Donald Trump promised to revived the coal industry but instead he has been a nightmare for coworkers. Some big companies are even going bankrupt:
"Perhaps the most persuasive evidence of President’s Trump’s failure to revive the coal industry lies in the number of coal company bankruptcies and mine closings. As of Oct. 30, 2019, 11 companies, including the largest privately held operation, had declared bankruptcy since Trump’s inauguration. And according to the USEIA, more than half of all mines operating in 2008 had closed by the end of 2018. The consumption of renewable sources of energy surpassed coal consumption in 2019 for the first time in over 130 years, according to USEIA."
Coal miners are great people and I feel bad for them because they were conned into voting for Trump with the illusion that he would help them.
We heard a lot about Hillary being potentially really bad for coal workers but Donald Trump has been full of empty promises of greatness and resurgence.
And yet,
In coal country, Trump holds sway despite failing to revive industry
More than 600 feet underground in the Appalachian region of southwestern Pennsylvania, it’s almost like John Morecraft, a 45-year-old history teacher turned coal miner, is back in a classroom.
Several of his former high school students work in the mine, still calling him Mr. Morecraft, or coach. Some of the older men who never got much of an education look to him to explain current events.
And when it comes to presidential politics these days, in the words of another miner, “It’s pretty much Trump all the way.”
During the grinding impeachment process, Morecraft said, the miners were “watching it very closely. They’re passionate about it. And angry about what’s going on.”
On the surface, that’s no surprise. In 2016, Trump won a whopping 68% of the votes here in Greene County, compared to Hillary Clinton’s 28%.
But as recently as 2008, Barack Obama and John McCain split the vote evenly in the county, which has a total of four working coal mines and a population of about 36,000. And before that, the area was a dependable Democratic stronghold in the state.
What lies beneath the enormous shift over the last decade — and its endurance despite Trump’s mostly failed promises to bring back coal — contains a somber warning for Democrats, and not just in coal country.
Many voters here — and likely in many other areas across the country — see the Democrats as a party seemingly out of touch with their everyday interests and concerns.
While that indictment may not be entirely fair or representative of every miner, the overall impression here is of a party that cares about other people, not them, whether the issue is immigration, student debt or universal health coverage. Greene County’s population is 1% foreign-born, less than one-fifth have college degrees and just 6% don’t have medical insurance.
Then there’s the environmental issue. Some of the miners will concede that climate change may well be an enormous problem, and ending use of fossil fuels may be desirable, even necessary. But what happens to them and thousands of others whose jobs and livelihoods depend on it right now? they ask. What do the Democrats offer on that?
And it’s not just coal’s future that has people here anxious. A surge in fracking for natural gas in recent years has softened the blow to the region’s economy. But as Wednesday’s Democratic primary debate made clear, most candidates want to toughen requirements for fracking or even end it.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, asked specifically about the potential loss of thousands of jobs in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, defended his call for a ban on fracking as a moral imperative to save the planet. There was even less sympathy for coal, with Michael R. Bloomberg, the former New York mayor who made his debate debut Wednesday, proudly noting that 304 out of 530 coal-fired power plants in the U.S. have been closed.
Despite Trump’s mostly failed promises to bring back coal, he's still popular among many miners.
www.latimes.com
So in coal country, Democrats continue to define themselves as enemies of the workers.
