McConnell on the Wrong Side of Coal War

Courier-Journal headline: "McConnell vows war with Obama over coal."

The only war on coal is the one Mitch McConnell is fighting on behalf of the mine owners who are murdering coal miners and their communities.

Down with Tyranny:

Yesterday NPR and Mine Safety and Health News released the results of an investigation into another class of coddled criminals who thumb their nose at lawful society and get away with it: the mine operators.

While McConnell was shedding crocodile tears for the suffering the mine workers will have to endure because of Obama's Climate Change agreement with China, NPR was broadcasting how McConnell's donors may have been sending him his bribe money while refusing to pay millions of dollars in fines. Citations and the fines that go with egregious violations of safety rules are key components of the federal law designed to protect miners, reported NPR. "They are supposed to make violations expensive-- costing hundreds of thousands of dollars for the most serious offenses-- and create an incentive for mine owners to keep workers safe."

Erik Loomis at LGM:

Ken Ward has an excellent piece on the media’s complicity in the War on Coal narrative to describe the decline of coal jobs in Appalachia. In short, blame it on Obama and the hippies. This is of course absurd because the real reasons for coal’s decline in the region and the disappearing of the jobs is depletion of the resource, automation, the turn to natural gas and other cleaner forms of energy, and investment in the Powder River basin of Wyoming and other new coal fields. Instead of explaining this though, far too much of the media just repeat industry talking points that obscure the actual reasons in favor of cheap politics that cover up industry’s fault in the disappearance of jobs.