Mountain Mud At UBS Bank

UBS is the leading financier of Mountaintop Removal, a deadly form of strip-mining. The coal companies it finances blow up mountain peaks with dynamite, then push the dying soil into the valleys and streams. They poison the water, people get sick, children have unusual cancers. UBS recently arranged $400 million more for this practice. They are the dark lords of Appalachia. They do to our mountains what they would never do to their beloved Alps.

JPMorgan Chase was the ascendant bank for big coal, with extensive stock and bond offerings after the recession began two years ago. Rev. Billy and friends journeyed to Coal River Valley in W VA and returned to New York with wounded soil from the mountains. The Choir used the soil to sculpt little peaks in 20 Chase branches, along with song, prayer and sermon -- plus information about strip-mining for customers wandering in.

On July 1st, 2010 Rev. Billy and Mountaintop Gospel Choir left it's first deposit of murdered mountain mud at UBS' Manhattan Headquarters on 51 Street and 6 Avenue.

 Photos by John Quilty

From The Rev.

Our Appalachian mountain soil leading the way, we started the UBS campaign in the canyons of absolutely de-politicized 6th Avenue. Since we are mixing American icons, trying to get people to think, our Jimmy Swaggart without Jesus Christ plus radicals in robes harmonizing created dropped jaws from the lobby of UBS to the subway at Radio City. Mostly folks stared at us in some sort of dreams state. It wasn't like a conversation, where an audience talks back and pushes and pulls. It was a dream. We couldn't tell if anyone knew what Mountaintop Removal was, so we kept starting over with the basics. "Blow up mountains, then push the dying earth into neighboring valleys." "Burying headwater streams." "Unprecedented cancers in children." "Climate change is real and here is the cause." "UBS claims it wants environmental well-being, now you can do something." "This soil is from a mountain UBS thought it removed." "Do you know where your executives send those billions?" On and on, all those phrases anybody in the movement can finish.

We were humbled by descending into a place where people were innocent of considerations of the earth. These were the workers, the partition people who push the legalities and dot a million i's and cross a million t's - but all by computer of course. We had the sensation as we sang and chanted with the little mountain before us - that we were suggesting there was ultimately content in their work. We also prayed that in UBS there would be a revolt of the pixel-pushers, that the earth would rise up in the bodies of the UBS employees, that they would flow out of the building like a stream. We told them the mountain was waiting for them, and that the mountain knew all their secrets, all their secret Swiss bank accounts were full of back-fill and blast-rock. We were, in other words, trying to work some magic today, but it was like dog-paddling in a wind-tunnel....

But still we screamed: "This Appalachian mountain soil before you today, here on 6th Avenue – faces your corporate logo. Our power prayer pulls on you. The unearthing of this office building begins. You will flow out like a stream and confess. You will change your lives and stop killing. People of UBS, remember that you are made of the Earth. The mountains know your secrets."