And, as with all the other ways in which this nation is moving in reverse, cases of black lung in WV, VA, and KY are soaring to levels not seen since the 70’s:
A joint investigation by NPR and the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) has found that McCowan is not alone. Incidence of the disease that steals the breath of coal miners doubled in the last decade, according to data analyzed by epidemiologist Scott Laney at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH).
Cases of the worst stage of the disease have quadrupled since the 1980s in a triangular region of Appalachia stretching from eastern Kentucky through southern West Virginia and into southwestern Virginia.
Black lung experts and mine safety advocates have warned of the resurgence of the disease since 1995. New reporting by CPI and NPR reveals the extent to which federal regulators and the mining industry failed to protect coal miners in the intervening years.
Why is this happening? You know the drill- underfunded inspectors, lax regulations, and industry power to dilute the rules and penalties:
From the very beginning, miners reported “irregularities” in controlling coal mine dust, says Donald Rasmussen, 84, a pulmonologist in Beckley, W.Va. Rasmussen says he’s tested 40,000 coal miners for black lung in the last 50 years.
“So many miners will say, ‘If you think the dust is controlled you’re crazy,’ ” he says.
Measuring coal mine dust is key to preventing overexposure. Excess dust can trigger citations, fines and even slowdowns in coal production. Mining companies enforce their own compliance by taking and reporting mine dust samples. Federal mine inspectors also test for excessive dust.
But NPR and CPI have found widespread and persistent gaming of the system designed to measure and control exposure.
Richard Allen, a federal mine inspector underground when the 1969 law first took effect, says he remembers a strange question from a Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) investigator about a carpet’s color in a coal mine manager’s office.
“It was blue and [MSHA was finding] little blue fibers in each [mine dust] sample,” Allen says. “[Investigators] cross-referenced the fibers in these samples to that carpet and found that he was sampling in his office” and not deep inside the mine.
This is a great two piece story from NPR, and I would highly recommend listening to both pieces.
JPL
John, You are on a roll. Keep the posts coming.
The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik
But of course, any attempt to hold mining companies to task for this shit is just total anti-coal bigotry that Dems are just so known for and why these states could never vote for another Democrat for president ever again, rabble rabble rabble.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
It’s really horrific that it’s actually worse than it was, as younger miners are getting sicker sooner. But all those evil regulations burden the job creators too much. It’s a shandah.
Hunter Gathers
I’m sure that the Invisible Hand will snap it’s fingers and birth a Free Market solution to this problem. As long as the solution involves even less regulation.
Culture of Truth
“freedom lung”
donnah
Having lost a grandfather and an uncle to Black Lung in West Virginia, I find this news very disappointing and depressing. It isn’t enough that these people risk their lives every time they go down into the mines, we have to relax the regulations to make their odds of dying from coal dust greater?
My grampa would not approve of my language, but fuck them all.
Southern Beale
Denise Rich self-deports, to which I say: take some friends with you.
beltane
Black lung is but a small price to pay for FREEDOM!
GxB
@Culture of Truth: Ding! Ding! Ding! – thread done… It’s OK John will have another up in about 5 minutes or so…
beltane
@Southern Beale: A millionaire who doesn’t pay taxes is worth about the same to society as a homeless person who doesn’t pay taxes, maybe less since the millionaire likely takes a lot more from society than he or she returns. Let them all go on the condition that they and their immediate family never set foot in this country again.
Mr Stagger Lee
A matter of time, before we put to work 12 and 13 year old boys in the mines, and if they die oh well we make more. And to think some Rush Limpballs fans believe the rest of the world wants to be us.
Dave
Obviously, protecting coal miners from black lung is Marxism.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
Cole, did you consume your midmorning caffeine with an IV drip?
kindness
I’ve been listening to the NPR series. Drive time, you know how it is. Anyway what galled me was the complicity of the miners. They went out of their way to make sure the dust scans were bogus. These tests of the dust in the air was for their benefit and they purposefully helped the management pull fraud.
Where do you go when the people you try to help go out of their way to screw us? Not only that, I then read the comments over at NPR (bad move on my part) and there you get reichtwingnutz hollering about unneeded regulations and at the same time yelling about Democratic Administrations not helping out the miners. Yes, as usual, they want ti win both ways. The truth doesn’t matter, only the smear job.
We can’t get solar power quick enough.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
All these miners complaining about black lung will give a hurty to the feelings of the job-creators who own the mines.
Why, someone might say something nasty to them at their yacht club or their daughter might get shunned at her dressage school.
I’m shocked at the irresponsibility of NPR releasing this report without thinking of the chillllldren.
Commenting at Balloon Juice Since 1937
This was on Front Line this week if anyone prefers pictures with their sound.
beltane
@Dave: Marxism you say? Bah, safety regulations for miners are worse than Marxism; they are like Hitler.
trollhattan
Was glued (not technically) to the radio yesterday, listening to this report. Considered along with Rick Scott’s vigorous support for TB and the resurgence of whooping caugh, I’d say those longing for a return to the America of the mid-20th century can celebrate–we’re there.
Let’s not forget Don Blankenship and his support for the Big Branch Mine explosion.
scav
As it’s energy related although slightly less twisted and comes with a fine to give brief fluttering hope to some: Oil firm accused over Kalamazoo spill ‘handled response like Keystone Cops’
Scathing report finds that Enbridge overlooked warning signs for five years before 2010 spill that exposed 320 people to crude (as ever w/ me, via Guard)
trollhattan
@Herbal Infusion Bagger:
Big Coal is already accusing Obama of declaring war on Big Coal This is more pruff.
wenchacha
Oh Jebus. I don’t know how someone steps into a coal mine every day. There isn’t enough money in the world.
Turgidson
It’s called “black” lung.
Hence, it’s a monstrous Kenyan sockulist scheme thought up by that illiterate Chicago thug boy in the White House who needs a teleprompter to speak.
Or, it’s just Obama’s fault. Because shut up.
jaime
Is this the first time an entire state won a Darwin Award?
Martin
See, the GOP said they had a jobs plan!
Herbal Infusion Bagger
Typical librul, only looking at the down side of occupational hazards. Now, once these miners are too disabled to work, then that opens up a job for another person..
Plus, as the miners spend themselves into bankruptcy in medical care, that stimulates the local healthcare economy. I thought libruls enjoyed stimulus and healthcare spending?
It’s a great solution to the problem of unemployment – too many workers chasing after too few jobs. If we cull the workers, then problem solved!
(Hattrip for “culling workers” to the 1970s UK Comedy series, “The Goodies”)
scav
@jaime: Texas is going to be jealous. Will have to name a still-BIGGER state fatal disease to keep up.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@beltane:
Way back when, the late economist Louis Kelso came up with a way to model how an individual’s accumulated wealth affected the economy at large.
Bottom line: After about $20 million or so, you actually become a net drain on the macro economy. (Essentially because once you’re that rich, your natural focus turns from producing wealth to preserving/enhancing wealth– witness Romney’s offshore accounts and private equity antics for an easy example).
This was something I read over 20 years ago, so I assume the actual dollar figure’s now somewhere between 50-100 million.
Kelso fell out of fashion right about when MSM decided that “Keynesian” was a synonym for “Marxism”, which is a shame. We could use thinkers like him now, more than ever.
Patricia Kayden
@The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik: You took the words out of my mouth.
Which party is responsible for cutting back on legislation to regulate the mines? If it’s both, then the good people of WV need to let their political leaders know that they expect something to be done so that miners are not putting their lives at risk to earn a living.
If Obama were to recommend more regulations, the good folks of WV would be screaming “socialism” at the top of their lungs. Manchin won’t even commit to voting for the President who shares his party.
FlipYrWhig
Where are WV politicians on this sort of thing? Do they support worker protections, or are they pliant creatures of Big Industry? Because if there’s to be any hope for economic populism as a winning political strategy, it should be kicking in, places like this, times like now. Is it?
Rafer Janders
Personally, I’d like to hear what Joe Olivo has to say about this before jumping to any conclusions.
beltane
@Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God: Thanks. Today’s mega-rich seem especially parasitic as they do not seem to go in big for building projects, philanthropy (not a very Galtian word if you think of it), or arts patronage. Whatever money they do spend all seems to go for imported luxury items that do nothing whatsoever to stimulate the U.S. economy.
