Chris Hayes held a town hall in McDowell County, WV with Bernie Sanders yesterday. I assume it is available online. It was fascinating to hear the different stories and opinions. One young woman, 29 & pregnant with her third child, talked about the problem of opiod addiction. She said that she is off some of her normal meds due to pregnancy, but that otherwise she takes 13 pills daily. Another panelist, a local OB-GYN, hesitated, but then pointed the finger at over-prescribing physicians in addition to big pharma. The area was awarded a federal prison to fulfill a promise to replace coal jobs, but too few people can pass the drug test for employment there, so they are bussing in guards and other employees. I live in a neighboring state and have followed this issue for some time, but when you see the actual people telling their stories, whether in the WP article or via this town hall, it is still unsettling.
WV sits on the Marcellus and Utica shale formations which are a source of natural gas. Last time I looked natural gas was low so not much drilling was going on. I don’t know how many jobs natural gas provides either.
This was a comment from a thread on our kid’s reactions to the election results, posted 11/16/2016:
I’ve heard a lot of similar sentiments: “You lost, get over it.” “Suck it up, Buttercup.” “We won, fair and square.”
So there’s that.
It seems like some of the sentiment that some posters have been posting in this thread is more like “you got what you wanted, now live with it…”.
This is just a guess, but it seems to me new immigrants have a support network (of other immigrants) that poor citizens trapped in pockets of poverty do not have readily available.
I think you are agreeing with me? I was raised a Roosevelt Democrat and am still fairly liberal but I am getting fed up with the fraud and failure to try I see around me. I am, however, a staunch believer in unions.
I can empathize with those whose livelihood has evaporated but I agree with the above posters. Trump sold these coal miners a big con as coal is never going to rebound to employ the numbers of people and pay those coal miners the salaries they earned with only high school diplomas. But what I cannot understand is how people vote against their own self-interest. How could people fail to understand that Medicare/Medicaid are programs sponsored by the federal government. The ACA expanded Medicaid in WV and enrolled thousands of people, many never having had health care coverage before. Interviewed voters said they believed that Trump because he was a “successful businessman” would have their best interests at heart and “make America great again” because it said so his hat. What a con.
I also agreed that it is hard to relocate from the lifestyle and family connections one has but throughout our county’s history and throughout history zillions of people have done so. How many of us would be here if our ancestors hadn’t done so? I recall that in recessions past, I knew several people who relocated to other parts of the US for employment. Did they want to leave their families and friends - not necessarily but they did want to make a living and feed their families.
@marvin100 - Great article. But here again, people shot themselves in the foot. Alex Mooney is a carpet-bagging piece of (work) who only won because carried the Eastern Panhandle where people like to think they’re Maryland and we let them have their sad little fantasy as long as they send their money here to Charleston. He’s done absolutely nothing for us. (Full disclosure: I was a campaign volunteer for his opponent, Nick Casey, who is now Gov. Jim Justice’s chief of staff.)
They have emotional support networks but most of them are just as bad or worse off. One also has to deal with the prevailing attitude of many people in rural West Virginia: “Don’t get above your raisin’” which to some translates to “Don’t do better than your family.” There’s a lot of pressure not to get an education and not to succeed as anything but a coal miner or other blue collar worker. Many of them are not exposed to anything else and people prefer it that way.
But not everyone. I knew several McDowell Countians in college whose parents were doing everything they could to get them out. A guy I dated is now a successful attorney in Myrtle Beach. One of my sorority sisters got a doctorate in speech pathology. A couple of others are teachers. They visit often and haven’t forgotten where they came from. But they didn’t stay stuck here either.
