The mud is being slung and the stakes are getting higher in West Virginia as November nears. The Democrats can’t afford to lose West Virginia to the GOP, and the Republicans are savoring at this opportunity and doing everything they can to capitalize on it.

The coal industry, especially corporations like Massey Energy, have an interest in using the agencies of counterterrorism to target activists for conspiring to commit acts of “domestic terrorism.” Corporations like Massey Energy have lobbied for support from federal law enforcement so that they can be protected from the threat posed to them by a movement to end mountaintop removal.

Appalachia Rising will mobilize people from across the country, and especially Appalachia, against the destruction of Mountaintop Removal Mining (MTR). This scourge to the environment has effected thousands upon thousands of people, but coal barons cling to the profit motive and push forward.

The anger and courage of Americans who have been expressing opposition to the coal industry and expending energy to chip away at the power coal companies have to destroy America’s environment is paying off.

This is the fourth part of an analysis of the swing state Pennsylvania. It focuses on the industrial southwest, a once deep-blue region rapidly trending Republican. Part five can be found here.

Pittsburgh and the Southwest

Pennsylvania’s southwest has much in common with West Virginia and Southeast Ohio, the northern end of Appalachia. Electoral change in the region is best understood by grouping these three areas together as a whole.

Socially conservative (the region is famously supportive of the NRA) but economically liberal, the industrial southwest voters typify white working-class Democrats. These voters can be found in unexpected places: Catholics in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, loggers along the Washington coast, rust-belt workers in Duluth, Minnesota and Buffalo, New York.

More below.

Who is financing Mountaintop Removal now that Chase got out of the business? Our answer came from Rainforest Action Network. Two banks, mostly, PNC Bank of Philadelphia and UBS Bank of Switzerland.

Don Blankenship is in more hot water. Maybe one day this coal conman will be ousted, or better yet…arrested

Obama’s EPA approves 42 of 48 mountain top destruction permits.

Did Obama throw Appalachia’s mountaintops under the bulldozers? Yes. Looks like the Mountain Justice Summer and other local campaigns as well as a whole lotta enviro attorneys will need help.

a look at what’s being done to the mountains of West Virginia, and a few ways to support wind technology instead