Government

Messrs. Coats and Messer Are Coal Industry Sellouts

MUNCIE, Indiana – After we wrote the article about Senator Dan Coats, we received a few emails wanting to know the contents of the letter written to both Sen. Coats and Representative Luke Messer. A couple of readers followed our link to the Huffington Post op/ed written by Jeffrey Sachs from the Earth Institute. He tore into the U.S. Chamber of Commerce with economic facts and questioned their morality and ethics. We did the same to our district representatives, Messrs. Messer and Coats.

In case you can’t read the quote in the meme above, it’s from Mr. Sachs saying, “I meet a lot of these people on Wall Street on a regular basis now, and I’m going to put it very bluntly, I regard the moral environment as pathological.”

We heard Matt Taibbi and Yves Smith tell Bill Moyers the same thing…actually, they called them sociopathic. Meaning they lack any conscience. You’d have to be sociopathic, or lack any conscience, to know what you’re doing is wrong, but try to sound convincing while you’re doing it – the climate change deniers. They are already threatening to close down the federal government over the President’s new EPA proposal.

If you’d like to learn more about Sachs, here is a link to Wikipedia and his website at Earth Institute. You can visit his personal website to get more information about his background and work in sustainable development. He is brilliant and has warned us for decades about the real costs of doing nothing to reverse the negative effects of man’s contribution to climate change.

Here is our letter to Messrs. Coats and Messer:

In case you haven’t read Muncie Voice, we recommend you check it out online. We’ve written several articles about our Hoosier environment and the new EPA standards. We received even more research this morning from Dr. Norma Kreilein on our Facebook page:

https://www.muncievoice.com/11225/conservative-hoosier-physician-calls-out-polluters/

https://www.facebook.com/muncievoice/posts/663454820370107

These figures and statistics are hard to ignore, but most of the conservative newspapers in this state have lulled Hoosiers into a naïve sleep with consistent misinformation. Some call Hoosiers “simple”, but I think they can handle the truth. Either way, it’s sugar-coating the fact the newspaper industry has slept with corporate interests for the past several decades.

While you feel comfortable in your carved up districts, rest assured times are changing in Indiana. You can either be a leader in this state or be known as another conservative puppet for the oil and gas industry while we face environmental realities. Our air in Indiana is filthy. Our ‘simple’ populace is coated with mercury and other toxic particles making us sick. It’s a public health disaster, but you smile and pat each other on the back and talk about economic development, or tell Hoosiers that Washington is attacking “Hoosiers way of life.”

If you read Mr. Sachs article, and watch his video interview on MSNBC, you’ll see that 69% of Hoosiers don’t want to breathe dirty air and they support EPA standards.

Our dependency on coal should have been reversed decades ago. As the largest physician organizations in the world come forward, they will have a friend in Muncie Voice. When simple Hoosiers learn their children and grandchildren have got sick because corporate lobbyists and politicians obstruct changes to protect profits for the Koch brothers and the coal industry, well, we suspect they’ll be ‘Bobby Knight after a loss’ mad.

So, how will you play the cards dealt to you? Will you be a politician or leader in our state? Will you make the tough call and side with the President of the United States, the EPA, the World Health Organization and some of the largest medical practitioner organizations in the world, or will you hide behind a phony report prepared by one of the Koch’s many trust-funded “think-tanks”?

These are the decisions that make some men leaders, while others shrink into their cowardice role as shiftless politicians. Which one will you be, Representative Luke Messer and Senator Dan Coats?

As we mentioned above, Senator Coats already answered our question. He’ll stand behind the Koch brothers and their dirty coal money, and let Hoosiers suck on mercury sticks. He is a shameful politician who completely disregards public health in favor of corporate greed which damages our environment here and abroad. The costs of which are growing exponentially and dwarfing the profits made by a few gas and oil capitalists.

It’s time to stop the madness and quit letting Hoosier newspapers jerk us around to protect advertisers. No more pulling punches on these guys and gals who have sold out their souls to Billionaires who make profit by damaging human life and hurting our environment.

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Todd Smekens

Journalist, consultant, publisher, and servant-leader with a passion for truth-seeking. Enjoy motorcycling, meditation, and spending quality time with my daughter and rescue hound. Spiritually-centered first and foremost. Lived in multiple states within the USA and frequent traveler to the mountains.

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