| For their August issue, Details magazine profiles Ayn Rand fanboy and Republican candidate Rand Paul's quest to win Kentucky's open U.S. Senate seat.
You can see why Massey Energy and International Coal Group love the guy, and have chosen him as one of three candidates they're going to aid with a flood of corporate 527 money this fall.
Paul thinks the problem with mountaintop removal is just a branding issue, perhaps corrected if we simply stop referring to the "Appalachian Mountains."
"The top ends up flatter, but we're not talking about Mount Everest. We're talking about these little knobby hills that are everywhere out here."
Paul continued courting Massey cash by reciting the repeatedly-debunked talking point that MTR provides needed useable land.
But it was probably when Paul shared his thoughts on federal mine safety rules with a crowd at the Harlan Center that Don Blankenship started digging for his checkbook:
"The bottom line is I'm not an expert, so don't give me the power in Washington to be making rules. You live here, and you have to work in the mines. You'd try to make good rules to protect your people here. If you don't, I'm thinking that no one will apply for those jobs."
In other words, leave everything up to the coal companies, Paul says. And if the mines are still ticking time bombs, methane detectors are being turned off and evacuation drills aren't conducted - well, no one's twisting your arm to make you work there.
The right's been romanticizing Libertarianism a lot this past year. Perhaps Paul's candidacy is a blessing in disguise, in that it shows just how regressive this type of thinking is.
Paul and his fellow wingnuts can wrap their ideology in all the talk of "freedom" they want, but it's painfully clear what this is all about - taking power away from the public, by transferring it away from a democratically-elected government and into the hands of unaccountable corporate officials.
The end result, in which the people ultimately have little or no say over their well being, is as undemocratic as it gets. |
