Why Does Governor Beshear Hate Kentuckians?

Kentucky DINO and waste-of-oxygen Governor Steve Beshear dropped trou today and exposed his shortcomings on two issues of critical importance to impoverished and working-class Kentuckians.

First, he responded to President Obama's moratorium on new mountaintop removal coal mining projects by demanding that the feds continue to allow mountain-raping corporations to choke freshwater streams with toxic mining waste.

Then Beshear claimed to be protecting economically distressed families by signing a bill that gives aid and comfort to the very loan sharks who force those families into destitution.

There are wingnut freakazoid republican politicians in this state who in a lifetime of working to make Kentucky comfortable for rich people haven't done as much to fuck over working poor people as Steve Beshear did today.

Mountaintop removal coal mining is to Eastern Kentucky what the crack cocaine epidemic was to inner cities: a way for outsiders to get rich quick off a business that sickens and kills children, ruins homes, tears families apart and destroys communities. Beshear has been hiding behind his Lieutenant Governor Dan Mongiardo, a shameless advocate of the practice that is destroying his own home region, but now Beshear has come out of the closet with his concern for the "404 permit backlog."

404 permits are what the Army Corps of Engineers issues to mining corporations to dump thousands of tons of toxic coal mining waste into the headwaters of freshwater mountain streams, thus cutting off sources of drinking water and causing massive floods.

In other words - words you won't find in Beshear's press release - a 404 permit is a license to kill people. Poor Kentucky mountain people.

After they are flooded or blasted or poisoned out of their homes, Beshear's Eastern Kentucky victims can join their fellow citizens at the quick-cash loan sharks for whom Beshear once lobbied and continues to protect.

Governors who don't give a shit about people who can't afford large campaign contributions are nothing new in Kentucky, but I can't remember one so blatant yet hypocritical in his eagerness to actively hurt them.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....