The Hightower Report

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POOR JOHN ROBERTS

Now that Republican judges have taken over the Supreme Court, they are pushing the agenda item that is closest to their little, flinty hearts: their own paychecks.

On the court for only a year, Chief John Roberts issued his annual report, which you might think would cover any number of crucial judicial issues facing our country – the increasing class bias of the justice system, for example, favoring corporate power over the rest of us. But, no, America's top judge devoted his entire report to just one topic: the pay of federal judges. Indeed, the chief worked himself into such a rhetorical froth that he called the low pay of judges "a constitutional crisis."

This black-robed pauper wailed that federal judicial salaries are set by law at the same level as congressional salaries, which are now a mere $165,200 a year. With tears welling in his eyes, Roberts noted that for five of the past 13 years, Congress has even failed to provide a cost-of-living increase in this paltry pay. Breaking into sobs, he then blurted: "This situation is grievously unfair."

Oh, judge, we feel your pain! The 94% of us Americans who make less than $165,200 a year and who get zero cost-of-living adjustments can clearly see the injustice you are suffering. We realize that you were a corporate lawyer making more than a million dollars a year before Bush put you on the high bench, so your public paycheck obviously amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. Gosh, if only you'd known what the job paid before you took it!

I think we need some people on the Supreme Court and in Congress who come from the real workaday world, who'd see $165,200 a year as good pay, and who'd at least not insult regular Americans with self-serving gibberish about such pay being a "constitutional crisis." Get a grip, Roberts, and go to work – or get off the bench.

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A MOUNTAINTOP REVELATION

There is environmental degradation – and then there is environmental degradation that punches you right in the stomach.

Mountaintop removal is in this last category. Actually, "removal" is way too nice of a phrase for this abhorrent, destructive assault on Mother Nature by coal corporations. Rather than tunneling down to extract coal, corporate giants are simply blasting away the top thirds of Appalachia's mountains to allow them to scoop out the deposits.

This process is literally destroying some of the most gorgeous, ancient, and ecologically unique mountains in the whole world – as well as destroying the life of people, plants, and animals that inhabit these serene forests. The rubble that once was the mountaintop is labeled "spoil" by the corporations, who crudely bulldoze it down into the streams and valleys below, where it is then called "fill."

For years, local residents and environmental groups have fought often lonely battles against these powerful corporate exploiters, but lately they are being joined by some allies who are new to environmental causes – and who come to the fight with a strong moral force. Appalachian group "Christians for the Mountains," part of a national awakening among people of faith to what evangelicals call "creation care," is urging religious people to take up mountaintop destruction "as a spiritual issue" – which, after all, it is.

Of course, the coal industry insists it is doing God's work by blowing up mountains. As an industry spokesman explained: "Human welfare depends on the rational exploitation of nature." But the corporations aren't winning this religious argument – as a retired coal miner put it as he viewed the blasted and flattened peaks where he lives: "God ain't ever run no bulldozer."

To learn about a DVD explaining the issue, check out www.christiansforthemountains.org, or call 304/799-4137.