The Justice Project is a multimedia editorial feature of WestVirginiaVille.com, focused on issues and people in the 2020 elections. SUBSCRIBE to our free newsletter for new videos and site updates: westvirginiaville.substack.com
This latest Justice Project 2020 video speaks for itself. On the hand in this year’s West Virginia elections, you’ve got state Attorney General Patrick Morrisey and his Trump-Adoring, Big Pharma-tangled connections, and Affordable Care Act Torpedoing Ways.
On the other hand, there’s labor lawyer Sam Brown Petsonk. Here’s are two minutes about that (above). Plus a snippet of “West Virginia Hills” by Brown on banjo and vocals and primo Mountain Stater musician Randy Gilkey on guitar and vocals. See some of Petsonk’s credentials for the job in the text of the video below.
TEXT from The Justice Project 2020 video: ‘The West Virginia Hills’
“I’m Sam Brown Petsonk and I’m the Democratic candidate for attorney general of West Virginia. I have to say I am plumb honored and just humbled to be here together with Randy Gilkey, one of our greatest guitar pickers and showmen here in the state of West Virginia. We’re going to do a little bit of the old “West Virginia Hills.”
EXCERPT from “WEST VIRGINIA HILLS …”
PETSONK: “I’m a labor lawyer presenting coal miners. Hundreds of coal miners and black lung cases, retirees, healthcare cases—all around West Virginia. So, I deal with our health care providers in our rural health clinics, our black lung clinics.
“And a lot of those health care providers came to me and they said, ‘Sam, you know, we’re scared about what’ll happen if we lose our federal health care programs …’
“And you know, Morrisey, the current attorney general, has filed this lawsuit to eliminate health care for 200,000 West Virginians.”
EXCERPT OF SONG:
“O, the hills … beautiful hills!
“How I love those West Virginia hills…
“If ‘oer sea or land I roam, still I think of happy home,
And my friends among those West Virginia hills.”
PETSONK: “I worked for Senator Robert C. Byrd when we enacted that federal health care law. And I helped to write some of it. I helped to write the parts that have brought black lung benefits to thousands of coal miners across this country—$5 billion of black lung benefits have come to American coal miners through the very same health care law that Morissey is trying to take away.
CONCLUSION OF SONG:
... I till I think of happy home…
and my friends among those West Virginia hills.
And my friends among those West Virginia hills.”
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