Everybody Who Thinks McConnell Is Going to Help These Coal Miners, Stand On Your Head

I sincerely hope they are trolling Senator Motherfucker, because they are morons if they think he gives a flying fuck about them.

From the Herald:

Because a pension fund for thousands of coal miners faces insolvency within three years, a contingent of retired coal workers will descend on the Capitol Wednesday, hoping to convince Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to back a fix.

It’s the ninth consecutive year the group has pressed Congress to act — but McConnell wants a broader fix to ensure the health of the federally chartered Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., which insures millions of Americans in defined benefits pension plans but is facing its own fiscal challenges.

“There is momentum to fix the entire system, but that’s going to move slowly,” said Phil Smith, director of government affairs for the United Mine Workers of America. “Our plan is separate because we can’t wait for a global pension fix.”

Smith said the slump in the coal industry and company bankruptcies have hurt the pension fund, which now has just one major company, Murray Energy, contributing to the fund.

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia, who is sponsoring legislation to address the coal miners’ pensions and will appear Wednesday at a press conference to push his legislation, said Tuesday he wants a more sweeping fix, but worries about the immediate risk for the retired coal workers and their families.

“I don’t know how he can just turn his back on the miners in Kentucky and West Virginia,” Manchin said of McConnell in an interview Tuesday. “He just can’t continue to stonewall them and leave them with nothing.”

As if The Treason Turtle has ever done anything BUT stonewall working Kentuckians and leave them with nothing.

Of course he will stonewall them.  And of course every single one of them who is still alive after their pensions are taken away is going to vote for Bevin this fall and McConnell and Trump next year.

Read more here: https://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article230129654.html#storylink=cpy

More Proof That Coal Is Even More Dead Than Before

Via Political Animal:

Here is your daily dose of irony:

The Kentucky Coal Mining Museum will always commemorate the past, but now it’s also looking to the future by switching to solar power.

The museum, owned by Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College, is located in Benham, a once thriving coal town portrayed in the 1976 Oscar-winning documentary Harlan County, USA…

“We believe that this project will help save at least eight to ten thousand dollars off the energy costs on this building alone, so it’s a very worthy effort and it’s going to save the college money in the long run.

Solar and wind power are now producing more energy at lower cost than any fossil fuel while employing hundreds of thousands of people at good pay.

If Kentucky's coal miners had jumped on that renewable energy train 10 years ago when it started to take off, Eastern Kentucky would be the new Silicon Valley.  But the repugs they keep voting for prefer Appalachians to stay stubbornly poor and stupid so they'll keep oting repug.

Jobs!

Via Political Animal:



  Dab Aggin‏ @DabAggin 11h11 hours ago

BREAKING: Trump announces that as soon as he's done bringing coal jobs back, he plans to get Fotomat workers back to developing film. pic.twitter.com/ad8siC63fF

Even if Coal Generated 100 Percent of Electricity, That Wouldn't Create Coal Jobs

Coal is a rotting corpse pretending to be a zombie, but the stench of decomposition won't go away.  Coal is dead.  Dead, dead, dead.  And the repugs who keep promising to restore coal jobs are not just lying, they are laughing at the desperate unemployed in the former coal fields.

Stephen Rose at the Washington Monthly:

The table below shows how output has increased while employment has decreased because of rising productivity from 1920 to 2015. The huge jump in productivity between 1980 and 2000 is due to the rise of surface strip mining as an alternative to underground drilling. Instead of creating mining shafts several hundred and to a few thousand feet underground and then using trolleys to bring the coal to the surface, strip mining uses bulldozers to flatten mountains and extract the coal from the debris.

SNIP

Patterns in American coal consumption have also changed dramatically over the years, which make a reversal in demand unlikely. First, in the beginning of this period, many houses used coal for heating; but today, according to the Department of Energy, virtually all coal is used to produce electricity in big power plants. Second, we do very little international trade in coal—we import about 1-2 percent of our needs and export about 10 percent of production. Third, the advent of fracking has made coal less competitive compared to national gas.