FlipYrWhig
@Patricia Kayden: Ah, same wavelength, I see.
FlipYrWhig
@beltane: Srsly. At least when pharoahs built pyramids it was with in-sourced labor.
Hypatia's Momma
@Mr Stagger Lee:
And pregnant women.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@kindness:
Fix’d, but mostly because I don’t get it either. Why would you deliberately endanger your own life for the benefit of your bosses? Did they not understand they were increasing their own risk of black lung? Did they think it would only affect other people?
And, of course, they will all vote for Romney, because they’d rather die choking for one last gasp of air than have one of Those People in charge.
beltane
@FlipYrWhig: The most current theory on the building of the pyramids suggests that the vast majority of workers were not slaves as was previously thought, but wage-earning laborers. The least every Wall Street crook could do for his country would be to hire thousands of skilled construction workers to build tombs and monuments.
Culture of Truth
So… Better Black Lung than Black President
Spatula
This is horrendous and totally predictable news.
What I have never been able to fathom: WHY in the hell would anyone choose to spend all their working days down in a filthy hole, in the dark, doing back breaking work?
It boggles my mind to think of it.
I suppose I’m not supposed to say this, but if I had been raised in West Virginia or any other state surrounded by a coal mining culture and family and friends, I still would have done anything, including getting the hell out to another part of the country to do another type of work if mining is all that was available to me there.
I know it is true, but blows my mind to think how beaten down and unimaginative and fearful most people in this country are, that they will stay in their emotionally “comfortable” situations and suffer the agonies of hell before they’ll get up and fucking leave.
If most did this, it would have the up side of putting the coal industry out of business, as it should be.
Spatula
@Culture of Truth:
I know a lot of you like to say this type of thing a lot, but I really wonder if it would make much difference at all if the Dems had nominated a caucasian in 2008 or ever.
These codependent righties hate perceived ‘libruls’ generally; I don’t think the skin color matters much at this point.
eric
Respectfully, you are all missing the key point. the reason that the ‘victims” support the GOP, even though it is the key political mechanism of their harm (Manchin, notwithstanding) is that they take a broader view of their plight than simply the dangers of working in the mine. They are forced to do this because liberals and democrats are giving their hard earned tax dollars to the moochers and the blahs thereby causing the downfall of our once great nation. That is the big con. They are convinced that they would have been successful members of the Great American Tribe but for the affirmative action, socialist spending, godless educational system, to the point where those are the evil institutions keeping them down and not the more immediate institution of corrupt mine ownership and their political lackeys. Thus, the rebel against the protagonists causing the perceived larger social ills and give the more proximate and more real source of harm a pass as a necessary evil caused by the liberal corrosion of America.
Comrade Dread
@Hunter Gathers: The free market solution is for miners to die and be replaced by others desperate for any job, even if it means death in 10-20 years.
Bubblegum Tate
@Spatula:
Republicans disagree and point out that nobody could have predicted. The truth probably lies somewhere in between.
Culture of Truth
@Spatula: I was merely paraphrasing. You may well be right. I think it matters at the margins, and contributes to certain mindset that gives rise to teleprompter jokes and ‘you lie’ outbursts
David Koch
We need some Tunch porn
JGabriel
NPR:
Sounds like the rising costs and failings of the health care industry are a factor here too; if diagnoses of the worst stage have quadrupled since the 1980s, that means fewer people are getting early diagnoses and cost seems the most likely culprit.
.
sb
@Spatula: This.
@eric: And this.
Piratedan
@kindness: perhaps there were these off the record conversations… “well boys, these green energy initiatives are making it hard to compete. So if you give us a hand with these tests, I guess we can let you keep your jobs instead of closing down the mine”.
just a guess on why you would make that kind of call to sabotage your own health versus being put out of work.
Not that our considerate employers in the coal industry would do something like that, but it would be irresponsible for me not to speculate.
scav
@Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God: HA! I knew his widow Betty, mentioned only so that everyone here can adjust their Kelso number.
Spatula
OT, but it is a real pleasure to see you posting here with your former ardor and vitality, John.
More of you and less of DougJ is a good thing for BJ.
Bulworth
@Rafer Janders: Win
NonyNony
@Spatula:
Have you ever met any miners? Ever talked to any 4th or 5th generation miners?
Everyone has different reasons for doing what they do. Some of them do it because their family has always been miners and they really don’t think they have any other options – and in some cases they’re right.
But believe it or not – some of them are proud of their jobs and want to do them well – and people who say things like “I can’t imagine why anyone would want to be a miner” really get their hackles up. Much like 3rd generation auto workers get annoyed at people who say “I can’t imagine why anyone would want to work in an auto plant”.
Ruckus
@donnah:
He might just reconsider your language if he saw the dust issue getting worse instead of better.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Spatula:
Bill Clinton won West Virginia. Twice. The state currently has two Democratic US senators and their last 3 governors have been Democrats, including the current governor. So, no, I don’t think you can write it off to generalized anti-Democrat feelings.
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
Because they’re being threatened by the company. If they can’t fake the results to pass, the company will either fire them and find someone who will or shut down the mine if nobody will. They’d rather fake the results now and worry about black lung in 30 years than lose their job and worry about starving.
Ordovician Bighorn Dolomite (formerly rarely seen poster Fe E)
I heard these stories on the way from, and then to, work. I live in MN, and have a steady gig in a safe job, but I also am both a geologist and an industrial hygienist and this story got under my skin to the point that I actually right this second have the job posting for MSHA Coal inspector pulled up on my computer, and I’m thinking about applying and moving to wherever the hell just so I could
trytry to make a few of these companies squirm.If I were still single and didn’t have aging parents….
JGabriel
@Spatula:
Well, the downhill slide seems to have started during an era of increased power for, and activism by, Conservatives — beginning in 1981 with the Reagan and Bush I presidencies, a radically Conservative Republican party and congress from 1995 – present, and the Bush II presidency from 2000-2008, which seemed to act on the most conservative rhetoric of the Reagan years, the impulses and policies that Reagan couldn’t get through the Democratic congress of the time.
So we’re really not talking about 2008. We’re talking about 32 years of deregulation, de-emphasis of law enforcement, and dismantling of the infrastructure to maintain and improve safe working conditions.
Do I think a stronger Democratic government in those years would have helped? Yeah, damn right I do.
But for some reason, the voters of this country decided they’d rather spend those years poking themselves in the eye with a sharp stick instead.
ETA: If this is more directed at whether it would have made a difference if Obama was white, of course not. It’s the anti-liberalism and anti-unionism of the past three decades that resulted in our country’s backsliding, not that we’ve had a black president for 4 years.
.
cmorenc
@kindness:
Because they knew if they failed to play ball with management, management would find a way to single them out for retribution or firing. They knew if they got fired, there would be little the miner could do in the same community, the same region, to find employment at anywhere near the same wages.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Roger Moore:
Except that it sounds as though, with the current levels in the mines, it’s going to be more like getting black lung in 10 years, not 30.
So, again, you’re endangering your own life and the lives of your coworkers so you can have a job for maybe another decade before your medical bills push your family into destitution.
donnah
@Ruckus:
My grampa never said a curse word, but I’m sure he’d share my sentiments. He was an engineer in the mines in the fifties and sixties. My uncle worked underground in the sixties and seventies. My uncle also lost a thumb in one of the crushing machines.
I have another younger uncle who has worked in the mining industry since he graduated high school, but he didn’t spend much time underground. He worked his way up through management and now is a manager and tech trainer. He’s been traveling in the tri state area from mine to mine, and he even got to go to China a few years ago as an advisor. He said he never in a million years thought he’d get to do that.
Mining is a family thing. The money was good, but the risks are high.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
Right. No liberal is going to be legitimate as far as the GOP is concerned. They’ll find some reason to convince themselve why whoever Dem is elected either “cheated” or in some other way is not deserving of the job.
They insinuated that John Kerry, who earned a Silver Star and 3 purple heart was a coward in for God’s sake.
Finding some reason why Hilary Clinton or Joe Biden or whoever else might have won the Dem nomination in 2008 isn’t a Real Amurikan(TM) and should be impeached would be no cognitive strain for them.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
If the particle counts were too high, then they can’t work.
