychotic right-wing billionaire.” Which is significantly more accurate.

They, in turn, have a great influence on the main stream media. “As conservatives decried the media's left bias, they saw their institutions mentioned in various media almost 8,000 times in 1995, while liberal or progressive think tanks received only 1,152 citations.” (How Conservative Philanthropies and Think Tanks Transform US Policy, by Sally Covington, Covert Action Quarterly, Winter 1998)

Their influence on the national media affects the whole national dialogue.

Now, of course, they’ve taken the think tank concept to a whole new level – Fox News.

What about the media? Aren’t journalists – outside of Fox News – supposed to be objective.

In journalism there is no objective reality. There are only objectively collated quotes. Quotes can only come from “valid” sources. A journalist cannot look at tax cuts and compare them to economic results – job growth, changes in the median wage, and the like – and report that tax cuts do not create jobs. They can only quote politicians, like Bush and Obama, who say that tax cuts are a stimulus, and then look for someone of equal authority – or at least significant authority – to say the opposite, then go Chinese menu, two quotes from column A, one for column B. But what if there are no heavyweights ready to go on record for column B?

Here’s where it gets stranger than strange.

A whole field - economics - has lost its way.

This became obvious when 99.7% (that’s a made up, but probably accurate number), failed to predict the crash of ’08. Failed to diagnose the housing bubble, failed to understand the derivatives bubble, and failed to realize that world’s biggest banks were all bankrupt.

After the crash, they failed to cry out against the tax cuts that brought it on. They failed to come up with a way to solve the problems. Which, based on history, seem fairly obvious, raise taxes and spend the money on useful things that private industry can’t or won’t do, like hiring people.

Paul Krugman’s theory, loosely paraphrased, is that economists suffer from physics envy, which is like penis envy, but dumber. Economics is a social science, which is soft. Social scientists look at physics, the hardest of the hard sciences. They see lots of math and formulas. They imagine that if they have lots of math they will get hard, too. In order to create mathematical models out of the messy complexity of human activity, they presume perfect markets. So long as the economy is stable, that frequently works.

Faith in the perfection of markets promotes deregulation and tax cuts. That destabilizes the economy. The economists, therefore, help create the disasters that don’t exist in their mathematical models.

Charles Fergueson, who directed the superb documentary Inside Job, is much more cynical. He believes that academic economists, like doctors who shill for pharmaceutical companies, are on the take from big money interests. He does a marvelous job in the film of demonstrating exactly that.

Indeed, all of academia – except perhaps for English departments – have become part of the business, banking, military, and political nexus.

The ivory tower was supposed to be above the mucky world. That was one of our final defenses in the class war - a place devoted to knowledge for its own sake and truth just because it was true.

Now, universities pursue truths that someone will fund a grant for.

Tomorrow’s truth is what’s paid for today.

CLASS WARFARE

We’re in a class war.

It’s the corporations and the very wealthiest against all the rest of us.

We’re losing.

In 1962 the wealthiest 1% of American households had 125 times the wealth of the median household. Now it’s 190 times as much.

Is that a case of a rising tide lifting all boats, just a few of them a little bit higher?

No.

From 1950 to 1965 median family income rose from $24,000 a year to $38,000 a year. That’s close to 4% a year, close to 60% over 15 years.

That’s a rising tide.

In 1964 there was a big tax cut. That’s when things started to slow down for average people. By the mid-seventies the rise of the middle class stalled. From 1975 to 2010 median family income rose $42,936 to $49,777. That’s not quite 16% over 25 years, less than six-tenths of one percent per year.

Briefly, when taxes went up under Clinton, median income rose, peaked at $52,587 in 1999, and then, after Bush cut taxes, declined.

Keep in mind that this is median family income. In the fifties and sixties, family income was usually earned by a single person. Today, family income normally comes from at least two people.

At the same time, income for the richest soared.

In 1979 the richest 1% of Americans earned 9% of all US income. Now they earn 24% of all US income. One percent of Americans earn nearly one fourth of all the income in the country.