Coal production reached its peak in 2007 at 1.2 million tons. Since 2007, there has been a steady decline to 900 thousand short tons in 2015. The main causes of this decline are the increased availability of low-cost natural gas from fracking and the increased use of the renewable resources of solar and wind energy.Of course, these trends were consciously assisted as part of an environmental policy to reduce coal consumption because of its high emission levels of greenhouse gases. While the new technologies to produce “clean coal” with lower emissions may take some of the environmental cost out of coal production, the upside of coal production is quite limited because of cheap natural gas and the general movement to a more energy-efficient economy.

So, ‘bringing back coal jobs’ is a typical Trump initiative, much like the Carrier deal that saved 800 jobs, in that it is big on atmospherics and small on actual employment. Currently, coal employment is five one-hundredths of one percent of all employment. It is hard to see how a new Trump plan could do anything more than raise this total to six one-hundredths of one percent of employment. It is certainly possible that there will be no gain in employment because the increased use of strip mining due to higher coal demand could return productivity levels to their 2000 level.

The better promise Trump should have made to coal country is to offer employment retraining and other economic development initiatives for rural workers. In general, the decline of coal employment was driven by productivity gains that are good for the economy as a whole and that can’t and shouldn’t be reversed. Trump has made the same promise about increasing manufacturing employment, which has lost 5 million jobs from the 17 million that existed in 2000. This is a more fertile area to make change, but still, many of the same forces are at work. Trump wants to Make America Great Again, but his haphazard ambitions to increase working class employment are hardly a recipe for success.

Sold Down the River

Yeah, all you Kentucky coal county folks who voted 90 percent for a corrupt game-show host, his repug buddies in Congress are now killing your union health care and retirement.  Stop acting surprised.  Hillary Clinton and all us commie muslin terrist feminazi faggots have been telling you so for months.

Charlie Pierce:

... the (repug) elves in the Congress are busy, busy, busy selling out the Rust Belt suckers to whom, if the guilt-ridden elite political media is to be believed, we all owe a cookie for the next decade. First up, the coal miners! From the MetroNews in West Virginia:

The Miners Protection Act to address health and pension benefits for coal miners and their families will not be included in a continuing resolution bill, according to a Tuesday announcement. Congress said the bill, which would continue to fund the federal government, only has four months of funding for those retired miners and their widows. Cecil Roberts, international president of the United Mine Workers of America, called the announcement "a slap in the face to all 22,000 of them who desperately need their health care next month, next year and for the rest of their lives."

But, wait, isn't West Virginia represented in the Senate by that highly influential Democrat, Joe Manchin, who's been running around telling every camera crew inside the Beltway that that his party has to get right with the workin' man? Yeah, he's got the juice, no question.

Approximately 12,500 retired union miners and the widows of retirees stand to lose their pension and health care benefits across the nation

And those stalwart Kentucky defenders of Big Coal - which will benefit enormously from the ass-fuck, as opposed to the actual coal miners, AKA the ass-fuckees -  Senators Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul, and Representatives Hal Rogers, Thomas Massie, Brett Guthrie, Andy Barr and Ed Whitfield, repugs all, voted for the ass-fucking then refused to face the voters they just ass-fucked.

Folks, you're being sold down the river. I feel for you because selling you down the river is not good for the country. It never was. It is not immigrants who are selling you down the river. It is not minorities who are selling you down the river. It is not LGBTQ folks who are selling you down the river. Please remember all of that when you wake up pissed that you're, you know, down the river. If you look around the table and can't figure out who the mark is…

AynRandy to Coal Miners: Fuck You and Your Union, Too

It's such a perfect lying cop-out for the Tribble-Toupeed One:  No one can have insurance and pension relief from their criminal former employers until everyone gets the exact same thing.

Thus preventing anyone from getting anything.  Except of course for corrupt Big Coal, which skates as always. So conservative and libertarian at the same time!

Meanwhile Democratic Senate candidate Jim Gray is standing up for Kentucky coal miners.