If they’re wage employees, then they don’t get paid.
That’s a powerful incentive to skew the instrument calibration or do outright fraud.
Mr Stagger Lee
@cmorenc: I remember when the UMWA would put the fear of God into a nation,and companies would toe the line with them. John L. Lewis is gone and the people who would follow and remember him. Today Harlan County is just setting for Justified instead of the location where good miners took on a corrupt coal company, in today’s mind.
The Other Chuck
@beltane: The entire populace of the Nile valley had nothing to do for four months out of the year while the river flooded. The pyramids were basically a big public works stimulus program.
James E. Powell
@Spatula:
These codependent righties hate perceived ‘libruls’ generally; I don’t think the skin color matters much at this point.
But the main reason that they hate ‘libruls’ is that ‘libruls’ are N-lovers. Just ask them. If you are white, they will tell you, more or less in those words.
wobbly
What struck me when I heard this report this morning was the meekness of the miners told to park their personal dust sampling devices anywhere but where they were actually working.
All obeyed, terrified of being fired or that too many bad samples would shut down the mine.
Is a steady paycheck worth more than life itself?
Southern Beale
Can anyone explain this Romney 2012 graphic to me? Is that a chicken or a rooster? The shape of Utah? WTF?
James E. Powell
@eric:
They are convinced that they would have been successful members of the Great American Tribe but for the affirmative action, socialist spending, godless educational system, to the point where those are the evil institutions keeping them down and not the more immediate institution of corrupt mine ownership and their political lackeys.
Where would they get ideas like these? Could it be that they are ignorant bigots, and thus have a tendency to hold ignorant, bigoted beliefs?
The Republicans, the ones who actually run things, don’t campaign on racism, God, gays and guns because they care about those things. They do it because that’s how you get these people to vote for your candidates.
kindness
When I’m sanding wood I use a mask. When I’m up in my attic, I wear a mask. When I’m crawling around under my house, I wear a mask.
I abuse my lungs enough with my herbal remedies. And these guys are now getting Black Lung after only 10 years….
When you ask what a life is worth, these guys know. Me? Obviously I’m a weenie.
MikeJ
@wobbly: I wonder if the current generation of miners simply hasn’t seen most of the people they know unable to breathe, so they just don’t recognize the risk. It’s one thing to be told about it, and you may even sort of believe it. But if you see it every day, you’ll believe it down to your bones.
Mr Stagger Lee
@Southern Beale: It looks like who ever designed Romney logo, must been inspired by the guy who designed the Monkees logo.
Culture of Truth
@Southern Beale: That’s the Chicken of Liberty
Don’t mind the spots, he’s got the pox.
Chris T.
@Southern Beale: Obviously intended to look like an eagle, but Mitt’s Inner Chicken came out anyway.
Southern Beale
It’s fucking bizarre. I swear, yet another thing that makes me think Romney was beamed in from another galaxy.
Martin
@Southern Beale: That’s the Rmoney tsunami about to crush the Blinky ghost from PacMan. It’s representative of how he plans on crushing the Soviet Union using Swatches and leg warmers.
tamied
@Southern Beale: I think it’s an eagle trying to struggle its way out of a trap.
MikeJ
@Southern Beale: The blue bit is a spinnaker from a yacht.
Hypatia's Momma
@Culture of Truth:
I’m cruel enough to think it would be hilarious if Romney actually had the pox and I’d love to hear Ann try to blame Obama for it.
Chris T.
By the way, superultralarge word for “black lung disease”: pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. (Usually shortened to “pneumoconiosis”, or of course just “black lung”…)
trollhattan
@Mr Stagger Lee:
Hmmm.
http://osmond.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/OsmondLogo72dpi.png
Roger Moore
@wobbly:
If you only know one way to earn a living, you might not see a lot of difference between losing your paycheck and losing your life. How are you going to sustain life itself without a paycheck to pay for life’s necessities? Are you willing to abandon your wife and kids to the kind of life they’d have without a source of income to protect your own health? It’s easy to criticize, but don’t be too hard on these people until you’ve lived something like their life.
Culture of Truth
Didn’t I see this on the X Files??
Arclite
Nothing could go wrong with that. Nope.
jwb
@Southern Beale: Looks like a vulture to me.
jwb
@Culture of Truth: And it comes in two basic colors: red on red and blue on blue.
Roger Moore
@jwb:
So it’s bragging about his time at Bain Capital?
Spatula
@NonyNony:
Wrong. There are ALWAYS other options.
That said, if someone in their heart of hearts truly ENJOYS being underground in filth and darkness most of their waking life, then I have no problem with it. How many mine workers fall into that category?
Why should such a sensible question “get their hackles up?” unless they are justifiably very defensive about a choice they themselves wish they had the courage to make differently?
Why would they be proud of of such a job unless they had been brainwashed by coal companies and their social environment to feel that way? They dig up filthy black rocks and spend their productive life underground and in the dark for the benefit of corporations. What’s to be proud of? There are a world of other choices. I don’t say the effort required by those other choices are EASY, but they’re no harder than spending your life in a waking hell and then getting black lung as your thanks.
While an auto plant is several circles of Hell above a coal mine, it should also be noted that at the very least auto plants are not nearly as filthy, exist above ground, and don’t risk life and limb to such an extreme degree as a coal hole.
bootsy
How dare you attempt to regulate these Job Creators! In Communist China children as young as six have the freedom to earn and die from whatever industry/disease they want.
Mr. President, we cannot allow a Black Lung gap!
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Roger Moore:
I think what people are getting most frustrated by is not only that the miners are endangering their lives and the lives of their co-workers, but that they’re simultaneously voting to put politicians into power who will ensure that they have to continue doing so.
At some point, one starts wondering if it’s worth trying to help people who not only reject that help, but actively put people in power who will make their lives worse.
jwb
@Roger Moore: A blue vulture feeding on the red blob of America is how I would parse it.
Spatula
@Roger Moore:
And I submit that this is a very poor choice to make.
Roger Moore
@jwb:
I think it’s intended to evoke this artwork. At least that was what I immediately thought of on seeing it.
General Stuck
More good news from the front
And for me, at least. The sweetest thing is this strategy is fully Rovian in style of attacking your opponents strongest point.
scav
@jwb: Good Catch. Vulture Indeedy.
Also, too, Rombot threw the Real Repub Elephant under the bus! Rino.
This survey’s been popping up here and there. Many Wall Street executives says wrongdoing is necessary: survey. Not knowing the group, I’d hold off leaping with joy, but the numbers are fun in the usual strange-attractor fashion.
Spatula
@cmorenc:
And so it’s time for strikes to shut down the mines again, a massive PR campaign, or getting the hell out of the area and getting a different job. And yes, government should crack down too.
But there is an element of codependence here. Coal is a sick industry that needs to go the way of dinosaurs.
Spatula
@wobbly:
BINGO
Violet
@Spatula: Someone will always make that choice. If you’re starving and don’t have a roof over your head, maybe you have a baby or a couple of kids who are also starving, you’ll take whatever work at whatever wages. There will always be someone to take that job.
burnspbesq
@trollhattan:
Sounds to me like a war worth waging.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@scav:
That’s what some of us naive dreamers keep trying to point out — strong regulations are better for everyone in business because they don’t allow cheaters to get ahead of honest players. Unfortunately, cheating has been accepted and even valorized, so it’s hard to get people to accept that it leads to an unbalanced marketplace.
Dee Loralei
@Southern Beale: One winged bald eagle? Looks left-winged at that. LOL!
eemom
Cowboy Junkies, Mining for Gold
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUhaq4Yg74w
General Stuck
@eemom:
Hey eemom!
Citizen Alan
@NonyNony:
I can imagine working in an auto plant. Hell, if I were ten years younger and sixty pounds lighter, I’d be applying at the local Nissan plant right now — it pays better and offers better benefits than being a struggling solo practitioner. But being an auto worker, last I heard, does not involve a substantial risk of dying in an agonizing manner while doing the sort of work that convicted criminals are forced to do in Third World countries. No sum of money is not worth my life. Irrational pride in being a loyal peasant who brings value to the local gentry certainly isn’t.
Southern Beale
Would the last corporation to leave ALEC please turn out the lights?
elmo
The privilege, it is strong in this thread. Jeebus.