Then came the crashes of 2001 and 2008 and the recessions that followed.

The crash hasn’t changed anything. Things have become worse.

From 1990 to 2005, adjusted for inflation - the minimum wage is down 9%, production workers’ pay is up only over fifteen years 4.3%.

At the same time, the rich get richer:

Corporate profits are up 106.7%.

The S&P 500 is still up 141.4% since 1990.

CEO compensation is up 282%.

Call it transfer of wealth. Or call it class warfare.

What’s wrong with the rich getting richer?

Timothy Noah, in The United States of Inequality (Slate, 9/30/10), wrote,

“Income distribution in the United States [has become] more unequal than in Guyana, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and roughly on par with Uruguay, Argentina, and Ecuador.”

Take a look at that list.

Countries with wide income inequality don’t lead the world in research, technology, industry, and innovation. They’re unstable. They have large underclasses. They have high rates of crime. They have little opportunity.

In such countries the rich have disproportionate power. They take control of all aspects of society, especially government, the police, and the judiciary. They become self perpetuating.

If current trends continue, “the United States by 2043 will have the same income inequality as Mexico.” (Tula Connell, Mar 12, 2010, AFL-CIO Now).

Countries with high levels of income inequality are third world countries.

Here’s how regular people can deal with cultures of high inequality.

The primary, and best, weapon is a progressive tax structure.

As people move up the income ladder they pay a higher rate at each rung. Unearned income –from dividends and capital gains – is taxed at least as high as earned income (money that people actually work for.)

Tax cuts for the wealthy mark, with great precision, the decline in fortunes of ordinary Americans.

Tax cuts for the wealthy mark, with equal precision, the increase in inequality.

We had a chance to slow the process by letting the last round, the Bush tax cuts, expire.

We’ve lost that round.

People can become educated and move on up.

Back in the 60’s, when I was growing up, New York City had free universities. The burgeoning SUNY system charged $400 tuition a semester. The minimum Regents scholarship was $400 a semester. If a student didn’t get one, he or she could easily earn enough to pay their tuition with a summer job. The same held true for most state university systems across the country.

Today, students have to borrow.

The median student debt for an undergraduate degree – forget about a doctorate, law school, and med school – is $20,000. The first, and truest, lesson you learn when you go to college is how to be in service to the banks.

We’ve lost that battle.

What does it mean?

“Children from low-income families have only a 1 percent chance of reaching the top 5 percent of the income distribution, versus children of the rich who have about a 22 percent chance.

“Children born to the middle quintile of parental family income ($42,000 to $54,300) had about the same chance of ending up in a lower quintile than their parents (39.5 percent) as they did of moving to a higher quintile (36.5 percent). Their chances of attaining the top five percentiles of the income distribution were just 1.8 percent.”

(Understanding Mobility in America, April 26, 2006, Tom Hertz, American University)

Working people can organize and form unions.

Unions do more than raise wages. They improve working conditions and safety. They provide protection against abuse, intimidation, and wrongful dismissal. Non-union employers have to compete, partly to keep out unions, so the existence of unions helps everyone. Unions also have political power, they spend money and mobilize their members to vote.

Businesses have become very good at beating unions. And they’re getting better at it. According to Business Week, ("How Wal-Mart Keeps Unions at Bay,” 10/28/2002),"over the past two decades, Corporate America has perfected its ability to fend off labor groups."

In the 1940’s a third of private sector employees were unionized. Now it’s down to just 7.2%.

Unions only remain strong in the public sector, where membership is 37%.

If you read the papers or watch the news, you will see an anti-public service union story almost everyday. These are the people who teach your kids, pick up the trash, clean the sewers, drive the buses and trains, they’re the police and fireman. The stories will tell you that their pension fund liabilities will bankrupt the states. That it’s unionized teachers who have ruined our schools. Charter schools – without unions – are the new favorite charity for billionaires.

When a country is, or becomes, a third world country, the other thing people can do is run. To some place richer and freer. Like America.

But when America becomes Mexico, where you gonna run to?

PART II TO FOLLOW SOON