Adam Beam of the AP:

The bill, currently before the U.S. Senate, would use some of the $490 million each year that flows through the federal Abandoned Mine Land program to rescue the health benefits for union coal miners whose companies have gone out of business. It would also shore up a United Mine Workers of America pension fund that is on the brink of collapse following the 2008 recession.

The bill would preserve the health benefits of about 3,500 Kentucky coal miners, most who worked for Patriot Coal, which filed for bankruptcy in 2012. It would also protect the retirement benefits of about 9,800 retired Kentucky coal miners who were members of the United Mine Workers of America labor union.

U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, who like many fellow Republicans has criticized Obama's energy policies as a "war on coal", does not support the bill in its current form. He says he supports the concept of the bill, but only if it provides relief for all coal miners, not just those who joined a labor union.

"If they will give the coal companies relief, and the nonunion workers relief as well as the union workers, I could be persuaded to be for it," Paul told The Associated Press in an interview. "For something to get passed, it has to please more people."

Paul is seeking re-election in November after ending his presidential campaign earlier this year. He faces Democrat Jim Gray, the mayor of Lexington, Kentucky's second-largest city.

Gray said he if he were a senator he would vote for the bill because "you don't let the perfect get in the way of the good."

"I think it represents a positive, bipartisan step. I think it shows that at least some members of the Senate can cross party lines and work together. And that's what I promised I'd do," Gray said. "It's (Paul's) usual endless rhetoric that prevents anything good from being done."

The bill passed the Senate Finance Committee on Thursday by a vote of 18-8, with six republicans joining all 12 Democrats to vote "yes."

Selling Thier Bodies

Divine Irony:

QOTD

Erik Loomis:

American justice: Be a wealthy white man who kills 29 workers and you get a year in prison. Be black and smoke a joint, get many years in prison, assuming the cops don’t just kill you.

KY Senate Repugs Out to Kill Remaining Coal Miners

Literally kill them. This isn't reducing paperwork.  This is taking oxygen tanks and fire-resistant clothes away from firefighters.  Safety inspections are the only thing standing between miners and death.

John Cheves at the Herald:

On Wednesday, the 40th anniversary of the Scotia coal mine explosions in Letcher County that killed 26 people, a Senate committee passed two bills to roll back the state’s mine-safety laws.

Senate Bill 297 would end state safety inspections of coal mines, leaving the task to federal inspectors. Senate Bill 224 would end mandatory state safety training for mine foremen, giving coal companies the option of offering their own training for foremen to save money.

The votes came 40 years to the hour after an explosion caused by the build-up of coal dust and methane rocked the Scotia mine near the Oven Fork community. Two days after the blast, a second explosion occurred. The death toll was 26 miners and mine inspectors; faulty equipment and inadequate ventilation were blamed.

SNIP

Only one lawmaker, Sen. Ray Jones, D-Pikeville, voted against Girdler’s bill. Jones said the language would leave state mine safety analysts without legal authority to issue citations, shut down a mine or file a report with their superiors if they witnessed dangerous problems while in a mine. State mine inspectors tend to be more knowledgeable and thorough than their federal counterparts, Jones said.

Mine safety analysts should not have to remain passive, simply offering recommendations, in the face of serious violations, Jones said.

“There would be no enforcement mechanism,” Jones said. “I think this bill may go a little bit too far on the safety issue.”

 Jones isn't the only state senator representing coal miners, just the only one willing to stand up to the industry and the repug nihilists.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article65006967.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article65006967.html#storylink=cpy

But It's Obama Who's Killing the Coal Industry

Have you ever not been able to breathe? Maybe after diving into too-deep water and inhaling too soon? Or in an asthma attack?  Remember the terror you felt, unable to make air move into or out of your lungs?  Now imagine feeling that every minute of every day of your life forever.

Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

I, for one, am glad that some doctors out there are brave enough to hold back the tide of “black lung” addled coal miners/parasites who are threatening the profitability of our coal companies and our insurance companies:*

After working underground in the coal mines of southern West Virginia for almost 35 years, Steve Day thought it was obvious why he gasped for air, slept upright in a recliner, and inhaled oxygen from a tank 24 hours a day.

More than half a dozen doctors who saw the masses in his lungs or the test results showing his severely impaired breathing were also in agreement.