For those of you asking how anyone could do such a job, and especially for those of you putting some of the blame on the workers themselves, I want you to take thirty seconds out of your air-conditioned, Internet-having, new-clothes-wearing, decent-car-driving lives, and think — really think about the choices that are actually presented to teenage boys and young men in these mining towns when they are growing up and figuring out how to live their lives.
For reasons that should be obvious, most coal mines aren’t co-located with abundant light industrial and commercial job opportunities. In order to work anywhere else, you have to leave home. And the “home” I’m talking about is a small, tight-knit, insular community that has coal mining as a significant part of its core identity. Coming of age, manhood, and masculinity are tied to that identity.
You think it’s hard to leave a political identity, or a religious identity, that you were raised in? How about leaving a work-and-worth identity?
And that’s if outside choices are even presented to these young men growing up. Assumptions and defaults are incredibly powerful forces in human life. Most people do what’s expected of them. Most people don’t have the means to seek out and explore a vast universe of potential options by the time they’re sixteen. Some do, sure, and that’s laudable and to be encouraged. But it’s a very Republican trope to condemn these men for their choices, when those choices were literally made for them in childhood.
Keith G
This is an important story which I hope will lead to a greater good. Not bad for a news organization that some twitchy idjits think of as timid and just not good enough.
@elmo: @elmo: Right on, friend.
Rafer Janders
@Spatula:
Spoken like someone who’s never been born, grown up in, and lived all his life in an economically depressed area with poor schools and few employment options.
Why would you be proud of such a job? Because it’s tough, hard work, and the paycheck you get from it keeps a roof over your family’s head and food on their table.
There sure are — Wal-Mart greeter, Wal-Mart stocker, McDonald’s cashier (except, of course, that there are 50 applicants for each one of those jobs).
Well, that’s mighty big of you to acknowledge, that uprooting your whole life, moving away from your community and family, and finding a decent-paying blue collar job in today’s America isn’t EASY.
elmo
@Rafer Janders:
DAMN straight. Preach it!
khead
Clearly, Donald Rasmussen is a communist.
Odie Hugh Manatee
In conservative free market land, wage slaves are expendable. Slashing medical benefits, increasing medical costs and slashing wages and pensions will save everyone a few bucks, make more than a few bucks for the wealthy corporations and reduce the numbers in the moocher class sucking off the well-endowed wealthy teats of our country. Conservatives believe that these policies will make our country stronger.
For the wealthy.
Roger Moore
@Violet:
This. Intimidation by employers works when there isn’t an equally powerful force pushing back. Republican success in gutting regulators and destroying unions has left the minors with nobody to back them up. Maybe they’re partly to blame for helping to elect Republicans, but unless you know the miners specifically voted Republican that seems like an unfair assumption. Even if they did, I still think they deserve better than they got.
Violet
@elmo: Right on. True, true, true.
@Rafer Janders:
When I lived and worked in WV a woman worked in the front office of the company I worked for. It didn’t pay a lot, but it was her job and put food on the table. I left for a bit, then came back and by then she’d left for a job at Wal-Mart. She was so proud of getting that job at Wal-Mart and boasted of how much more it paid than her previous job at the company I worked for (probably minimum wage, but I didn’t ask). It was quite an achievement for her to get the Wal-Mart job as they were quite competitive.
So yeah, unless you’ve lived with that poverty and insular community, you just don’t understand. These people may have a high school education at best. Some not even that much. Their entire family, history and knowledge of the world is in that community. And now you want them to refuse to work at the job that their dad, grandfather, maybe even great-grandfather worked at, the job that will feed their families, because…they might get black lung at some distant point in the future? You ever tried to talk to a teenager? They don’t usually think past tomorrow or this weekend. Young guys starting out don’t think that far ahead. They just want that job.
Ruckus
@donnah:
The money was good, but the risks are high.
That is usually the only reason a person gets paid reasonably well for manual labor. Only a relatively few will do the dangerous jobs society needs. I worked in a dangerous job myself(not nearly as dangerous as mining!) and how few people had any desire to work in the field is one reason why so many jobs went overseas. If in your area the only real job is mining, you become a miner or you move or you starve. Those are the choices. And a significant percentage of people don’t want to move from where they are born. Moving could be worse, you never know.
khead
I just wanted to pimp Coal Tattoo for those folks who are not aware of the fine work done by Ken Ward, Jr.
MikeJ
@Culture of Truth: Sorry, didn’t get the weathered background in the 30 seconds I spent on this. Someone with more talent should do it properly.
trollhattan
@Violet:
However, am willing to wager the list of fathers who want their sons to follow them into the mines is a very short one. But “what are the options?” remains a good question.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Roger Moore:
And when people actively reject the help that they’re offered, what’s Plan B?
General Stuck
Having grown up in east Ky, I learned a long time ago not to try to explain to people what something like the coal industry has meant to a region that up until lately, might as well been on the dark side of the moon, it was so isolated. I have a lot of reason for not liking the fact that coal was in them thar hills.
First of all, that strip mining was unregulated for nearly a century, that left much of the beauty of the Appalachia mountains, looking permanently like the dark side of the moon. And still is doing the same, though with a lot less abandon to destruction, and filling up the rivers with sediment from mine runoff, to the point every time it rained rampant flooding added to all the other many sorrows of folks that live there.
But the biggest evil, imo, has been the boom/bust nature of the coal market, from the beginning. Acting as a big trap for the poor in urban areas to do better moving the family to the hills and hollers, to maybe feed their families during the boom periods, and then stranding them as poor or poorer than before they showed up. There are generations of people like this, with not a pot to piss in, having put down deep family roots for equal generations, making it double hard to pick up and leave.
The only other ways even remotely capable of providing a legal living from, has been a hard scrabble existence growing tobacco, and at one time some timber industry. But that is about it in a place you can drive all day and not see a piece of flat ground more than a hundred yards wide.
So what happens with all these people trapped in a nightmare, entered for noble purposes. They cook meth and grow pot, and turn the place into a huge crime zone, with destitute and drug addicted citizenry. Not unlike any big city ghetto place full of outlaw predators feeding off of decent peoples in their midst.
And all of it, or near all of it, caused by deposits of fossil fuel in solid form, covered with inert rock. With Mostly now, a bounty too full of sulfur to burn in the US, so it gets shipped overseas instead. I do not care a whittle for the coal industry, but exactly none of it is the fault of the common people who sacrifice their health to feed their families. Anyone who takes up that argument will get an earful from me.
Mino
In 2006, there were about 83,000 coal workers total for the US. Less than 50,000 total were underground. Max in a single state was about 13,000. Only two states, Ky and WV had numbers in the 5 digits.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Coal_and_jobs_in_the_United_States
Not very many jobs we’re talking here.
That said, there are countries that arrest regulators who subvert their agencies. How come not here?
khead
@trollhattan:
It’s pretty low. See 30 Days in a coal mine. Folks know what they are getting into.
I would guess that many thousands of folks in southern WV made it their entire goal in life to “not end up in the mines”. I know that it was goal #1 in my life back when I was 16 years old.
Having said that, several folks I went to school with are now currently digging the black gold out of the ground where I grew up. Hey, somebody’s gotta do it. I just wish it didn’t suck so bad for the folks who choose to do it.
trollhattan
BTW, Woody Guthrie’s 100th birthday on the 14th (French sympathizer!). He’d have a few things to say about today’s realities, I imagine.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/woody-guthrie-at-100-american-struggles-and-dreams/2012/07/09/gJQAI82MYW_story.html
Violet
@trollhattan: Didn’t you see Zoolander? Dad wanted all his sons to follow him into the mines.
Okay, seriously, I don’t know how many fathers want their sons to follow them into the mines, but I bet the list of miner dads who put in a good word so their sons can get that job in the mines is longer than you might think.
pseudonymous in nc
@Spatula:
Some do it in the hope their kids won’t have to. Except that their kids often do, because that’s where the jobs are, and so the hope passes down a generation.
I agree with @Rafer Janders: it’s easy to pontificate about options and choices and alternatives from outside. The miners may be in a fucked-up codependent relationship with bosses who don’t give a shit about them, but somewhere in your family tree there’s very likely to be people who worked shitty, dangerous, lifespan-limiting jobs and whose lives were primarily a sacrifice for their kids.
