https://www.dailykos.com/stories/20...s-Trump-cuts-safety-regulations-cripples-MSHA
Doubling the death rate from coal mining means more openings.
Doubling the death rate from coal mining means more openings.
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Campaign promise fulfilled--more coal jobs!
- Thread starter Loren Pechtel
- Start date
Elixir
Made in America
"Trump Digs Graves"
What a surprise.
Meanwhile, these poor coal-mining suckers who believed Trump's hollow promises, are not only stuck in dead-end, dangerous jobs, but many will lose their health care, and there will be no educational opportunities for them or their children to get into another gig. Poor fuckers - they almost might as well be Puerto-Ricans instead of "real" American citizens. At least some of them are white though - they still have that going for them...
Valjean
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Coal is rapidly going the way of buggy whips. Demand is decreasing and wind and solar generated energy is now cheaper in some regions.
SimpleDon
Veteran Member
The same thing happened under Reagan/Bush I and Bush II. The relentless drumbeat against regulations is nothing more than a call to improve corporate profits at the cost of workplace and product safety, financial sector instability and overall market competitiveness.
My construction sites were inspected many times by MSHA inspectors. It was annoying because we ran as safe of a site as we could, exceeding the regulations on countless points. But the inspectors were driven to find violations at every site that they inspected, so much so that it was tempting to leave an obvious violation in plain sight like a compressed air line coupling lacking a cotter key safety lockdown.
Every time we discuss the government doing something to raise wages someone invariably says that the government shouldn't be in the business of supporting higher wages, i.e. raising the minimum wage, supporting unions, reducing immigration legal and illegal, increasing tariffs, etc. But the last forty years of movement conservatism's dominance of economic policies has been nothing more than repeated examples of the government supporting higher profits without any complaints from conservatives.
Perhaps we could get an explanation of why this is, that workers have to rely on the vulgarities of the market while the corporations can count on the government to artificially increase their profits, largely by intentionally suppressing wages?
Logic would dictate that we should have a balance between profits and wages in the government policies that we institute and not the profit first policies that we have now. To the point that we have the absolute absurdity of the Republicans selling a tax cut clearly targeted for the 1% by lying that it is a way to increase wages.
Jimmy Higgins
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In Trump's defense, the coal industry has successfully made enforcement of violations impossible because they have flooded the courts with violations. This was happening well before Trump.
SimpleDon
Veteran Member
Coal production peaked in 2006, roughly when fracking of natural gas started to drive the price of natural gas down. I think that this had much more to do with the price of coal dropping than the emergence of solar. Solar at its absolute best reduces some peak power demand. But coal is burned in power plants that produce base power, which solar can't produce.
I am out of the solar power production game. I had solar panels on my roof for more than twelve years. The original four panels were producing only about 40% of their rated production and the remaining three which were eight to ten years old struggled to make half of their rating. I recently had my roof re-done, paid for by my homeowners' insurance because of the damage caused by Hurricane Irma. The panels fell apart when the roofer's took them down. I don't know how they survived the hurricane. Needless to say I didn't have the panels reinstalled. I don't know if I going to put panels back up there. I need to find a way to mount them that can survive a re-shingling of the roof.