The clear diagnosis was black lung.

Yet, when I met Steve in April 2013, he had lost his case to receive benefits guaranteed by federal law to any coal miner disabled by black lung. The coal company that employed the miner usually pays for these benefits, and, as almost always happens, Steve’s longtime employer had fought vigorously to avoid paying him. As a result, he and his family were barely scraping by, sometimes resorting to loans from relatives or neighbors to make it through the month.

Like many other miners, he had lost primarily because of the opinions of a unit of doctors at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions that had long been the go-to place for coal companies seeking negative X-ray readings to help defeat a benefits claim. The longtime leader of the unit, Dr. Paul Wheeler, testified against Steve, and the judge determined that his opinion trumped all others, as judges have in many other cases.

 *Yes, of course he's being sarcastic.

Two Miners Dead Because We Won't Bury Coal's Rotting But Still Murderous Corpse

Patriot Coal's executives should be imprisoned for premeditated murder.

Rude Pundit:

Eric Legg and Gary Hensley died in what is called a "coal outburst." What that means is that the walls of the mine burst, ejecting coal and gas into the area where the men worked. It's a nasty way to die, hot and violent. It means that the gas wasn't drained out of the area to relieve pressure, which is a significant safety violation, which is what Brody No. 1 was already cited for: "MSHA said that its inspectors had cited more than 250 'significant and substantial' violations during the 12-month period that ended Aug. 31. An MSHA audit of the mine’s records found that injuries resulted in nearly 1,800 lost-work days at the mine, 367 of which were from eight injuries that the company did not report to MSHA. A separate audit in 2012 found 29 injuries that were not reported." To do the math, Patriot owned the mine for 8 of those 12 months.

As always with mining companies, Patriot has been on the forefront of doing vile shit to workers. The United Mine Workers of America was already pissed off at Patriot for using bankruptcy to dick over miners and retirees. Yeah, when it sought bankruptcy protection last year, a judge approved allowing the company to cut health benefits and pensions to union workers and retirees. It shitcanned a contract it had with the union and renegotiated one that cost the company far less. The workers got dicked, but it was with a smaller dildo. The deal allowed Patriot to emerge from bankruptcy in December 2013.

To celebrate, in February, Patriot spilled 108,000 gallons of slurry waste into a creek feeding the Kanawha River, the same river that was polluted by Freedom Industries. Don't worry, though. It wasn't supposed to significantly impact the drinking water, which could be another way of saying that things couldn't get worse. (You can make your own joke about how Patriot and Liberty have fucked the people of West Virginia.)

Not just West Virginia.

Hold Thomas Massie Acountable for These Deaths

Andy Barr, Hal Rogers, Brett Guthrie and Ed Whifield, too - they are all refusing to pass a continuing resolution to re-open the federal government.

And now there's blood on their hands.

Coal miners are dying on the job at an alarming pace while politicians are squabbling and the government remains partially closed, the United Mine Workers of America said Tuesday.Last week was the first time since 2002 the industry had three deaths in three days — one each in West Virginia, Illinois and Wyoming. 

The union called on workers to "watch each other's back" and take extra precautions working around machinery while regular safety inspections by the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration are on hold.

Also, don't eat any chicken or anything from a kitchen where chicken has been cooked: there's a salmonella outbreak and nobody to figure out where it came from or how to stop it.

Friends of Coal Are Not Friends of Coal Miners

Beware of politicians conflating the best interests of Big Coal with the best interests of coal miners. Friends of the formers are almost always enemies of the latter.

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Mioney:

Who are the real friends of coal miners? Like in the timber wars of the 1980s, an exploitative industry and its lackey politicians have claimed that the industry looks out for the miners against those evil environmentalists, while at the same time engaging in land management and labor policies that make workers’ lives worse.

Given a declining industry due to overexploitation of the resource and because of a lack of economic alternatives for scared workers, this political move has been very effective both in logging towns of the Northwest and Appalachian coal country.