Citizen Alan
@elmo:
So is the condescension. You seem to think that we should all just placidly accept the existence of an insular community of superstitious medieval peasants dwelling in squalor just a few hundred miles from the nation’s capital because they’re all set in their rustic ways and can’t adapt to our modern society. Meanwhile, they consistently vote to destroy our modern society and drag all of us back to join them in the 18th century. Fuck that noise. If you are such a mindless groveling peasant that you deliberately conspire with your bosses to allow them to fake safety tests so that they can make a tiny bit more profit by murdering your co-workers, your friends, your family members and YOU, then you deserve nothing but contempt.
elmo
@Violet:
The thing is, though, you don’t have to have lived it yourself. I never did. You just have to have the barest sliver of empathy and human imagination.
This one struck a nerve with me, I think, because it touches on something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. I am incredibly fortunate in my life and work. I was raised in a blue-collar household, but one that valued education and intelligence above all things. So it wasn’t out of the question for me to attend university (though nobody else in my family did or ever has), and then it was natural to go on to law school, etc. I did my undergrad at Harvard, as one of the token lower-income smart kids. My road was paved and smoothed out before me. And yet – despite all these advantages – I still didn’t have the mental infrastructure to take full advantage of the Harvard opportunities. Not because I wasn’t smart enough, but because I simply wasn’t aware of them. I had friends who did the Wall Street thing, and I remember being utterly bemused that they wanted to work at a bank. Banks are things with vaults and tellers – why on Earth would you waste a Harvard education being George Bailey at the Building & Loan?
Other friends did the pre-med thing. I couldn’t have if I’d wanted to, because my high school didn’t offer calculus and I was a year behind on the necessary math.
None of this is a complaint about my lot in life – I love my work, and I am the most fortunate of women. But if even I, with a Harvard education and a law degree, with 1470 SATs and an early love of reading, can have my choices constrained by upbringing and environment, how can anyone possibly blame young coal miners for doing what they know how to do?
Mino
@General Stuck: So what happens with all these people trapped in a nightmare, entered for noble purposes. They cook meth and grow pot, and turn the place into a huge crime zone, with destitute and drug addicted citizenry. Not unlike any big city ghetto place full of outlaw predators feeding off of decent peoples in their midst.
There’s your rural local economy. And it probably employs more than the mines.
And it hazards any investments in ecotourism. Maybe that KY governor who approved the Jesus theme part wasn’t so crazy.
General Stuck
@Citizen Alan:
What is it with you on this blog? More and more sounding like some preachy asswipe whose shit don’t stink, whether on this thread, or on others with arrogant assholery toward people having problems dealing with right wing relatives. How about you take that holier than thou tough guy shit and shoving it up your perfumed ass.
edit – you sound more like a republican than any kind of decent liberal I know.
khead
@elmo:
Let’s not fucking push it.
Given the availability of UHauls and a university education, nowadays, it’s really not that hard.
General Stuck
@elmo:
You got it right
edit – social problems are social, and complicated. Liberals realize this, and that is what separates them from the wingnuts and the eternal GOP sociopathic prescriptions of let em die. No muss no fuss. Didn’t we just have a thread on that?
Roger Moore
@Mino:
Because the orders to subvert the regulatory agencies came from the top. When the President shows he doesn’t want the laws enforced by appointing opponents of regulation to run the agencies, and Congress backs him up by refusing to fund them adequately, there’s no doubt about the intent.
elmo
@khead:
Thirty seconds of real thinking turned out to be too much, eh?
FlipYrWhig
This thread sure exposed the inner Yglesias of a few posters who normally style themselves as leftier than left.
gene108
@elmo:
With regards to Appalachia the geography/geology has a lot to do with how insular that area traditionally has been.
The Valley and Ridge geology of the coal mining Appalachian mountains makes travel to other places difficult. Going through W.Va. with modern roads, you may not notice it as much, but if you get in a valley think about how tough it’d be to climb over the ridge to get to the next valley.
It ain’t easy.
From Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ridge-and-Valley_Appalachians
khead
@elmo:
I, for one, applaud you for your overwhelming and serious caring for those folks who choose not to rent the UHaul.
Maude
@elmo:
For those who think it’s easy to get up and go, it must be nice.
It costs money to keep the air quality to an acceptable level in mines. That has a lot to do with it.
The workers in the mines are people, but you wouldn’t know it from reading some of the comments.
Mino
@gene108: So mountaintop removal is a good thing? It makes a lot of mesas?
Spatula
@Violet:
And I believe government, via aggressive regulation and monitoring, should protect them as long as this nasty industry exists.
And I also believe that for a person to choose to spend their life in the mines is a tragedy. In every case.
Feeling as though there is NOTHING else they can do is just where the mining companies want them.
Rafer Janders
@Violet:
Hell, even if I knew I’d get sick, I might still take the job if it was that or my wife and kids starve and go homeless. Some people will do almost anything, even destroy their own lives, to take care of their families.
Keith G
@FlipYrWhig: More like their inner Sully.
Roger Moore
@FlipYrWhig:
I’d also like to ask when “they didn’t vote the way I like, so fuck them” become a progressive position.
Spatula
@elmo:
@elmo:
Yes, I do think it’s hard to do that. Because I did it. All of that. And if I can do it, then I know that anyone can.
Millions of people relocate for work EVERY year.
Perhaps progressives should focus on making sure young people in coal mining regions know they have options, and how to exercise them.
Did someone condemn them? Was it you? Cause I haven’t read anyone here “condemning” them>
khead
@elmo:
More like someone who actually rented the UHaul while still repecting his friends’ choices.
See here.
Maude
@Roger Moore:
1981?
IT’s the we can tell people what to do because:
a) We know better than them
b) We are better than them
C) Because we are Fwits.
GxB
@Citizen Alan: Uhm, wow… Save this post bro, and read it back to yourself in 72 hours or so. If you don’t feel the least bit of shame at that point do us all a favor and sign up with Free Republic – they’ll welcome you with open arms.
MattR
@Keith G: And the perfect example of that inner Sully came just after your comment, at 140 by Spatula.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
I can think of a good way to deal with this problem that will compensate for losses, encourage safety and not eat into corporate profits (originally mentioned on Pandagon):
If a company kills someone on the job, their dependents are compensated with stock, say enough to the value needed to buy an annuity paying the best annual wages for the worker lost.
But, and here comes the kicker, that stock isn’t issued from company reserves. Instead, it is taken at random from already issued stock, that already owned by stockholders.
– The family is compensated. They can sell the stock and “buy” the worker’s salary.
– The company doesn’t lose any profits. It’s not an expense for the company.
– Those who OWN the company pay for the company’s actions. And they do so directly, through losing the stock. At the same time, they’re limited in liability to stock ownership – and the more stock you have, the more of it you’ll lose to compensations.
– A company which routinely kills people will see its stock value fall as people avoid investing in it. A company which tries to keep people alive will benefit in stock value.
– Company executives will be expected by their shareholders not only to run a profit, but to keep people alive.
Spatula
@Rafer Janders:
If you say so. It’s not easy. Millions do it. I did it myself and it was very difficult for a while and now it’s wonderful.
If I listened to you I’d still be doing a thing I hate in an area of the ocuntry unsuitable to the very makeup of my personality, but hey now, at least I could be PROUD of wasting my life.
Your kind of unimaginative, defeatist thinking enables the coal companies and their profits. Good job.
Spatula
@Maude:
I agree. Particularly the commenters who want to encourage people to spend their lives in the mines. They must think of miners as less than human.
Baud
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
This. You want to know what’s change over 30 years:
Spatula
@Rafer Janders:
Ever hear of food stamps, welfare, etc? Who will feed the family when you are too sick to work and then dead?
I swear, sometimes it seems that some adults use limited thinking and short term support of their families as an excuse to destroy themselves. And then when their children do the same thing, what good was any of it?
Maude
@Spatula:
Is that you Mitt?
piratedan
@khead: jaysus….yesah, you sure as hell can rent the U Haul, where would you like to go, with spouse and kids and all of your worldly possession to work where, doing what? Especially with all of the opportunity that WVa has offer to make you an attractive candidate to be hired? My dad was lucky to join the Military when he came of age and that there was a need for cannon fodder then back in the 50’s.