@techmom99 - I feel your pain. Coal miners aren’t the only ones in West Virginia who get laid off. It’s happened to me three times since college, most recently from July 2010 through December 2011, when my employer, a faith-based non-profit, eliminated my position. I took the first thing that came along, a job I knew I’d hate, in January 2012 because my unemployment was about to run out. It paid about 75 percent what I was making. Then after six months I took a job with the state for about the same money but infinitely better benefits and a modicum of job security, or so I thought. Now, because of decreased coal production and loss of coal severance taxes, we are facing a huge deficit. Employee furloughs are on the table, if our departments and programs aren’t cut entirely. We’ve known for years that coal wouldn’t always be here and politicians kept kicking the can down the road. The “war on coal” has affected all of us. A sinking tide lowers all boats.
Some coal mining jobs will come back, with subsidies, tax breaks, and permission to destroy the environment. But they won’t pay 75k, I guess 30k and lousy benefits, take it or leave it.
Very easily, when you read at a third-grade level despite having a high school diploma and are very seldom exposed to other points of view.
@ucbalumnus – is NG cheaper than a coal-fired power plant? It certainly wasn’t 20+ years ago when I worked at a power company during college. We had coal for the baseline and then fired up NG plants to ride the peaks (NG was expensive so they only used them as-needed). NG is efficient over a wide range of outputs while nuke/coal are best run at full capacity.
BTW, nukes were/are an interesting engineering problem. They generate massive amounts of power … but you have to keep multiple coal or NG plants available to pick up the slack if the nuke goes down. I wrote a program to analyze load factors as part of a study to determine if we needed another nuke.
It is when all the cheap methods of coal extraction have run dry. It’s also cheaper if you take into account the environment–often considered an externality but increasingly understood as worthy of attempted quantification.
But you don’t really even have to do that. The chart here is very clear that NG has been far cheaper than coal since at least 2010.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#United_States
It was also mentioned in the McDowell Cty program that mechanization took many jobs and has been an issue for decades. So bring back what jobs no longer needing actual people? And that’s the same threat in many industries. The writing has been on the wall for a long time. The audience in that piece knew it.
Jobs are being mechanized at checkouts as well and banks–self-serve and ATM. Those jobs aren’t coming back either.
FYI: Two factors in causing China to reduce coal consumption are:
- Pollution levels so high in major cities/industrialized areas that a critical mass of people have been affected by respiratory illnesses or even died. One of those affected was a younger relative of mine who developed such a serious respiratory reaction to the pollution in Beijing it forced his expat parents to move back to the US.
- Most of the coal available to be mined in China is of a far lower grade and gives off much more pollutants as a result.
This factor along with increasing public outcries…especially from the newly emerging influential upper/upper-middle classes and and increasing number of CCP bureaucrats means the CCP government have encouraged much more R & D/long-term investment in solar and other renewable energy production sources.
Ironic considering the current administration policies so far seem to lean towards pulling such investments in a manner similar to what the British did at the end of WWII in cutting funding to British aerospace industry.
End result was within less than 5 years, the British went from being the leading pioneers in jet aviation technology* to being left behind by their US and Soviet counterparts.
Worse, the US doesn’t have much of a lead…if it existed in relation to other countries in this area.
- Not including the Nazi Germans as their regime was completely defeated and their jet propulsion technology/aviation research split up among the Allied powers. Even before the defeat, the British were the technological leaders in jet aviation technology among the Allied powers....especially considering several early American jet engines were derivatives of British designs such as the Allison J33 which powered the P/F-80 shooting star, the first jet fighter to be put into operational service by the USAAF(Later the USAF).
If you believe the figures from various sources listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#United_States , natural gas is competitive with or less expensive than coal (even conventional coal without the newer scrubbing and carbon capture stuff) is now for generating electricity.
“It would also eliminate the Appalachian Regional Commission, a federal-state-local partnership aimed at serving as a regional economic development agency. The agency, established by Congress in 1965, includes Ohio and 12 other Appalachian states and aims to invest in business development in the region; in worker education and training; and in infrastructure.”
So, losing their health care, no coal jobs coming back, no education/retraining programs and no money to invest in bringing new businesses into these regions.
And I’m suppposed to feel sorry for these people?