But in both places, activists have pushed back against the false choices of industry versus environment. Here is an outstanding letter from retired UMWA organizer Carl Shoupe about the lies of the coal industry to the people of Kentucky.

Since I’ve been around coal all my life, I guess I should be pleased when our “leaders” say they are Friends of Coal. But lately, I’ve been wondering, which part of coal they’re friends with.

Peabody Energy and its new company, Patriot Coal, are trying to weasel out of paying health and pension benefits promised to thousands of retired UMWA miners. Have you heard any objection from these Friends of Coal in our marble palaces in Frankfort? Those miners earned their benefits with their sweat and their blood, but now Peabody wants to dump them like they’re just more overburden.

These politicians may be friends of coal, but they’re not friends of coal miners and their families. These miners and their families are being robbed of their retirement and benefits.

My friend Truman recently spent a week hooked up to a hospital ventilator. Like thousands of others, he suffers with black lung, caused by working in underground mines filled with coal dust. Today, the number of severe black lung cases is on the rise again, affecting workers on strip mines and below ground. And yet Congressman Hal Rogers has led efforts in Congress to block rules designed to protect miners from that awful disease.

Another friend of mine had to move with his daughter away from the homeplace where his family has lived for over 200 years. Toxic runoff from mountaintop removal was poisoning him and his family.

But his state representative, House Speaker Greg Stumbo, stood up at an Environmental Protection Agency hearing about water pollution and insisted that anyone who wants to save the mountains should just “go buy one.”

The speaker may be a friend of the coal companies, but he’s no friend of coalfield families threatened by mountaintop mining and poisoned water.

Coal companies and politicians of both parties who are beholden to coal money are not the friends of workers. At the very least, political progressives should be aware that environmentalists are not the enemies of coal miners. The enemy is the employer who has zero concern for the aftermath of coal mining and the long-term effects of coal dependency on Appalachia.

Watch the State Officials Dance to Big Coal's Tune

I swear, there is absolutely nothing Kentucky politicians and officials will not do to please Big Coal. Their desperate and humiliating dances are simultaneously hilarious and depressing.

Bill Estep at the Herald:

HARLAN — To federal prosecutors, Mackie Bailey is a witness who provided information about dangerous practices at an underground coal mine in Harlan County where a man was crushed to death in June 2011. The company and three supervisors pleaded guilty in federal court.

To state authorities, Bailey is a miner who broke the rules. The Kentucky Office of Mine Safety and Licensing filed a complaint against him for taking part in the dangerous activities he reported to state and federal regulators.

To Bailey and his attorney, that's an injustice, not just because supervisors ordered Bailey to do unsafe work, but because his information helped convict the people responsible.

Note that Bailey doesn't have a union backing him up.  That's because Kentucky is a Right to Freeload state and the once-might UMW is weaker than it's ever been.

Here's an idea: have the feds arrest Governor Steve Beshear, Energy and Environment Cabinet Secretary Len Peters, officials at the Office of Mine Safety who came up with this brilliant plan, and every coal-bought legislator in the General Assembly, and give them life sentences in the Super Max at Marion, Illinois for terminal corruption.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2012/12/17/2447156/kentucky-officials-seek-to-punish.html#storylink=cpy

The Battle of Blair Mountain

From the once-and-future Congressman:

This weekend marks the anniversary of the most brutal confrontation in the history of the American labor movement, the Battle of Blair Mountain. For one week during 1921, armed, striking coal miners battled scabs, a private militia, police officers and the US Army. 100 people died, 1,000 were arrested, and one million shots were fired. It was the largest armed rebellion in America since the Civil War.

This is how it happened. In the Twenties, West Virginia coal miners lived in "company towns." The mining companies owned all the property. They literally ran union organizers out of town - or killed them.

In 1912, in a strike at Paint Creek, the mining company forced the striking miners and their families out of their homes, to live in tents. Then they sent armed goons into that tent city, and opened fire on men, women and children there with a machine gun.

By 1920, the United Mine Workers had organized the northern mines in West Virginia, but they were barred from the southern mines. When southern miners tried to join the union, they were fired and evicted. To show who was boss, one mining company tried to place machine guns on the roofs of buildings in town.