Is that all you got? Just leave your life behind and go somewhere else…. damn! Why didn’t we do that instead of urban renewal? Don’t give out food stamps, here’s twenty gallons of gas and a uhaul, now go forth and conquer.
Spatula
@Maude:
I am pretty sure Mitt would encourage ALL of the clamoring masses to STFU and go work in the mines.
Roger Moore
@Spatula:
Show me one post that encourages people to work in the mines. There are plenty that justify why people might continue to work there even though it’s dangerous, but I don’t think any of them are suggesting that people with better options should give them up for mine work. They’re just suggesting that the mines may be the best of a lot of bad choices for some people, and the people who are in that situation deserve something more than a big “fuck you, it’s your own fault for working in a mine”.
khead
@piratedan:
Where would I like them to go? To Maryland. Or Virginia. Or anywhere. Anywhere that they do not have to kiss mine company ass in 2012.
There are two kinds of folks from WV: Those that stay and those that go. I made it clear back at post 119 that I have plenty of respect for the folks that stayed and worked the mines…..
I also made it clear that I would really, really, like it if folks could find some sympathy for those FOLKS THAT STAY instead of treating them like a political wedge like elmo.
Don’t give me shit. Encourage the folks that leave for a better life and also support the folks who decide to stay and get black lung.
scav
It’s a little disconcerting to see how little value has been attached to the whole concept of community in some of this discussion, which also probably factors into the decisions people make, over and above the needs of the immediate nuclear family. Not everyone is as willingly rootless as certain elements of contemporary America. I’ve got kin that still own the log house our common ancestor built before or about the Revolutionary War. I can easily imagine them not wanting to move to chase down the next easy come-easy go job at Wally’s World, and that’s ignoring all the people and relationships that are involved in that community. It’s complicated.
Spatula
@Roger Moore:
Did someone here say that?
HyperIon
@Rafer Janders: That is pretty much my reaction to any NPR story these days. Fuckers.
pseudonymous in nc
@Spatula: How very fucking self-actualized of you.
Roger Moore
@Spatula:
Pretty close
Rafer Janders
@elmo:
Hey, elmo — do you have a contact email? It seems we have a lot in common, and would love to discuss more off-line.
Rafer Janders
@Spatula:
Bing bing bing! Ah, here’s the tell.
No, they can’t. You did it? Good for you. But you’re not everyone. Congratulate yourself all you want, but no, other people have their own problems, and the fact that you did it does not necessarily imply that others can. Moreover, a just and fair society should not demand of everyone that they give up their community, family and friends just to get a non-deadly and well-paying job.
Christ, you sound like every right-wing asshole who brays about “if I could pull myself up by my own gottdang bootstraps….”
Triassic Sands
What a depressing development.
Years ago I went to a screening of Harlan County, USA, a documentary film about coal miners. When we were leaving the theater, one of the people in my group said, “Jesus, if they don’t like coal mining they should quit whining and find another job.”
I didn’t know where to begin. There was no 2×4 handy (a 4×4 would have been even better), so I couldn’t just smack him “upside the head,” as they say. We went to a nearby bar and over several beers those of us who understood tried to explain it to the two who didn’t.
Some people lack the imagination, the empathy, or both and simply can’t understand why coal miners had (and have) every right to want better pay and safer working conditions. Many of them are ill-suited to other work, and re-locating to find another job is often very expensive. Further, someone is going to mine coal in our society (for the foreseeable future) and they deserve pay that acknowledges the nature of their work and its inherent risks.
At the time we saw Harlan County economic turmoil had demonstrated why simply switching jobs is often not a viable alternative. Mine coal, but want a safer, better paying job? Move from Kentucky to Michigan to get a job in the auto industry, which then enters a severe downturn because of gasoline prices. Laid off, you re-locate to Texas to take advantage of the oil boom, but then that industry experiences a downturn and now you’ve moved twice, probably losing lots of money in each move and you’re still out of luck.
Over the past several years the housing market depression has meant that many people who own their own homes, but can’t sell them, can’t afford to go elsewhere in search of a better job.
The point is there are lots of reasons why individuals can’t simply find another job (and high unemployment doesn’t help, does it?) and for anyone willing to do the miserable work that coal mining is — which is a service to millions of Americans who get their electricity from coal-fired power plants — good wages and safer working conditions are the least they deserve.
Rafer Janders
@Spatula:
Um…no one? Since you claim to have been poor, you should have a pretty good idea of how public assistance in this country actually works, especially in Appalachia. Once you exhaust your limited benefits, you’re pretty much on your own, and if you don’t have friends or family to take pity on you, then no one will feed your family.
Maude
@Triassic Sands:
Just a side note. The woman who did the film got a contract in Hollywood to direct movies. They called her a c*** to her face.
Bago
@Phoenician in a time of Romans: You DO realize that stock compensation is a dodge for black lung. When someone goes and gets cancer ten years down the road, the stock might not exist if the company goes bankrupt. The management makes their quarterlies, and founds a new corporation. All of the risk is borne by the survivors, and all of the profit is kept by the management. Because of tradition, you have a mostly captive labor market, consisting of people that mostly know how to work the
plantationmine.Elmo
@Rafer Janders:
Sorry to hit you back late, but in case you check back: sierrak9s
At
Bellsouth
Dot
Net
Spatula
@pseudonymous in nc:
Interesting that you are against self actualization, of which there is decidedly very little in a coal mine.
You should go to work for a coal company personnel department.
lless
Nothing a couple prominent homicide prosecutions wouldn’t fix.
Another Bob
Clearly the free market has spoken: preventing black lung disease is just too expensive and too much trouble. If Big Government gets in the way to try to do something about it, it will only increase inefficiency, and somewhere down the road, it could actually lead to libertarians being unable to afford hip, distressed leather jackets. Our society simply can’t afford that risk right now.
Spatula
@Rafer Janders:
Here we go with the extra strength stupidity: Do you really believe that educating and encouraging people to NOT work jobs that put them in danger of death and disease while feeding the corporate coffers of organizations that profit from a stone age means of energy production is a right wing idea?
You are a maroon.
I asked for and got a lot of help when I moved, and I worked hard to make it happen. But the hardest part is to DECIDE to leave.
I am nobody special; I am generally as fearful as the next person. That’s how I know if I can do it anyone can. They can but they DON’T.
But you, you’d rather reassure people that their choice to live in a hole in the ground while making their evil overlords rich is just dandy; a great way to spend their lives.
good, progressive values you got there.
Spatula
@Rafer Janders:
Where did I say I was or had been poor?
Middle class here.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Triassic Sands:
I understand people who want those things. I don’t understand people who say they want better working conditions and then vote Republican, thereby ensuring they won’t get what they claim to want.
shortstop
@Keith G: Christ, yes.
mai naem
@Southern Beale: I was looking at the big R graphic and comparing it to the Obama circle with the horizon/road/path whatever you want to call it. The “R” to me looks like Romney’s giving us some trickle down golden shower.
GxB
@Spatula: Sigh…
Uhm, wow… Save
thisyour post bro, and read it back to yourself in7224 hours or so. If you don’t feel the least bit of shame at that point do us all a favor and sign up with Free Republic – they’ll welcome you with open arms.Note: I don’t think what you’re saying is as deplorable as CA above – so I think you may see the light a bit sooner than him. But honestly, berating persons with entirely different physical, emotional and/or mental capabilities for not doing as you did is a keystone of the rethug mindset. Please reconsider it – thank you.
mclaren
The United Snakes of Amnesias is headed back to 1897 at warp speed. Unions illegal, no worker safety regs, the whole nine yards. Only a matter of time before we get another Triangle Shirtwaist fire.
And the thing is, it’s a bipartisan consensus — both Democrats and Republicans have united in agreeing that we must roll back the New Deal and repeal the Bill of Rights. The only different in opinion between the two parties? How fast we roll back the New Deal and how quickly we repeal the Bill of Rights.
mclaren
The United Snakes of Amnesias is headed back to 1897 at warp speed. Unions illegal, no worker safety regs, the whole nine yards. Only a matter of time before we get another Triangle Shirtwaist fire.
And the thing is, it’s a bipartisan consensus — both Democrats and Republicans have united in agreeing that we must roll back the New Deal and repeal the Bill of Rights. The only different in opinion between the two parties? How fast we roll back the New Deal and how quickly we repeal the Bill of Rights.
