Three more retired coal miners died of black lung today. Over 105,000 Americans have suffered and died from black lung related diseases; 10,000 miners, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, have died from black lung in the last decade.

Despite a recent spike in black...

On October 18, 1929, just days before the Stock Market Crash, Thomas Wolfe published his monumental novel, Look Homeward, Angel, unveiling the machinations behind small town life in western North Carolina. It took Wolfe several years to return to his Asheville hometown, and when he finally took his first glimpse...

"These laws are no panacea; nor are they self-executing. More than ever, we must maintain our vigilance." --Ferdinand Pecora, Wall Street Under Oath, "A Word About the Future," 1939

Bailout or otherwise, we don't need no stinkin' commission to understand the roots of the current Wall Street crisis. While our...

"When party activists gathered in Chicago to nominate Bill Clinton to a second term in 1996, Mr. Obama was making his first run for political office, but he did not have enough clout to get full access to the convention. Instead, he concluded that high-dollar breakfasts and dinners seemed to...

"The phrase clean coal is a contradiction in terms. There's no such thing as clean coal now."
Al Gore, Meet the Press, July 20, 2008

In his New York Times column this past Sunday, Tom Friedman rewrote and distorted Al Gore's new energy challenge, which called for an energy...

Whether or not the George W. Bush administration's surprising act this week of initiating people-to-people diplomacy with Iran is sincere, it presents a critical opportunity for cultural and human rights organizations in the United States to take the lead in making the first small steps in bridging the great...

If Senator Barack Obama ever needs a living symbol of change we can believe in, and a hopeful way to transcend the dirty politics of our failed energy policies, he should go and see the future of renewable energy in the Coal River Valley in West Virginia.

Yes, renewable...

Call her America's first blogger, albeit two centuries ahead of her times. Today is her birthday.

Born on June 11, 1769, Anne Royall was an American original, a stranger to fear, and one of the nation's most daring, impassioned and indomitable social critics in Washington, DC. In the early nineteenth...

When the shouting is over, a sad fact remains about Appalachia during this presidential primary season: When Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton, trundled their liberal stop-global-warming bandwagons into the coalfields of West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, southwestern Virginia and eastern Tennesse, they blew off one of the biggest crimes against nature,...

When I saw the clip of the Daily Show's Jon Stewart apeing a misinformed West Virginia voter last week, I had a flashback to a Saturday Night Live "Appalachian ER" skit, which featured rocker Neil Young embroiled in a mess of incest and depravity.

How the media loves its hillbillies....

Instead of a pie in the face, which Thomas L. Friedman ducked at Brown University a couple of weeks ago, the student pranksters should have tossed a few tough questions to the bestselling author about his fading green bona fides.

For starters, take his ill-informed understanding of coal. Using his...

In the eyes of most pundits, the upcoming primaries in Appalachia -- including western Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Kentucky and West Virginia -- will most likely deal a blow to Sen. Barack Obama's ability to transcend the brewing racial quagmire in presidential politics. Didn't Sen. Hillary Clinton score a landslide victory...

"Walter Mondale has seen the light at the end of the tunnel - and it's out."
-Dan Rather, CBS Evening News, election night, November 6, 1984

As Senator Hillary Clinton took the stage in Ohio, aglow in the victories that came about from her Red Phone ads and negative...

"I am ready to act, if I can find brave men to help me." --Carter Woodson

As schools, communities and politicians across the country celebrate Black History Month in February, they will be remiss if their lessons don't include the coal fields of Fayette County, West Virginia. There, in the...

Let's face it: Every single presidential candidate with a veritable chance at victory, Democrat and Republican, is in the hip pocket of King Coal.

The Republicans, of course, make no bones about their unfettered support for strip-mining and lax mining safety. Despite the undeniable fact that coal-fired plants in our...