In Matewan, when the coal company goons came to town to take it upon themselves to enforce eviction notices, the mayor and the sheriff asked them to leave. The goons refused. Incredibly, the goons tried to arrest the sheriff, Sheriff Hatfield. Shots were fired, and the mayor and nine others were killed. But the company goons had to flee.

The government sided with the coal companies, and put Sheriff Hatfield on trial for murder. The jury acquitted him. Then they put the sheriff on trial for supposedly dynamiting a non-union mine. As the sheriff walked up the courthouse steps to stand trial again, unarmed, company goons shot him in cold blood. In front of his wife.

This led to open confrontations between miners on one hand, and police and company goons on the other. 13,000 armed miners assembled, and marched on the southern mines in Logan and Mingo Counties. They confronted a private militia of 2,000, hired by the coal companies.

President Harding was informed. He threatened to send in troops and even bombers to break the union. Many miners turned back, but then company goons started killing unarmed union men, and some armed miners pushed on. The militia attacked armed miners, and the coal companies hired airplanes to drop bombs on them. The US Army Air Force, as it was known then, observed the miners' positions from overhead, and passed that information on to the coal companies.

The miners actually broke through the militia's defensive perimeter, but after five days, the US Army intervened, and the miners stood down. By that time, 100 people were dead. Almost a thousand miners then were indicted for murder and treason. No one on the side of the coal companies was ever held accountable.

The Battle of Blair Mountain showed that the miners could not defeat the coal companies and the government in battle. But then something interesting happened: the miners defeated the coal companies and the government at the ballot box. In 1925, convicted miners were paroled. In 1932, Democrats won both the State House and the White House. In 1935, President Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act. Eleven years after the Battle of Blair Mountain, the United Mine Workers organized the southern coal fields in West Virginia.

The Battle of Blair Mountain did not have a happy ending for Sheriff Hatfield, or his wife, or the 100 men, women and children who died, or the hundreds who were injured, or the thousands who lost their jobs. But it did have a happy ending for the right to organize, and the middle class, and America.

Now let me ask you one thing: had you ever heard of this landmark event in American history, the Battle of Blair Mountain, before you read this? And if not, then why not? Think about that.

Courage,

Alan Grayson

 If you haven't seen the movie Matewan, now's the time. If you have, then show it to people who haven't..

Preventable Return of a Scourge

Here's an idea for creating jobs in Appalachia: Hire ten thousand mine inspectors to stop coal operators from murdering miners.

From the AP:

Black lung diagnoses have doubled in the last decade, and a new investigation blames a combination of factors, including operators who cheat the system and lax enforcement by regulators.

Experts have warned of the resurgence since 1995, but an investigation by National Public Radio, the Center for Public Integrity and the Charleston Gazette concludes that all the systems designed to protect coal miners have failed. That includes federal lawmakers, who haven't passed regulations to toughen 1969 standards for coal dust.

Read the whole thing.

Then read Erik Loomis:

Despite the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969, which was groundbreaking workplace safety legislation, not only have coal miners been exposed to insane amounts of coal dust, but federal regulators and the coal industry have known about this for 20 years.

SNIP

In any case, if the goal of industry is to return the United States to the Gilded Age, killing coal miners with black lung is a pretty good way to do it.

Don't miss Ken Ward at Coal Tattoo.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2012/07/10/2253720/safeguards-not-protecting-miners.html#storylink=cpy

Obamacare is Saving Coal Miners

Handing the state treasury over to Big Coal won't save coal miners. Eliminating EPA won't save coal miners. You know what is saving coal miners? Obamacare.

Via Barefoot and Progressive, good news from the Herald:

Proposed changes to U.S. Department of Labor rules would make it easier for coal miners and their families to obtain black lung benefits. . . .

The 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act – dubbed “Obamacare” by critics – requires the Office of Workers’ Compensation Program to reinstate two provisions of the Black Lung Benefits Act that were eliminated in 1981.