Linnaeus
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
Maybe some of those people didn’t vote Republican.
Linnaeus
And I don’t care where you work, be it an office cube or a hole in the ground. All labor has dignity. All of it.
Rafer Janders
@Spatula:
Wait a minute. You were going on and on about how you made it out — “I asked for and got a lot of help when I moved, and I worked hard to make it happen. But the hardest part is to DECIDE to leave” — etc., and you’re MIDDLE CLASS?
Wow, way to overcome those obstacles, there.
Cain
@Violet:
I hear that there a bunch of fields in Georgia that are looking for people to do the work. I suppose they don’t pay as much as the mines do, but it’s still a hell of a lot safer.
Cain
@Rafer Janders:
Wow, that kind of sucks. Kind of reminds me of India.. A little 3rd world country inside this big rich 1st world. If you have no one to take pity on you, I suppose you could move then right?
Also, wouldn’t you then be a proponent of welfare so at least you don’t starve? I mean people are making millions out there, they could afford a little something so that everybody doesn’t suffer. Who knows, maybe one of these dispossessed people is actually really smart and could get an education and make an impact in the world?
Meh.
KS in MA
@Culture of Truth:
“freedom lung”
FTW
Spatula
@GxB:
I really don’t see how it’s a bad thing that I want to encourage people to NOT spend their lives underground in the service of evil corporations…nor do I see how that’s a republican sentiment.
Stop taking the drugs which are clouding your comprehension skills.
Spatula
@Linnaeus:
Was this written by one of the coal company’s PR firm?
I wonder how many coal executive’s children or grandchildren work in the mines…
Linnaeus
@Spatula:
No, unless this guy worked for a coal PR firm and none of us knew about it.
Linnaeus
@Spatula:
It’s not a bad thing. I think the point folks are trying to make here, though, is that some people’s options are constrained and that we should understand why they make the choices they do given those constraints. The coal executive has considerably more power than the average mine worker, and so I’m more likely to hold him/her responsible for the conditions of the mines than I will the miner.
Not every one can pick up and leave a particular place. Furthermore, I don’t think we should necessarily let communities wither and die. Let’s transform them where we can. That means being willing to commit the political will and to cough up the dough (as a society) to do it.
GxB
@Spatula: Sigh (pt 2)…
You know nothing of me, though I assure you I am currently quite sober. Thanks for the baseless claim of drug abuse – it’ll add legitimacy to your argument.
There’s some comprehension failure here but it is not on my behalf. Please re-read what I wrote. The money statement there is berating persons with entirely different physical, emotional and/or mental capabilities for not doing as you did is a keystone of the rethug mindset.
Like it or not, there are 313+ million people currently in America, over 7 billion in the world. The only way a vast majority of them can keep a roof over their head and food on the table involves big corporations (evil or no); and making choices that you cannot apparently understand nor abide. The way to a better world does not come about by beating down those who are victims of circumstance.
I strongly suspect you are at best a person who has their heart in the right place but is so rage filled and/or fearful that you have a long way to go to be the liberal warrior you think you already are. At worse, you’re a fairly skilled troll that has already got me to waste some time trying to reason with you – oh well, my loss. I hope it’s the former – if you are truly passionate, you could go a long way to bring about change – but first you have to get your head right and then learn to focus on the real cause of our problems. A tough row to hoe to be sure. Good luck and get better – we will not converse again.
Ruckus
@Linnaeus:
You have the tense wrong. All honest labor should have dignity. Not all of it does. Take this post. Some of the people here seem to be saying if the job is so bad then do whatever it takes to find another. Spatula says just move and find a better life. And he/she is correct millions around the world do so quite often. They escape whatever life they had and move on. I’ve done it three times. And now after 50 years of working/moving life I’m back to the area where I was born. Some people just want to skip the middle steps that I took. Why should they have to leave to find a job that won’t kill them? Why should their labor and life have so little value that they can’t be provided a safe work environment? I maybe could see it if the job was not a necessary job, say maybe making buggy whips by the millions. But in this country, for better or worse we burn coal for electricity. Should we? I say no. But it is the fuel we have in abundance.
So why shouldn’t a coal miner be a coal miner? It is an honest manual labor job. I’d sure rather be a coal miner than a pontificating village asshole. As Linnaeus said labor has dignity. At least honest labor does.
Ruckus
@Ruckus:
And I thought I had heard that line some where before. MLK. A man who spent his life trying to make sure that everyone’s life has the dignity all(OK most) humans deserve. That’s really all we are due. A little dignity. In your life and in your work.
pseudonymous in nc
@Spatula:
Interesting that your head is so far up your own arse that you don’t hear me telling you. Did you find your freedom at a pat-yourself-on-the-head clinic?
Well, knock me down with a fucking feather.
Spatula
@GxB:
Oh thank goodness.
Spatula
@pseudonymous in nc:
Average coal mine worker, at the lowest level, makes around $51,000.00, a solidly middle class wage.
Your point?
Triassic Sands
@Maude:
Who is “they.”
Whoever it was, that takes real class.
Triassic Sands
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
There are lots of people who vote emotionally on certain issues despite what is in their own economic best interests.
Back when the Texas genius (W) was running for re-election I had a conversation with an elderly woman who was making minimum wage in a local retail store. Anyway, this elderly woman said something that piqued my interest, so I asked her more. She seemed like a potential vote changer at first. That lasted for a very brief time.
First, I asked her why she was going to vote for Bush. She told me she was going to vote for Bush because Kerry was (and presumably still is) a “baby killer.” I knew at that point that I would never change her mind.
The GOP despises that woman and everything about her, except her vote. They offer her nothing, except a full term of anti-abortion rhetoric and occasional efforts (and some success) to restrict women’s access to reproductive health services. I was going to write “access to abortion,” but that really understates what the zealots are after.
The woman was a member of the working poor and the only reason she had health insurance was because of Medicare, which “her party” wants to privatize. She may have graduated from high school, but that was the end of her formal education, and I’d wager that she paid a lot more attention in church than she ever had in school. To understand her vote all you had to know was how she felt about abortion.
Even though I knew it was hopeless, I calmly explained to her all the reasons why she should vote Democratic; I calmly explained to her exactly why George Bush was a terrible president; and I calmly explained to her why the Republican Party is very, very detrimental to her well-being.
And her only response was “Well, at least he (Bush) isn’t a baby killer.” I was calm; she was very emotional.
In the end, understanding her vote was quite simple, and she’s got lots of company.
For others the equation may be more complicated, but the result is the same. You’ve paid enough attention to the issues and news to know that Tea Baggers aren’t, for the most part, remotely interested in the truth, facts, reality, and on and on. They’re for things like “strict constructionism,” a smaller federal government, and, of course, lower taxes (none at all would be best). You can argue all day with those people, but you’re unlikely to make headway, because the very qualities that allow them to believe the nonsense they believe, are the same qualities that will prevent you from changing their minds.
LanceThruster
In order to forever squelch the notion of outsourcing American jobs, US miners have now essentially become the canaries in the coal mine.
pseudonymous in nc
@Spatula:
Doesn’t make miners middle-class, even by the ridiculous overreach of American class terminology. Your point?
Is it your haughty insistence that hitting escape velocity from your slightly chafing middle-class upbringing gives you the right to pontificate here? Once again, I’ll tell you to consult your own family tree to learn who sacrificed their lives on shitty jobs for your ultimate benefit.
Then stick your head back up your arse and fuck off.
Interrobang
@pseudonymous in nc: I’ve got sympathy for both sides here. It’s pretty obvious to me that the coal companies are deliberately encouraging people to stay ignorant and scared so they have yet another generation of brainwashed proles they can treat as expendable widgets, and I also think moving for a job is possible once you know it’s possible. Several of my ancestors not only moved to different places for work, they moved to different continents. My great-grandfather brought my maternal grandfather and his siblings to Canada from Scotland, and then six months later the farmhouse they were renting burnt, so they moved to another town and started over.
I work in IT, and in my particular (undervalued and low-paid) subspecialty, you go where the jobs are, so I’ve lived in a bunch of different places, all within a couple hours’ drive of each other, though. There is lots of work out west, but you couldn’t pay me enough to do what I do for the people destroying the middle third of Canada via Tar Sands.
