Paul and Corey Cross the Streams: S5E15 [HARLAN COUNTY, USA (1976)]

Following Paul's choice, The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Corey wanted to choose a film they both knew they'd get to eventually – Harlan County, USA (1976). The film is a documentary which focuses primarily on the Brookside miners' strike in 1973, against Duke Power Company-owned Eastover Coal Company's Brookside Mine and Prep Plant in Harlan County, Kentucky. The film won an Academy Award for Best Documentary, and Corey himself declared it "one of the best documentaries ever made." There is a lot to discuss, from the career of director Barbara Kopple to the 1968 and 1972 UMWA elections to the ins-and-outs of a strike to the heroism of the strikers and their wives to Marx's Law of Value (a.k.a. Labor Theory of Value).