Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. gave an important interview to Tavis Smiley earlier this past summer. He talked about mountaintop-removal mining in West Virginia, the influence of corporations on democracy in the U.S., and the influence of corporations on U.S. media.
I'll provide a link to the 24-minute interview, the trailer of Kennedy's new documentary, The Last Mountain, and also give you selected excerpts from the transcript of the interview, along with a few stills from the film.
Here's a link to the interview. And here's the trailer from the documentary.
And here are selected excerpts from the transcript:
“They have flattened an area larger than the state of Delaware. They have blown up the five hundred biggest mountains in West Virginia in the last ten years, and it’s all illegal. They have buried 2,500 miles of rivers and streams. That’s illegal. . . . In order to do that, you have to subvert democracy. So if you go to West Virginia, democracy essentially doesn’t exist. . . . The transparency is disappeared in government, which is the hallmark of democracy. The agencies that are supposed to protect the West Virginian public from these companies have become the sock puppets [or] instrumentalities for these companies they are supposed to regulate. And the judiciary and virtually every publically elected official in the state has been corrupted by big coal. By every poll, two thirds of the people in West Virginia want to see mountain-top removal banned, but not a single politician dares to say that in the state, and this is what happens when corporations take over government.
“You see the Tea Party out here, Tavis, saying that big government is the big threat to democracy, and I agree. . . . But the bigger threat comes from unleashed corporate power, and we have to understand in this country that the domination of business by government is called communism. The domination of government by business is called fascism. And that is what you’re seeing. . . . Well, our job is to walk that narrow trail in between and hold big business at bay with our right hand and big government at bay with our left and walk that narrow trail in between, which is free-market capitalism and democracy. And to do that, we need an independent press that is willing to stand up and speak to power and is going to inform the public, and we need an informed public that can recognize the milestones of tyranny, and we don’t have either of those things left in this country.
“When my father started talking about strip mining in the Appalachians back in the sixties, I remember a conversation I had with him where he said, ‘This is the richest state if you look at the resources and the land, but it’s the poorest people after the state of Mississippi, the 49th poorest people in the country.’ Why is that? It’s because the corporations have stolen the resources from the people in the state. He said, ‘They’re not just destroying the environment; they are permanently impoverishing these communities because there is no way that you can regenerate an economy from these barren landscapes that are left behind.’ And he said, ‘They’re doing it so they can break the unions.’ And that’s exactly what they did in West Virginia."
“When he told me that, there were 151,000 unionized mineworkers in West Virginia digging coal out of tunnels in the ground. Today there are fewer than 15,000 miners left in the state. So 9 of 10 jobs have been removed. But they’re taking twice the amount of coal out of the state that they were in 1968. The only difference is, back then a large amount of that wealth was being left in that state for salaries and pensions and reinvestment in the community. Today it all goes straight up to Wall Street. . . .
“Now we have a Supreme Court . . . there’s no coherent right-wing philosophy to the Supreme Court. The only coherent philosophy to Alito, Scalia, Roberts, and Clarence Thomas, one thing: The corporations always win. If it’s government against an individual, the government wins. If it’s corporations against the individual, the corporation wins. If it’s corporations against the government, the corporation wins. Show me any exception to that written by that Supreme Court. . . Last year they repealed this 100-year-old law and made it legal for the first time in a century for corporations to flood our federal political campaigns with a tsunami of money, and that is the beginning of the end. . .
“The devolution of the American press began in 1986 when Ronald Reagan abolished the fairness doctrine. We had a law in this country that we passed in 1928 that said that the air waves belong to the public. The broadcasters can be licensed to use them, but only if they use them to promote the public interest, to inform the public and advance democracy. That’s why we have the 6:00 news. They didn’t want it. The broadcasters didn’t want that because the news departments were chronic money losers. . . .
“Today as a result of Reagan’s changes—Reagan abolished the fairness doctrine in 1988 as a favor to the Christian right, which had helped him get elected, and wanted to take over all of AM radio, which is now complete. Talk radio is 95 percent controlled by the right. And the big studio heads helped him get elected who wanted to take over all media.
“So now you have five giant corporations that control virtually all 14,000 radio stations in our country, all 2,200 TV stations, 80 percent of our newspapers, all of our billboards, and most of the large internet content providers.
“So you have five guys who are deciding what Americans hear as news. They no longer have an obligation to serve the public interest. Their only obligation is to their shareholders. They serve that obligation not by informing us, telling us the things we need to understand to make rational decisions in a democracy, but rather by entertaining us. . . . They got rid of their investigative reporters. Eighty-five percent of them lost their jobs in the last 15 years.”