Spatula
@pseudonymous in nc:
Even if that were true, which it’s not, and I’ve gone back three generations, why would you encourage ANYONE to spend their one and only life on this planet PERFORMING A FUCKING SHITTY JOB IN INHUMAN CONDITIONS for the financial benefit of coal executives and their shareholders, while fantasizing that it is for the benefit of some future descendant? That’s just insane and fantastic. And a great way to guilt people into wasting their lives.
So I think we can agree: You believe coal miners are fit only to work under the ground in horrific conditions, and that is okey dokey for them to do so. I say there are a million other ways to make money, and NO human being is meant for that kind of life or work.
I don’t think you feel sorry for mistreated coal miners. I think you get off on their suffering.
This, of course, tells me most of what I need to k now about you.
Spatula
pseudonymous in nc clearly WORKS for a coal company, in an air conditioned communications/propaganda office no doubt.
pseudonymous in nc
@Interrobang:
Reaching escape velocity takes time and good fortune and the clear availability of alternatives. It’s no surprise that coal country is prime recruiting territory for the US military.
I’m the child of a working-class family. Both of my grandfathers moved to where the jobs were, which put them in industrial towns doing hard, unhealthy manual work: shipbuilding, steel work, chemical plants. Some of their male children — my uncles — stayed around doing the same kind of work; some of them had opportunities to move away. Of their children, some of them stayed around, and some of them (including me) had opportunities to move away. This is how it works.
What Kitchen Implement would like us to believe is that those who stick around to do shitty jobs are unambiguously suckers and fools and toadies, as opposed to people who suck it up to provide some kind of benefit for their children. That belief is facile and insulting.
@Spatula:
I think we can agree that Kitchen Implement’s attempt to shove words in my mouth is transparently lame, and reflects the condescension and arrogance displayed elsewhere in the thread.
Spatula
@pseudonymous in nc:
Have you heard of an emotional/psychological phenomenon called PROJECTION? I very deliberately did NOT use words like that to describe the folks we’ve been discussing. The fact that you did reveals your own hostility and shame regarding your family. Sorry you feel that way, but the fact that they did what they did is not my fault nor yours. You need to think about letting that go.
It is most definitely a very sad waste to spend one’s life doing labor one despises and hates; I believe it is a sort of slow suicide. Only a corporatist or a brainwashed victim would defend it.
hahaha…this is rich coming from you. Your entire argument is based not on what I wrote but on what you are ashamed of and projecting onto me.
JR in WV
I always come along about 12-16 hours after a thread ends, no one left to talk with – or to.
My Grandpa worked in the mines from about 1913 until he died of black lung, lung cancer, and COPD in 1951, when I was 10 months old. Many years later my brother moved to Grandma’s to work in the same mine, long enough to fund 3 years at WVU, where he qualfied for professional work the rest of his working life.
My Grandpa wasn’t a coal miner, he was a hoist engineer and mechanic, and only went underground a couple of times to help get a broken machine to where they could work on it. My Grandma, when they still lived in the coal camp, had a view of the tipple, where the headframe lifted machines and men into the mine to work, and lifted men and coal out of the mine.
The tipple was where, when an explosion took place, a huge plume of smoke and burning coal dust shot thousands of feet into the air. Then someone would pull the steam whistle cord and tie it off, so that the scream made sure everyone knew the mine had blown up.
Grandma saw at least two major explosions from her kitchen window… neither of them killed her husband, my Grandpa, or I wouldn’t be here to type about mining. Look it up. Eccles, 1914.
My best friend’s son-in-law
now worksworked in a new mine in the same place on a different seam. He has recently been promoted to safety director in another large mine recently reopened after a long closure.Mining isn’t filthy, it’s dirty. There’s a big difference. Dirt isn’t filth, and doesn’t cause disease. It washes off after work, and doesn’t smell bad. It’s just black rock dust. Filth is what you find in a sewer, or a poorly managed dump.
Mines aren’t dark if they’re properly managed. They’re filled with white ruck dust, finely crushed limestone, a non-explosive powder designed to dilute coal dust enough so that it isn’t explosive. Coal dust explosions are what kill miners, gas explosions aren’t violent enough to kill everyone in a mine.
But a gas explosion stirs up all the dust, and will ignite the coal dust, if it isn’t properly diluted with white rock dust. Well-managed mines are white inside, every surface covered with limestone, except right around the machinery. Upper Big Branch, which was the last mine to blow up in West Virgina (the USA) was spectacularly badly run, which is why the little gas pop set off a terrific coal dust explosion.
We’ve known how to prevent coal mine explosions for at least a hundred years. First, keep the methane gas concentration below 5% – regs call for it to be less than .5% if I recall correctly – and, second, keep the coal dust from accumulating, dilute it with rock dust, wet it down with water spray at the cutter heads and a belt intersections where mined coal splashes from one belt to another.
That’s all there is to it. No rocket science at all. But this preventative maintenance costs a little, and for some bosses even a little bit of cost is out of the question if it drops profits even a tiny trickle.
Another thing about coal mining – it isn’t a job for people too dumb to do anything else. Once upon a time it meant using a pick and shovel well. Now it means properly using huge and vastly complexs and expensive machinery safely. It means using a long-wall shear, a machine that cost around a $150 million dollars, without damaging it, to remove hundreds of thousands of tons of coal with no lost time accidents.
So a coal miner is capable of doing lots of other jobs, running a blast furnace or a power plant, for example. They are smart, physically strong and capable, and brave. They know exactly how dangerous the job is. They love it anyway, most of them.
I hate to see people who have never been down in a mine go on about how it’s a filthy job, backbreaking and dangerous, needing only a strong back and a weak mind. That’s all a lie, except the dangerous part. And it’s only dangerous if safety isn’t job one.
Mining today is highly technical, complicated, and requires many different technical skills. Many miners are part of rescue teams that train and practise to go into mines after accidents and rescue injured miners and recover dead miners. They volunteer for the opportunity to be on such a team.
If you don’t know anything about mining, don’t venture a stupid and uninformed opinion about why men go underground every day to mine the coal our lifestyle requires.
The Republicans have about killed the UMWA off. At a union mine there’s a safety committee, and the safety committee can shut a mine down if they see a dangerous condition. Upper Big Branch would have been a safe mine if it had been a union mine.
My friend’s son-in-law started work in a non-union mine. When he got a new job in a union mine, he was amazed. He said “Everyone is respected!” like it was a revelation. He also said it was safe. It’s news when a miner is hurt in a union mine. It’s almost always something impossible to anticipate, like a big piece of rib falling away from the wall, landing on someone working there.
It isn’t the same kind of news when a miner – or 20 or 30 of them – is killed in a non-union mine. There isn’t a safety committee. The law and regulations say that no miner can be forced to work in unsafe conditions. Under the Republican regime that’s so many meaningless words.
The deaths of the Big Branch miners were the direct responsibility of the management of the company, and the indirect responsibility of the government as managed by Republicans over the past 30-40 years.
The fact that those young men working in Upper Big Branch had Black Lung is also not surprising. The same things that protect miners from coal dust explosions also protect them from Black Lung – water spray on the cutting heads and on the beltways. But that costs a little bit, miners assigned to maintain water lines, repair and replace pumps, replace clogged spray nozzles, all a waste of money, if money is all that means anything to you.
And we know what matters to Republicans – money. Not lives. Money for them and their owners. And the hell with everyone else.
Spatula
@JR in WV:
OK, here’s what doesn’t make sense to me: Why do coal companies cut corners on safety expenses? Sure, it costs a little now, but surely they don’t save more than they are going to pay when a coal mine blows up and they get their asses sued off, or their workers come down with black lung and they get sued for that, and on and on, etc.
The short term profits surely can’t make up for the long term costs…or do they?
A note: Please don’t tell me how to use words like “filth,” which most certainly does refer to dirt and dust and the muck that is made from them when you mix them with water in a mine. Feel free to google the definition. Yours and mine are both there. Thanks.
I am utterly amazed at the lengths a couple of commenters will go to here to pretend that people really, no really, WANT to spend their lives under ground in a mine; and that really, no really…there are NO other options for them.
That’s just depressing thinking.