After 1982, survivors of a coal miner who was totally disabled due to pneumoconiosis – commonly referred to as black lung disease – had to prove the disease had caused the miner’s death. One new rule would make that an automatic presumption for those who worked in coal mines for at least 15 years and suffered a totally disabling respiratory impairment.

The other rule would automatically transfer black lung benefits from the late recipient to eligible survivors.

SNIP

Pennsylvania leads the nation in black lung claims with 138,545 filed since 1973, and $56 million in payments during fiscal 2011. Statistics on the Labor Department’s website show West Virginia was second during that period with 117,321 claims and nearly $47 million in payments last year, while Kentucky was third with 98,248 claims and about $34 million in payments.

In all, 662,249 claims have been filed nationwide since 1973, with payouts last year totaling $227.4 million.

The disease was once thought defeated but has been reappearing among younger miners in recent years. The federal Mine Safety and Health Administration’s report on the Upper Big Branch mine disaster, for example, found that at least 17 of the 29 miners killed had black lung.

The explosion at the Massey Energy mine in southern West Virginia was fueled by a deadly combination of methane gas and coal dust. Black lung is caused by inhaling dust, and MSHA has been developing rules designed to better protect the nation’s miners from the irreversible disease.

Meanwhile, the deeply deluded president of the UMW thinks the greatest threat to coal miners is EPA administrator Lisa Jackson.

So desperate is he to attack President Obama that he actually equates coal miners to Osama bin Laden.

Erik Loomis takes him apart.

Coal miners have been fucked over by every corporate and political power player for more than a century. Their dependence on a boom-and-bust industry leave them vulnerable to every plausible lie and mistrusting the truth.

The fact is, they can't be saved. Their jobs died decades ago, along with their towns, their future and their hope. They're the walking dead, useful to Big Coal only as a fake excuse to keep mining the rock that will kill us all.

If we banned all fossil fuels tomorrow, they'd be better off.

Long-Overdue Justice for Dying Miners

Black Lung. It sounds medieval, a scourge like Plague and Childbed Fever that should be relegated to history books.

But it is still killing coal miners throughout Appalachia, smothering them slowly and painfully until they cannot work, cannot walk, cannot breathe.

Many times, they have to watch their families suffer financially at the same time, because Kentucky makes dying miners jump through fiery hoops to get the benefits federal law requires.

No more.

Coal miners sickened by years of inhaling black dust on the job have been subjected to an unconstitutional system of medical screenings to quality for worker's compensation, the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled Thursday.A sharply divided high court decided that Kentucky has violated the constitutional guarantee of equal protection under the law by requiring miners suffering from coal workers' pneumoconiosis, better known as black lung, to undergo a litany of tests that workers in other occupations aren't subjected to when they apply for worker's comp benefits.In a 34-page decision written by Justice Will T. Scott, the high court found no "rational basis and justifiable reason for the disparate treatment of coal workers."

SNIP

Coal miners Jesse Gardner, Joe Martinez and others brought the case, saying Kentucky's law subjected them to a more stringent burden of proof than workers who suffer from pneumoconiosis from sources other than coal dust."Pneumoconiosis caused by exposure to coal dust is the same disease as pneumoconiosis caused by exposure to dust particles in other industries, yet coal workers face different, higher standard-of-proof requirements than those other workers," Scott wrote. "This is an arbitrary distinction between similarly situated individuals and thus it violates the equal protection guarantees of the federal and state constitutions."

SNIP

Prestonsburg lawyer Thomas Moak said Thursday the state's system for awarding worker's compensation to black lung victims is so stringent that most miners don't bother to try for it. Those who do apply and are confirmed by a panel of physicians typically don't qualify for enough money to cover basic living expenses."The current system provides benefits in less than 5 percent of claims," Moak said. "It's amazingly traumatic."

Coal-country legislators will try during the General Assembly session that begins in January to revise the 15-year-old state requirements. But that session already faces demands for yet more budget cuts, and loosening Black Lung requirements - thus increasing state costs by millions - is going to be a hard sell.

Look for more idiotic calls for privatization (which always costs more than paying state employees) and lethal program cuts for those without high-priced lobbyists (women, children and the disabled.)