Bidder Number 70

Bidder 70 from Gage & Gage Productions on Vimeo.

Why does Tim DeChristopher go to jail while the CEOs of BP and Massey Coal go free?

I met with Tim DeChristopher at Netroots Nation, and asked him a similar question. Unfortunately my Flip Cam's battery died during my filming the panel discussion.

My question was this-- If MTR coal mining is literally killing people, why isn't anybody prosecuting the executive boards of these companies for murder?

Tim's answer was that we need creative and daring prosecuting attorneys to bring these sorts of cases. Which I took to mean in a roundabout way, that I should redouble my efforts at getting into law school. Specifically Pace, where Robert F Kennedy teaches.

Seeing this interview with Robert F Kennedy Jr is enheartening. Perhaps he and the Pace law clinic will pursue charges?

The following was originally posted over at Peaceful Uprising

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Environmental activist Tim DeChristopher is going to jail, but Don Blankenship isn’t—despite the fact that he illegally destroyed an entire mountain range. Why? Because he’s the CEO of Massey Energy Company—and has completely bought off the judicial system in West Virginia and eastern Kentucky.

In this conversation with The Nation and On the Earth Productions recorded at Chicago’s Orrington Hotel, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says that we are once again on the verge of losing our democracy to corporate power. Yet instead of surrendering the achievements of the New Deal and Progressive Era, activists need to fight for the middle class and prepare the way for social change. Kennedy has long been active in the environmental justice movement, and his latest efforts to stop mountaintop removal mining are featured in the new documentary, The Last Mountain.

Netroots Nation: Panel on Dirty Energy

Part 1:


Part 2:


Netroots Nation Panel on Dirty Energy includes:

Bruce Baizel of Earth Works
Michele Boyd of Physicians for Social Responsibility
Tim DeChristopher of Peaceful Uprising
Mary Anne Hilt of Sierra Club

Teacher Lindsy Floyd- "It's time to be human"

One of her students said, "You can't be our teacher right now, you have to be a human. You have to make the human decision. This is our future."

And so she made the human decision.

It's small acts of courage like this that build into social movements.

Tim DeChristopher at PowerShift 2011

Environmental Activist Tim DeChristopher convicted

For the heroic act of interrupting the energy industry's grab of public land

From DemocracyNow


A federal jury in Salt Lake City has convicted environmental activist Tim DeChristopher of two felony counts for disrupting the auction of more than 100,000 acres of federal land for oil and gas drilling. DeChristopher was charged in December 2008 with infiltrating a public auction and disrupting the Bush administration’s last-minute move to auction off oil and gas exploitation rights on vast swaths of federal land. A student at the time, DeChristopher posed as a bidder and bought 22,000 acres of land with no intent to pay in an attempt to save the property from drilling. He faces up to ten years in prison. DeChristopher joins us today to talk about the verdict.